I joined the crowds to adore Hockney's exhibition but I wonder about the significance of physical inaccuracies in art – and his disloyalty to the frail spirit of blossom-ness
Even on a Wednesday afternoon, the least popular of times, the queue to see the Hockney exhibition stretches halfway down the Royal Academy's courtyard. Admission is £14 and the doors are open until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. Inside, the crowds roam the galleries getting their money's worth of formal exuberance and colour. People adore Hockney, and, to judge by the languages of their approbation, not just English people. "Belle" and "joli" and "bellissimo" could be heard, and for all I know the same thumbs-up was given in Russian and Farsi, too. A Scotswoman said simply: "This is the best exhibition I've seen in my life."
In this age, rarely does a living artist evoke so much pleasure – pleasure as opposed to obedient gawping and reverence, real or false. Some of the delight can be credited to Hockney's persona. None of the images he has created is as well known as the image of the artist: the glasses, the strong hair, the matter-of-fact voice, the lovely loose woollen coats. Combined with his age, his deafness and his defiant smoking, these things prepare many of us to like what he produces before we catch sight of it. But now that he's committed himself to nature, specifically to the Wolds of East Yorkshire, his audience has swollen to include those who like blossom and flowers and trees and country lanes, as well as those who like art for art's sake and rank art higher in their affections than anything it might depict. Britain has many more country lovers than art lovers, and even if the Royal Academy's queues don't reproduce this fact proportionately, the unfashionable question of fidelity can sometimes be detected in the crowd's critical discourse.
How accurately does a picture "catch" some aspect of its subject? How much does the artificial (the painting) remind us of the real (the tree)? Most art criticism put aside these questions long ago, but they still vex us civilians. "That tree to the left, the bark's just right, just perfect," one woman called to her companion, while another, arriving at a wall of peaceful watercolours after a room of manic oils, said: "These are better, these are more normal." In the gallery devoted to pictures of hawthorn blossom, an elderly man with an accent close to Hockney's own announced, "Eh, I don't mind that one," as though there were a great many pictures he had minded, as well as the expense of coming from Yorkshire to see them.
The exhibition begins with a couple of landscape studies Hockney painted at the Bradford School of Art when he wasn't yet 20. One of them, Fields, Eccleshill, 1956, shows a track following a hedge to a flat horizon. The style is a sober kind of impressionism that was fashionable in Britain from around 1890. The light is subdued and therefore persuasive; this could be one of those white summer days where the blue never quite breaks through, and the different greens in the field and the hedge never have their variety emphasised by sunshine. Sitting in my school art class a few years after Hockney went to his field, I would love to have had the skill to paint such a picture. As it was, I went around for a year or two with a sketchbook and a watercolour box, trying to put down something pleasing on paper that didn't play false to what my eye saw, and never succeeding.
That seemed to be the figurative draughtsman's struggle – to make the marks on paper obey the evidence of the world they were translating, and get the shape and colour of the tree bark "just right". For three years, an art teacher tried to liberate us from these notions by encouraging us to think in terms of patterns and shapes, in a theory of art that owed something to cubism and even more to the Wembley's Empire Exhibition of 1924, which our teacher, moustached and peppery Mr Smyth, had visited as a young man. "Boys, boys," he would say in the faintest of Edinburgh accents, "I want you to draw a poster for the Indian pavilion, but first you must think how to arrange the shapes." And so we would compose our patterns of circles, curves, rectangles and zig-zag lines, while Mr Smyth stood at the window and looked carelessly on the view: our grey town silhouetted with spires and chimneys; a view we were never once asked to draw, presumably because its haphazardness didn't oblige the Smyth theory of an underlying geometry. We would apply some version of this to our drawing paper with 3B pencils. The trick was to turn the abstract into the concrete, so that the semi-circle became the Taj Mahal's dome and the zig-zag line a snake.
"And what will you do with the rectangle, boy?"
"I don't know, sir."
"It might be an elephant seen from the front. Try putting a trunk in the middle and ears near the top."
After I left the modesty of Fields, Eccleshill, 1956 behind, I began to think of how much Mr Smyth would have enjoyed the rest of the exhibition's hundreds of pictures, if not the atypical one that opens it. All of Hockney's shapely enthusiasms and decorative instincts would have appealed to him – these are supremely confident, attractive and theatrical pictures, and sometimes very large ones, assembled from dozens of canvases, that are best seen from 20 or 30ft away, similar to a stage backdrop.
My problem came about half-way through, with the oils of the hawthorn blossom. In the wall captions, Hockney writes well about the blossom, and how it arrives "as if a thick, white cream had been poured over everything" during what he calls "action week" in late spring. It may not be the same kind of blossom that Dennis Potter saw around his house when he was dying: that was plum blossom, "the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be". But all blossoms share a characteristic and a significance: they're frail, and they have a transience that, in Potter's words, reminds us of the "nowness of everything". In only one or two pictures does Hockney's blossom suggest that. Mostly, the blossom looked solid enough to stick to its bushes for ever, writhing from branches like a crop of impaled yellow slugs. I never thought that blossom could look so evil.
Does it matter? It wouldn't have done to Mr Smyth. It might not to the Hockneyite or the audience that gives representational duty a low priority in its estimation of art. But the blossom-lover may see it as failure; not so much for any physical inaccuracies as for its disloyalty to the spirit of blossom-ness.
Still, nature is a worthy opponent for any painter, and Hockney should be congratulated for taking it on. Towards the end of the exhibition, the visitor comes to a gallery that has been turned into a cinema, where the results of the painter's experiments with nine movie cameras are shown. The scenes are ordinary – trees and plants by a roadside – and exceptionally beautiful. The thought is hard to escape: if the same technology had existed in Lascaux, painting might still wait to be invented.