Absolute bangers abound in Tate Modern’s latest show. In the show’s biggest room, with Marlene Dumas, Peter Doig and Luc Tuymans close by, is arguably David Hockney’s best painting, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), made in 1972. You surely know it: a depiction of his lover Peter Schlesinger looking down into a pool in which a man breaststrokes beneath the surface, with verdant French hills behind.
It’s the great summation of his Sixties and Seventies obsessions: pools and bathers, enigmatic double portraits, queer desire and longing, sardonic riffs on abstraction.
