![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/A-Year-in-Normandie-detail-2020-2021_2.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nReview at a glance<\/p>\n
Goodness, it\u2019s big. The larger part of David Hockney\u2019s A Year in Normandie and Other Thoughts About Painting is very large indeed. It\u2019s Hockney\u2019s iPad paintings of his Normandy farmhouse over the course of a year, starting in winter and ending in winter, spread in an uninterrupted line across the internal walls of the Serpentine Gallery. He maintains that it\u2019s inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, with the figures and horses and ships replaced by trees, streams and fields. At 90 metres, it is 20 metres longer than the Bayeux work. <\/p>\n
Hockney discovered the iPad in 2010 and he\u2019s embraced the ease, the bright, often garish colours, the freedom from the nuisance of wet paint and mosquitos landing on the canvas.<\/p>\n
But he\u2019s forfeited the materialism of actual paint, that most valuable, tangible element of the process. The Normandie series is made up of huge printouts from iPad pictures. It\u2019s easy to blow up the scale of the things, for you can magnify as much as you like. No clambering about a giant canvas for Hockney, and at 88, that may be just as well. Indeed, the iPad images can be blown up ad infinitum to make, for instance, the mural of a flowering tree outside the caf\u00e9. The scale amplifies the loud colours, the gaudiness, though it\u2019s also possible to see the joins between the pictures. In fact, if you are one for bright and jolly colours, look no further; this frieze is all cheer, even the melancholic winter bits.<\/p>\n
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A Year in Normandie (detail), 2020-2021, composite iPad painting \u00a9 David Hockney<\/p>\n
\u00a9 David Hockney<\/p>\n
The other source of inspiration here is Chinese scroll paintings, which you unroll to reveal a painterly narrative. But if they are his inspiration, he has missed the crucial delicacy of form and colour, the haunting quality which characterises them.<\/p>\n
For I\u2019m not sure that painterly qualities are enhanced by the medium of the iPad. It looks from close-up like enforced pointillism; colours not blended but superimposed on one another. In one image of a flowering tree (a favourite motif) the effect is made by imposing uniform light and dark green circles on lots and lots of small pink and white ones. The same goes for other subjects \u2014 the lines of a tree or grass, say \u2014 on which he stamps uniform shapes like little potato prints. If you want to see the difference between these mechanical forms and Seurat\u2019s dots, go to the show at the Courtauld<\/a> to compare with those luminous seascapes.<\/p>\n The other element of the show is the acrylic works on canvas, a running conceit whereby he puts various subjects \u2014 people he knows \u2014 at gingham-covered tables. And yes, the tables play with perspective, narrowed towards the viewer, combined with the linear strokes of the floorboards and the decorative motifs on the walls. The figures at the tables are interspersed with canvases of abstract paintings, also on the tables \u2014 some recognisable, like a Mark Rothko, another derived from one of his own works \u2014 but all apparently intended to illustrate his dictum that figurative art is inherently abstract, so long as it exists upon a flat surface.<\/p>\n I may be missing something but it strikes me that while the tablecloths, the vertical lines of the walls and the horizontal floorboards may tend to abstraction, the same is not true of the relatively conventional if crude portraiture.<\/p>\n David Hockney, Abstraction Resting on a Green and White Checkered Tablecloth, 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 48 in. (91.4 x 121.9 cm) \u00a9 David Hockney. Photo: Prudence Cuming<\/p>\n \u00a9 David Hockney. Photo: Prudence Cuming<\/p>\n A baffling Tower of Babel<\/p>\n Whatever. The portraits here, executed last year, are not really comparable with his earlier work, and he has in his time executed some remarkable likenesses. Some years ago I visited an exhibition of them at the National Portrait Gallery and I have never forgotten his very beautiful drawings, for he was in his earlier days a most wonderful draughtsman, with the utmost clarity of line. His drawings of his mother are incomparable. But these depictions of his carer (complete with a jaunty badge saying End Bossiness Soon), his partner, his friends, are almost wilfully crude by comparison.<\/p>\n Introducing other works into these paintings is merely puzzling. It\u2019s one thing to quote his own work, quite another to bring in Breugel\u2019s The Tower of Babel, a work he very much admires. What on earth is that tower doing as background to Joe Hage Resting on the Green and White Checkered Tablecloth? Is there some subtle relationship between the hubris of the tower makers, confounded by God, and the very ordinary Mr Hage? Do tell!<\/p>\n All the same, it\u2019s hard not to be cheered by this show. The old boy is still going strong, still prolific, still curious and (thank God) still smoking. Like a painter version of Alan Bennett then, a veritable national treasure. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Review at a glance Goodness, it\u2019s big. The larger part of David Hockney\u2019s A Year in Normandie and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":383039,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[267],"tags":[365,362,363,364,30069,366,18,117,19,17,30070],"class_list":{"0":"post-383038","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-david-hockney","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-eire","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-ie","17":"tag-ireland","18":"tag-serpentine-gallery"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116221658098214998","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383038\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/383039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"David](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/JPG-Abstraction-Resting-on-a-Green-and-White-Checkered-Tablecloth-2025.jpeg\")
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