David Hockney reassured postwar Britain that it was OK to take pleasure in beauty and freedom. Emerging in the late 1950s, when the energy released by the artistic revolutions of half a century earlier had dissipated into dull academicism or tiresome machismo, his unabashed celebration of conventional forms of beauty revitalised modern painting. These coolly sentimental double portraits and domestic scenes celebrated the liberated (if not uncomplicated) lifestyles made possible by the economic and social reforms of the period, without the angst or irony afflicting the work of those peers for whom these changes were more ambivalent. (If you were working-class and gay, after all, what wasn’t to like?)
To call Hockney a gifted sentimentalist is no backhanded compliment. In this he resembles Andy Warhol who, for all that he is painted as some arch manipulator, was distinguished by the purity of his love for the fruits of the capitalist US and his genius for communicating that love to those who shared it. Hockney’s work, for a decade after about 1963, should likewise be treasured for disproving the lie (maintained by those who prefer to read about paintings than look at them) that great art must be difficult to comprehend, despise the everyday world, and remain inaccessible to a wider public.
