Twilight of the Bad Boy

Just as Goya did, David Hockney is going deaf. He has been for years. It doesn't keep him out of many conversations, though. He loves to talk, and with the help of two hearing aids, he can follow the flow of most discussions well enough. He's always happy to talk about art. He's particularly happy to talk about portraiture, especially since his own portrait work, more than five decades of it, is the subject of an important show that will open Feb. 26 at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He's very happy to talk about the shortcomings of photography, which he wants you to know is hopeless when it comes to representing the visible world. "The camera can't see space," he says. "It sees surfaces. People see space, which is much more interesting."

But we'll get back to art in a moment. What Hockney really wants to talk about lately is smoking. To his immense annoyance, the British government plans by 2008 to ban it in nearly all workplaces, in restaurants and even in pubs that serve food. A few weeks ago, leading me around his sturdy brick house in Bridlington, a British seaside resort town not far from where Hockney was born, he's steaming. "You know that Hitler didn't smoke?" he asks suddenly, as though daring me to disagree that this alone might explain der Führer's lust for world conquest. Last fall on British radio Hockney debated Julie Morgan, the Labour Member of Parliament who spearheaded the ban. "Death awaits you whether you smoke or not," he warned her. "Pubs are not health clubs." As for New York City, now that it has its own smoking ban, he's through with it. "Little Emily with asthma," he sighs. "She has taken over Manhattan."

So although it has been a while since he was the bad boy of British painting, a title that passed years ago to Damien Hirst--he of the dissected sharks--Hockney still takes pleasure in casting aside the latest standard of middle-class morality. He has aged, and in some ways he has mellowed, but he has not gone soft. He's 68, a time when many artists are repeating themselves or fading into the margins. But Hockney has always managed to take his art down enough new paths--double portraits, photocollages, Cubist landscapes--to keep himself, if not always cutting edge, then at least fresh and relevant. He's in the small club of living artists whose work has fetched more than $2 million at auction ($2,869,500 in 2002 for his 1966 Portrait of Nick Wilder). His devotion to representational art has sometimes made him seem out of step, sometimes in. Two years ago, he was one of just a handful of artists of his generation to be included in the Whitney Biennial, the New York City museum survey that tries, however bumptiously, to define what's happening. The curators credited him with "serving as a model for painting's renewed focus on the intimate and the figurative." And with the Boston show, which will travel to Los Angeles and London, Hockney is more visible than he has been for some time.