Bringing peace to the spirit

Hockney on Turner Watercolours at Tate Britain
Annely Juda — A Celebration at Annely Juda Fine Art

If you enter Tate Britain via the side entrance on Atterbury Street, you will find five large new landscape paintings by David Hockney hanging above the stairs to the main galleries, to celebrate his 70th birthday. Each painting is composed of six canvases in two layers of three. All depict the same stretch of woodland in east Yorkshire, seen at different times of year. I am not an admirer of Hockney’s recent landscape paintings, finding the colours insensitive and the drawing surprisingly inexact. His purples and oranges are not quite wild enough, while his greens lack all conviction. The light in these pictures is strangely uniform and uninflected (very unlike Britain), and when the trunks of trees cross from one canvas to another they frequently don’t meet properly. This would be fine if it were done for some expressive reason, but it seems simply to be carelessness. However, if the display helps to focus attention on the beauties of the English landscape, then I’m all for it.

As an introduction to the major exhibition in the Clore Gallery, the uninspiringly titled Hockney on Turner Watercolours, it is less effective than the single Hockney watercolour in the exhibition itself. Approaching the Clore wing from the Manton staircase where the Hockney oils hang, you eventually find yourself in the first room of the Turner show, which is called ‘From Architecture to Landscape’. Here hangs Hockney’s ‘Trees and Puddles, East Yorkshire, 3.11.04’, which has an interest of shape and observation so often lacking in the bigger oils. It stands up remarkably well considering it’s surrounded by Turners. To the left are a couple of Turner’s sketchbooks in a display case. At once the viewer is ravished by genius. One book shows Wharfedale with geese in the foreground, the other a distant view of Whitby with a windmill against the sunset.