David Hockney is celebrating a twin event this year. As he turns 80 on July 9, he has also been painting now for exactly 60 years and is undoubtedly the greatest living British artist still in action.

Tate Britain was naturally the first museum to organise the event in one of its four galleries. But the Pompidou Centre in Paris went a step ahead and its top floor at the moment is displaying no less than 160 of Hockney’s works that include not only paintings but also sketches, photographs and, many moving images following the artist’s own singular perceptions. Next in the line is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Bradford-born Hockney began his career as a teenager in the early ’50s and quickly developed his talents as a landscape painter with an unusually sharp eye for details. His initial works represent distant views, mainly over factories, roads and industrial workers’ living quarters as those were the only scenes accessible to him in his youth. However, despite their grey skies and rainy backgrounds, even those early paintings remain particularly unusual.

The Pompidou Centre in Paris pays tribute to one of the greatest British painters still at work

No longer able to hide his passion from his parents, he painted their portraits thus convincing his father — a factory accountant who had expected his son to follow the same line — that he would be happier as an artist. By 1957, at age 20, the artist sold his first work at a modest price of 10 pounds.

Soon he would move on a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London where his creations would assume newer proportions. By the early ’60s Hockney had also become a tireless traveller to the United States and Italy. His wild landscapes of the American West and the Italian Tuscany vistas are proof of his weird 3D vision, hitherto unseen in paintings whether modern or classical.

By the late ’70s, he would permanently move to his Yorkshire studio where he would create his immense ‘Pool Paintings’ and many of the gigantic canvases of natural scenes such as ‘Elderflower Blossom’ and ‘Bigger Trees near Warter.’

One large canvas that attracts many visitors and makes them stand before it for unusually long periods is ‘Portrait of the Artist/Pool with Two Figures.’ Though the onlookers are fascinated by the character staring down at the figure in the pool, much as a modern Narcissus contemplating his own underwater image, the artist insists his real subject is transparency. He took one-and-a- half year to finish the work in 1977 and destroyed many of the earlier efforts, being unsatisfied with the results.

Even today he does not hesitate experimenting with modern technologies. His Pompidou show carries many a slow-moving projection of trees and flowers shot in his peculiar vision through a movie camera.

However, Hackney warns other artists of the traps they could easily fall into while using contemporary high-tech methods: “I think photography is a great invention but it has also done us a lot of damage. We become used to seeing things through the lens of a camera in a rather repetitive and boring way. We are living in an age in which technologies do not claim to create art — they claim to recreate reality.”

Holding on to his now well-recognised principle of versatility, Hockney shifts with effortless ease from one technique to another in his quest for perfection while endlessly pursuing the same themes. He famously asks: “Portraiture, landscape and still life … what else is there in art?”

“David Hockney/60 Years of Artistic Creation/ 80th Birthday” show ison display at the Pompidou Centre June 21 to October 23, 2017

The writer is an art critic based in Paris.
ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 9th, 2017