Twilight of the Bad Boy

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That's pretty much the guiding philosophy behind Hockney's portraiture too. He rarely accepts commissions, so almost all his portraits are of friends, lovers and family. Many of his pictures feel intimate even when they don't involve an old boyfriend hoisting himself buck naked out of the water, as in Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool. Some of Hockney's most interesting canvases are the double portraits he started doing in the 1960s, pictures of people, like the writer Christopher Isherwood and his lover Don Bachardy, whom Hockney knew well. In My Parents, the physical space between the two figures becomes a psychological separation as well. "I am very interested in space," he says. "Especially the space between two people--which, after all, is what a lot of people want to eliminate. All creatures want union."

The Boston show will have more than 150 portraits in almost every medium that Hockney has worked in, including the intricate photocollages he made in the 1980s under the influence of Picasso's Cubism, a recurring obsession. "People feel that the world depicted through photography is absolutely real," he complains. "But it's not. That's just a tiny aspect of reality." So to make The Scrabble Game, 1 January 1983, Hockney combined dozens of separate photos from a succession of moments, allowing the scene to play out in time as well as space. The picture also presents itself in the way the eye actually sees, as a sequence of darting glances. In pictures like that, Hockney beats the camera at its own game, using photographs to prove the insufficiency of any one photograph.

He often talks about his art as though it were an assault on the still formidable cultural pre-eminence of photography. That's a big job, but Hockney gives the impression that he has the energy for it. One morning, as we're driving around the Yorkshire countryside, he gets out of the car to approach a large tree he painted the day before. "You see," he asks, "how its branches bend down and then curve up again?" To demonstrate, he abruptly lifts both his arms into the air. "The life force pushes it up, then gravity pulls it down, but it insists on rising back up!" He's holding a cigarette, of course. The smile on his face is just this side of triumphant. It doesn't take long to realize that he's talking about himself. •