Enjoying life sounds like a simple, even banal aim. Yet the art of David Hockney shows what an achievement it really is to stick with that goal and raise it to an ideal. He has dedicated his gifts to the pursuit of pleasure since the 1960s and, in the bubbly, enthusiastic new paintings unveiled in his latest exhibition, he’s still at it. Insisting on your pleasures, from sex to cigarettes, has rarely looked as fun, nor as serious.
Hockney holds a cigarette emphatically in a recent self-portrait, which comes at the beginning of this victory parade of an exhibition. It’s a happy and accepting work: in his mid-80s, no longer looking much like his younger, iconic self, he contentedly sits before you in a multicoloured houndstooth suit and flat cap, smouldering ciggy in one hand, paintbrush in the other.
