The most quoted remark by Picasso, his most telling quip, is: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” It’s popular because it nails something tangible and crucial: the artistic joy that appears twice in a long creative life — at the beginning and at the end.
David Hockney is 88. All of us hope he has many years left in his inexhaustible artistic tank, but it must also be true that the last dance has commenced. And the extraordinary vitality of his latest work constitutes a return to excitements we might usually expect in an artist 84 years younger.
Walking into his bouncy new display at Annely Juda Fine Art is a blast of fearlessness, innocence and the uninhibited enjoyment of colour. Anyone dreading the winter should skip along to this show, where spring has come early.
Delphiniums on My Garden Table, 13 July 2025, 2025
© DAVID HOCKNEY
Featuring fresh work and entitled with characteristic insouciance Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings Not Yet Shown in Paris — see what I mean about the return to childhood — the show presents a selection of interiors, still lifes and portraits, painted with a vim that seems to be accelerating.
The Paris event mentioned in the title is the huge retrospective that wowed them at Fondation Louis Vuitton in the spring: the most popular show of the year. Spread out across 11 galleries, it seemed to constitute an ambitious round-up. But, as this bouncy event keeps proving, Hockney is enjoying a volcanic burst of late energy.
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The first picture sets the mood. Featuring two empty chairs, a posh one and a prosaic one, sitting side by side, it’s a tribute to Van Gogh, who painted his chair and Gauguin’s as stand-ins for the two artists. Chairs feature prominently in the fun ahead. They constitute a soppy and emotional portraiture: presences that are also absences.
The way they are painted, with a reverse perspective that makes the fronts small and the ends large, seems to mimic the way we look at things: not by abstract rules of geometry but with leaps of attention. It may be a coincidence, or it may not, that in the show’s only self-portrait Hockney presents himself in a wheelchair, painting happily from a seated position. What others see as a restriction has been turned into a productive new viewpoint.
Waldemar with David Hockney at the artist’s new exhibition in London
ALL ARTWORKS © DAVID HOCKNEY
The jolly colours are at their jolliest in a series of still lifes in which the brightest fruit at the greengrocer’s — oranges, lemons, apples — launch a Smarties-style attack on Cezanne’s colourific reserve. Scattered on a rumpled tablecloth, chequered blue, the hi-vis fruit is both a tribute to the humble French still life and an art so tangy it feels like biting into a tangerine.
A set of portraits, focused mostly on the family of Hockney’s first dealer, John Kasmin, have an evident warmth to them. The cool Hockney of old has turned into the soppy Hockney of today and the same sense of loyalty that drives his choice of gallery appears to drive his choice of sitters. This is portraiture that hugs you.
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Upstairs, on walls that Hockey has painted a subtle blue that is both nocturnal and full of light, a series of paintings of the moon produced in Normandy before his move back to London takes us somewhere dreamy. Again and again, he tries obsessively to find the marks that best describe the silvery magic of a moonlit night. I didn’t immediately realise these dreamy battles with lunar skies are iPad drawings.
All this is delightful and thrilling. The childlike curiosity that has always poured out of Hockney is being given its head. The colours pop about with all the fun of a birthday party. And a wise and educative presence is encouraging us to open our hearts as well as our eyes, because there’s so much out there to enjoy.
8th April 2020, No. 2, 2020
© DAVID HOCKNEY
Before we leave the pleasures being served up, a word about the gallery. Founded in 1968 by its eponymous matriarch, Annely Juda Fine Art has been the most consistently educative and heartwarming art venue in London. Juda was a force of nature, a magnificent central European traveller who brought with her from Vienna a refined taste for European modernism and an address book to die for.
The shows she pulled out from her bottomless bag of progressive art by Malevich, El Lissitzky, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Gabo were uncommonly rousing. As a bumfluffed art critic, desperate for experience, nowhere instructed me as roundly or as passionately as Annely Juda’s little Vienna.
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Since her death 19 years ago, the gallery has shifted venues and focus. Under Juda’s son David it has expanded its mood. Which is where Hockney comes in. As the world’s most popular artist, Hockney could have gone anywhere to display his gorgeous wares. The fact he chose Annely Juda rather than one of the flashy arrivistes lured here by the smell of London money tells you all you need to know about Yorkshire loyalty and the respect in which this venerable establishment is held.
What’s more — toot the trumpets — the gallery has a new home. Moving around the corner from its old haunt in Dering Street, it has upgraded to an impressive Georgian townhouse on Hanover Square where the spaces feel more domestic and the aesthetic atmospheres appear gentler. All of which frames Hockney perfectly.
David Hockney: The Moon Room and Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings Not Yet Shown in Paris is at Annely Juda Fine Art, London, to Feb 28; annelyjudefineart.co.uk