A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney by Martin Gayford

Like his contemporary and fellow Yorkshireman, Alan Bennett, whom he slightly resembles physically, David Hockney has been loved and admired throughout his lifetime. He painted one of his greatest works, ‘A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style’ in 1961 while still at the Royal College of Art. He has dazzled, surprised and often upset the world of art ever since. Picasso aside, he is the wittiest modern painter, in the sense not just of being funny, but intelligent; a whole history of Western art is both contained and extended by his originality.

For example, it was both funny, and in the 1960s brave, to apply Boucher’s soft pornography to bums as well as bosoms. Andy Warhol made jokes about consumerist society’s dependence on the disseminated image. Hockney’s great joke, a serious one, has been seeing off abstraction. Asked by a puzzled viewer what a random splodge on a large Californian interior signified, he said that it was the world’s smallest Clyfford Still.

To Hockney, figurative painting and drawing is a constant of civilisation. You cannot interpret the world without it. Indeed, the way you interpret the world has been conditioned by the optical illusions you have grown up with, whether handmade from some imposed fixed perspective, or mechanical, like a still or moving photograph. If you want to live fully you must educate your eyes and learn to look again. Hockney’s vast body of work — he has sketched, drawn, painted, etched, printed, modelled, photographed, filmed, faxed, iPhoned and iPadded illustratively for nearly 60 years — provides the instruction. He is both truthful and entertaining. In the unfair way of life, he happens also to be well-read, musical, eloquent and Britain’s snappiest dresser.

His eloquence has been put to good use by Martin Gayford, whose previous book was an absorbing account of being the subject of a portrait by Lucian Freud.