London

Tim Cooke

The opening at Tate Britain was heaving – just a sign of what’s to come as crowds line up for this epic survey of David Hockney, the man regularly dubbed Britain’s most popular painter.

So popular indeed that there have been lots of Hockney shows of different kinds in recent years. This one, however, is more substantial. It’s larger, weightier, more diverse and very well structured. It’s hard to imagine that any future Hockney exhibition will ever better this one.

A saturated opening at Tate Britain.

There has been plenty of discussion as to where exactly elements of Hockney’s work will settle in the pantheon of art history. Here already though you can see the earlier works standing the test of time and casting us back to a period of social and human discovery as experienced by a young Hockney as he responded to the landscape, light and sexual freedom of California in the ’60s and ’70s.

As the FT critic Jackie Wullschlager wrote: “America offered Hockney sun, sex, an unpainted topography and psychological freedom.” The early American paintings declare that in spades. Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool 1966 and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) 1972 are two such examples.

The exhibition is helpfully chronological, displaying as it goes Hockney’s varying encounters with media, colour and technology.

An engaging work for me is My Parents (1977) from Tate’s own collection. It’s worth seeking out and dwelling with for a while. The painting can speak for itself.

I didn’t find myself dwelling much with the Gauguin-esque colours of some of his middle period and later works, although they are wonderfully eye-catching, nor with the Yorkshire landscapes with colouring more akin to France or Italy. His gargantuan works on Yorkshire, you may recall, got a lot of exposure via A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy in 2012. At the back end of this show the iPhone paintings are cleverly displayed and I enjoyed them more than I expected. You are able to watch a number of screen works taking shape simultaneously and that’s quite good fun.

Garden 2015 David Hockney / Richard Schmidt

Woldgate Woods 2016 David Hockney Inc / Richard Schmidt

What a versatile artist he is, brimming with curiosity, inventiveness and enthusiasm across six decades. Relentless really.

There can be little doubt as to the enduring iconic status of many of the works on show. And isn’t it both thrilling and challenging that one of the great champions of digital art is a man entering his ninth decade?

The exhibition runs at Tate Britain in London until May 29, 2017, before going on to The Centre Pompidou in Paris and then The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

David Hockney turns 80 this year. Photo: Jean-Pierre Gonzales de Lima