Exhibition of the week: David Hockney – A Bigger Picture
The ages of Hockney are as distinct as the four seasons. As a young star in a gold lamé suit emerging from the Royal College of Art in the 1960s he was a bold and radical painter and printmaker who put the lives of gay men into the British public eye. By the end of that decade he was becoming a darker poet of desire and solitude, in paintings of lovers and swimming pools frozen by melancholy. Then come the California years, when he captures the light of Los Angeles in paint and photography while involving himself in projects from opera design to fax art.
The fourth age of Hockney has so far seen him become better known for his provocative opinions than his current paintings. Will this exhibition change that by winning acclaim for the landscape art he has been making in Yorkshire? I hope so.
Hockney for me has always mattered more as an artist than a pundit. Obviously his views, whether on smoking or Caravaggio, are worth listening to. Most persistently of all, he argues that painters in the past possessed a "secret knowledge" of early cameras that blurs the line between fine art and photography in western culture. There's a lot of truth in it. But is pungent art history what we need from this talented artist?
Hockney is both right and wrong about the old masters and the camera. He's right to say they had access to devices like the camera obscura, but wrong to think this necessarily mattered to them all that much. In European painting in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, painters who wanted to capture reality directly were in a minority. Most believed you should reimagine the world. No one would suggest Rubens used any kind of camera – unless it had a lot of grease on the lens – and the same applies to Rembrandt. The great technology of this era was the science of perspective – the calculation of spatial proportion to create a theatre-like simulation of a space the mind can move about in. This is actually quite an unreal way of seeing the world, and contrasts with photography's rougher cuts.
A painter who did use a camera obscura was Vermeer, and you can tell this precisely from his "photographic" croppings. But this came from a new intellectual approach. In the 17th-century Netherlands, optical research was part of the scientific revolution. Perhaps a Protestant eye favoured the brutality of fact. Artists rejected the idealistic Italian tradition – and this is where paintings start to look photographic. It was only after the invention of modern photography that a 19th-century French critic rediscovered the genius of Vermeer.
Paradoxically, where I take issue with Hockney the ideas man is that he doesn't give enough credit to the ideas other people held – the beliefs of the past. The relationship between painting and early cameras is not just technical: a machine only becomes useful when people start to think in ways that make it relevant to their needs. It was in the curious visual culture of Vermeer's Netherlands that cameras really started to make sense to artists.
Anyway, that's to argue with Hockney the art theorist. But now we have a chance to see how his ideas colour his art. How have his concerns with craft v technology shaped his new paintings? Let's find out.
David Hockney once did a drawing of visitors to a Michelangelo exhibition looking at a male nude, adding a line from TS Eliot: "In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo ..." If you're going to the Royal Academy for Hockney's painting exhibition, don't forget to see, outside the Sackler Galleries on the top floor, the only full-scale marble sculpture by Michelangelo in Britain. It's unfinished, but that's integral to its poetry: no one understood the suggestiveness of the incomplete as profoundly as Michelangelo. On this round relief, sure, there are figures of Mary, Jesus, the young John the Baptist – but most movingly of all there are chisel marks furrowing the hewn stone. Too much neatness and fuss makes a sculpture into a mere object – that is the silent advice Michelangelo's work offers to students at the Royal Academy. If you respond to that unfinished, intimate quality – the hands that worked this still seem poised to hit another blow – this is the most powerful work of sculptural art in Britain.