Hockney in Bloom

SPOTLIGHT

the boyish, 60-ish David Hockney, with those glasses and that trashy blond hair—dyed eons before the punks—has been famous forever, it seems. Ditto the work. In fact, there has been so much work that it has come to be taken for granted, like the sunshine and light of California, where the painter has worked for the last few decades. Maybe this is why Hockney lacks the reputation of high-mindedness granted his older and less buoyant English landsmen Lucian Freud and the late Francis Bacon. There is also, of course, the fact that Hockney has never shown us his tortures; he brings ease, and modesty, to his art, domesticating issues like homosexuality which other painters announce with major Sturm und Drang.

You can always feel Hockney's irrepressible will to create—whether it's with a camera, a computer, a paintbrush, a Xerox machine, or an opera setting. No matter what his medium, he plants the seeds for an intimate way of seeing the contemporary world, which can seem so anonymous and technocratic. A selection of his new portraits and still lifes of freshly cut flowers will be on view this month atAnnelyJuda Fine Art in London.

It's been six years since Hockney showed in a gallery in London, and this homecoming reverberates nicely with the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic movements, which flourished in England and America in the late 19th century. Like his predecessors, Hockney has a thing for sunflowers. This photograph recalls a fin de siecle caricature of Oscar Wilde as a sunflower. The caption: "Oh, I feel just as happy as a bright sunflower!" Like hell he did.

INGRID SISCHY

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