PHOTOS: © DAVID HOCKNEY © FONDATION LOUIS VUITTON / MARC DOMAGE


moments that define an era. Fashions fade, Hockney remains. Auden said in a poem about Yeats that


poetry altered nothing, that all the savagery in the world would be the same if no poet had ever written. Te same could be said of painting. Te most important thing that art can achieve is to bring pleasure – true pleasure. And Hockney has never failed to do that. His ability to find beauty in the mundane has never deserted him. Te 21st century moves to its second quarter without a sense of optimism, but we have an artist whose sense of optimism seems never to


have faded, and whose ability to bring pleasure is as evident today as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. Te gritty integrity of his Royal College years (a mix of graffiti and a billboard-sized packet of Typhoo tea) led to instant stratospheric success that in turn gave way to a fugitive from publicity hounds; California beckoned and with it the surreal suburbia of Los Angeles – a world of paradise, and escape. Picture-perfect splashes, helically turning sprinklers against the ever- blue West Coast sky, affectionate double portraits, big soaring landscapes of the Hollywood hills, he takes the eye on a


journey – those drive-through compositions, the canyon paintings, the multiple-view impressions of a journey. He is seemingly always on the move. It is all here in this exhibition, and that is just for starters. Te heart of this quarter-century


anniversary begins with a celebration of Yorkshire landscapes: watercolours, charcoal sketches, oils, acrylics and film, in a display of great dexterity, overheated colours, multiscreen brilliance, all searching to define a pictorial language appropriate to his home county across the seasons of the year, including a hawthorn bush spectacularly


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