The British art establishment, in its ceaseless quest to canonise the transgressive, has now elevated David Hockney to the status of a martyred visionary. A new exhibition at the Tate Britain, we are told, celebrates his depictions of a ‘peaceful, gay paradise’ during an era when homosexuality was a criminal offence. The language alone is revealing: paradise, peace, innocence. We are to believe that Hockney’s sun-drenched pools and languid young men were acts of quiet rebellion, a pastoral idyll carved out against the grey backdrop of legal persecution.
Let us not be naive. Hockney was not some underground pamphleteer, risking prison with every brushstroke. He left a grim, repressed Yorkshire for the hedonism of Los Angeles, where the climate was warm and the police were, at least, less interested in what consenting adults did behind closed doors. California in the 1960s was not a bastion of legal liberty — homosexuality remained illegal in much of the United States until Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 — but it offered a certain privacy, a certain freedom from the constant surveillance of the British state. Hockney did not paint in defiance of the law; he painted from the safety of an expatriate’s haven.
What we are really being asked to admire is not the courage of the artist, but the triumph of the liberal narrative. The art institution, ever eager to rewrite history as a simple morality play, presents Hockney’s work as a beacon of progress, a visual rebuttal to the unenlightened past. Yet this framing does a disservice to the complexity of his art. His swimming pools, his double portraits, his domestic scenes — they are not political manifestos. They are celebrations of surface, of colour, of a certain kind of bourgeois ease that happens to include same-sex desire.
The truth is that Hockney’s ‘paradise’ was always a fantasy, even then. His paintings excluded the AIDS crisis that would devastate his community, the persistence of homophobia, the loneliness that often accompanied liberation. Today’s curators, however, prefer the sanitised version: a world of eternal sunshine, where the only crime is a lack of aesthetic taste. We are told that his work “challenged conventions,” but really, it aestheticised them. Hockney was a brilliant technician, but his influence on queer politics is vastly overstated.
One might contrast his legacy with that of, say, Francis Bacon, who painted the agonies and ecstasies of queer life with a raw, visceral intensity. Bacon’s lovers are contorted, grotesque, sometimes monstrous — a far cry from Hockney’s well-toned Adonises. Which artist, one wonders, was more honest about his experience? The one who sanitised his desires for public consumption, or the one who flung them onto the canvas in all their ugly glory? The world, perhaps unsurprisingly, prefers the former.
So let us dispense with the hagiography. David Hockney painted beautiful pictures of a life that mostly existed in his mind. That he did so while homosexuality was illegal is a fact, but not a virtue. The real story is not about a brave artist defying the law, but about a culture that now fetishises victimhood and retroactively imposes political meaning on art that was never intended to bear it. We view the past through a lens of present moral certainty, and we find it wanting — then we congratulate ourselves for being so enlightened.
The Hockney exhibition is not a history lesson; it is a ritual of self-congratulation. Look, we say, how much better we are than those benighted old bigots. Look at how far we have come. And we ignore the fact that the ‘paradise’ Hockney painted was always a mirage, and that even today, the safe spaces he depicted remain elusive for many. But that would be a less palatable story, would it not?
