David Hockney Returns Home in Vibrant Style

LONDON — Every few months, artist David Hockney slips away from his studio in the Hollywood Hills, passes anonymously through London and visits his aged mother and their family in northern England.

This spring is different, for Hockney has come home with big-ticket paintings to show in the country that considers him its most famous living artist. And never mind where he lives.

The prodigal’s return has caught British fancy. A pity about the critics: They’re not applauding.

“Home is L.A., and I haven’t had a show in London for a long time, so they’re making a bit of a fuss,” said Hockney, puffing a cigarette at the skylighted Annely Juda gallery, which is presenting “David Hockney: Flowers, Faces and Spaces.”

“It’s all a bit too much, but it’s fine.”

Framed against bright-splashed canvases, Hockney in his cloth cap and black wire-rimmed specs became evening news. “We’re the talk of London. More than 1,000 people a day have been coming from all over the British Isles,” said gallery director Ian Barker.

The art was as novel as the man: 18 still lifes--of all things--with California-painted flowers in vibrant colors and improbable combinations. Prices: from $240,000 to $730,000, with most paintings sold before the show opened, according to the artist.

“I may do a show in L.A. later this year. This is a selection of the new style--I edit them,” Hockney said.

On a separate floor of the gallery, 24 small red-and-orange-faced portraits on electric-green backgrounds of Hockney’s 97-year-old mother, Laura; his brother, Paul; his sister, Margaret; his friends; and three self-portraits. Together, the portraits--to be sold to a museum as a single work--carry a $1.2-million price tag, according to gallery owner David Juda.

It is the flowers, though, that have attracted most attention--and criticism.

“ ‘Space’ is one of the subjects of the show. And space is illustrated by the use of light and color,” said Hockney, pronouncing himself pleased with the hanging in an airy top-floor gallery where the light on a bright day could almost be Californian. “We worked it out in advance in a model at my L.A. studio,” he said.

The soon-to-be-60-year-old Hockney’s inspiration for the 1996 still lifes, he tells all comers, was a bellwether exhibition of Jan Vermeer paintings he saw in the Hague.

“Vermeer [1632-75] didn’t paint flowers, but that wasn’t what caught my attention,” Hockney said. “It was the great color vibrating from the work--and the space. I was incredibly impressed, and I went back to California and painted these.” After 300 years, Vermeer’s colors, says Hockney with a twinkle, “have lasted much longer than MGM’s.” Barker says Hockney is audaciously using still-life as the medium “for seeing and exploring California light and a spatial relationship with color.”

British critics don’t get it. William Feaver, in the Observer, found that in Hockney’s largest still-life, “30 sunflowers, marshaled on a red tablecloth, come on like shaggy pecan pies.”

Edward Lucie-Smith, in the Spectator, discerned little of the Vermeer influence and thinks spectators could better look to Van Gogh and Matisse for points of reference. “The paintings have none of Vermeer’s calm and magical stillness. They are also not nearly as good a work as the two masters they appear to challenge,” Lucie-Smith said.

Citing them as “evidence of steep decline,” Brian Sewell of the Evening Standard flayed the flowers. “That Hockney should now claim that the vulgar, cheap-jack daubs that he offers as his work have even the most tenuous connection with Vermeer is laughable--although anger and outrage are responses just as reasonable,” he said.

The bright colors and their juxtaposition have discomfited critics such as Martin Gayford of the Daily Telegraph, who found lemons on an orange cloth beside cactus with blue flowers “bold to the point of foolhardiness.”

“As a series, the flower paintings teeter on the edge of banality, and quite a few don’t just teeter,” Gayford said. “But the best, with their hyper-real sense of space and unique sock-it-to-them color sense, strike me as among the better things that Hockney has done in recent years.”

Writing in the Independent, Tom Lubbock lamented that “our most famous painter just doesn’t seem to be able to paint anymore. . . . The truth is without the [Hockney] name there wouldn’t be such cause to write these pictures up. They aren’t very good and they aren’t very good in perfectly normal ways.”

Does it matter what homeland critics say of Hockney’s first major show here of paintings in nearly a decade?

“As long as they reproduce some of his pictures, he doesn’t mind what they say,” said Barker. Said Hockney: “It’s what I think that counts. . . . I know what I’m doing.”

Perhaps the most pertinent question is whether in the striking, primary-color still lifes Hockney has found a motif he might keep in an extraordinary artistic journey that has already taken him from swimming pools and dogs to costumes and opera sets.

“To me, it looks like the journey is continuing on. In fact, I’m looking forward to going back to L.A. and painting quietly. I like privacy. I never go out there. Here they make such a fuss,” the artist said.

* “David Hockney: Flowers, Faces and Spaces” is at the Annely Juda Fine Art Gallery, 23 Dering St., London, (Bond Street tube stop), until July 19. Mon.-Fri., 10-6; Sat., 10-1. Phone (44) (171) 491-2139.