David Hockney: Drawing from Life review

Celia, Carennac, August 1971 by David Hockney

Celia, Carennac, August 1971: Hockney’s 'imperial phase'

(Image credit: Richard Schmidt/The David Hockney Foundation)

last updated 17 November 2023

David Hockney is "justifiably proud of his drawing skills", said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Like most artists of his generation, he underwent "years of enforced practice" drawing nude models, a discipline which "left him with a confidence and fluency in capturing immediate reality with pencil, pen or brush that today's young artists can only dream about".

This exhibition of his drawings originally opened at the National Portrait Gallery in early 2020, but was forced to close after just 20 days owing to the pandemic. Following the gallery's three-year refurbishment, it has now reopened, bolstered with 30 new portraits realised since the end of lockdown. Featuring everything from his very earliest 1950s self-portraits to pictures created on his iPad, it charts Hockney's innovations and experiments in the form, focusing principally on five sitters: the fashion designer Celia Birtwell; Gregory Evans, his friend and sometime lover; the master printmaker Maurice Payne; his mother, Laura; and the artist himself. The show "provides the perfect opportunity to assess whether Britain's favourite artist has lived up to his formidable gifts as a draughtsman".

There's no doubting Hockney's early brilliance, said Ben Luke in the Evening Standard. Take his extraordinary portraits of Birtwell from his 1970s "imperial phase", for instance. One "exquisite" sketch, created over lunch at Langan's Brasserie in 1970, is "dashed off, but utterly precise". Another, drawn in Paris, is "mesmerising", featuring "not one wayward mark, even among the thickets of lines describing Birtwell's hair". Yet it becomes increasingly clear that Hockney was at his best using "the simplest, time-honoured tools": there are mercifully few of his "wretched" iPad drawings, and the quality of his work since the 1980s is distinctly variable.

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The most recent portraits, mainly depicting friends and visitors to his Normandy home, are far from his "best work", agreed Hettie Judah in The i Paper. A much-trailed likeness of the pop star Harry Styles, for instance, is forgettable, while other pictures seem marred by an uncharacteristic hesitancy. Happily, however, there is much to enjoy elsewhere. It's particularly exciting to see Hockney's "ability to constantly see the same sitter in fresh ways": one moment, Gregory Evans is depicted "looking moody and romantic in a trench coat", the next "naked but for his gym socks". Best of all are the drawings of his mother. In a 1982 photo-collage portrait, she is "engulfed in a green raincoat" amid the ruins of Bolton Abbey, the artist's brogues "just visible in the foreground". It is a "wonderful" memento of "a widowed mother and adult son on a damp day out, surrounded by the architecture of death and commemoration". For all its faults, this is "a show of thoughtful delicacy" that testifies to Hockney's genius.

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