Art: Giving Success a Good Name

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No other English artist has ever been as popular in his own time, with as many people, in as many places, as David Hockney. At 50, an age at which J.M.W. Turner was hardly known in France and Henry Moore was only just beginning to enter collections outside Britain, Hockney has the kind of celebrity usually reserved for film stars but rarely visited on serious artists -- Picasso and Warhol being the big exceptions. Merely to see his blond hair and round glasses across a crowded room, let alone hear his Yorkshire voice droning unstoppably on about Picasso, cubism and his own photography, turns the knees of collectors to jelly. When Actor Steve Martin pays $330,000 at auction for a medium-good, medium-size drawing of Andy Warhol by Hockney, as he did last month, one knows that some overriding program in the fame machinery has kicked in and will not soon be turned off.

No one has ever begrudged the artist his success. Hockney is that rarity, a painter of strong talent and indefatigable industry who has never struck the wearisome pose of il maestro and has been grounded, throughout his career, in the bedrock of Yorkshire common sense. Self-mockery may not be his long suit, but Hockney is the least arrogant of men, and his achievement, uneven though it looks, is a distinguished one. It can be assayed in the retrospective of some 200 works -- paintings, prints, drawings, photocollages, stage designs -- that, having originally been put together by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, opens this week at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

To think of Hockney is to think of pictorial skill and a total indifference (in the work, at least) to the dark side of human experience. Does the latter make him a less serious painter? Of course not, any more than it trivialized the work of that still underrated artist Raoul Dufy. At root, Hockney is popular because his work offers a window through which one's eye moves without strain or fuss into a wholly consistent world. That world has its cast of recurrent characters -- friends, lovers and family. Hockney's portraits of his parents, in particular, are full of unabashed filial devotion, and through repeated drawings and paintings he has given the portly form of his friend and promoter Henry Geldzahler an abiding recognizability: one knows that stomach like the knob of Mont Ste.-Victoire. And then, inseparable from Hockney's skill and lack of pretension, there is his candor about sexual matters, which is no more titillating today than it was shocking in the early '60s. It is simply there, part of the work, like Bonnard's liking for peaches.

Hockney was by no means the first English artist to make his homosexuality a theme of his art, but he was the first to do it in a garrulous, social way, treating his appetites as the most natural thing in the world and not, like Francis Bacon, as a pretext for reflection on Eros' power to maim and dominate. His code for the subject in the early '60s was graffiti. Flattened scrawly figures with sticks for limbs and blobs for heads, much influenced by Jean Dubuffet, populate a whole set of images from 1960 to 1963 -- Doll Boy, The Fourth Love Painting, The Most Beautiful Boy in the World (a valentine to the pop singer Cliff Richard, on whom the artist had an unrequited crush), We Two Boys Together Clinging (a line from Walt Whitman, who, like Gandhi, was one of the heroes of Hockney's youth).