David Hockney's Digital Normandy Frieze: A 90-Meter Vision That Falls Short in Person
David Hockney, the artist who reassured postwar Britain that it was acceptable to embrace beauty and freedom, has unveiled a monumental new work at the Serpentine North gallery in London. Titled A Year in Normandie, 2020-2021, this 90-meter-long digital frieze depicts the changing landscape around his French home through the seasons. However, while it creates an impressive visual spectacle designed to shine on phone screens, the reality of the installation proves underwhelming.
A Legacy of Beauty and Direct Communication
Emerging in the late 1950s, Hockney revitalized modern painting with his unabashed celebration of conventional beauty. His coolly sentimental double portraits and domestic scenes captured the liberated lifestyles enabled by economic and social reforms, offering a refreshing contrast to the angst and irony of his peers. For a decade after 1963, his work disproved the notion that great art must be difficult to comprehend or despise the everyday world, making it accessible to a wider public.
To call Hockney a gifted sentimentalist is no backhanded compliment. In this regard, he resembles Andy Warhol, whose pure love for capitalist America's fruits and genius in communicating that love defined his legacy. Hockney's early work should be treasured for its directness and emotional resonance.
The Digital Experiment: A Year in Normandie
At the heart of the exhibition is the vast frieze, dramatically installed to run like a ribbon around the perimeter of the Serpentine's North gallery. Constructed from approximately 100 separate digital images, each composed using an iPad with a rubber-tipped "brush," these pictures have been collaged together on a computer, enlarged to gallery dimensions, and printed on a single strip of paper. Thematically, it tells a story about the seasons, akin to how the Bayeux tapestry narrates a conquest.
The curators have presented it against a dark-blue wall, theatrically lit to glow like a screen in a dark room, creating an impressive visual spectacle that reproduces well on digital devices. This is an intelligent decision, as the physical experience leaves much to be desired.
Technical Flaws and Conceptual Limitations
A Year in Normandie expresses Hockney's pet theory that single-point perspective in realist painting does not accurately describe human vision. He argues that we see through multiple "windows," with our brains stitching together images from different viewpoints and memories to create narrative continuity. While interesting in theory, the execution falters.
The work is undone by its details: the joins between each panel are unaccountably messy, the clangorous colors resist harmonization, and occasional nice touches—such as a shimmering reflection or a veil of lilac rain—cannot escape the limitations of the digital medium. The greatest problem is its artificiality; by rejecting mechanical perspective, Hockney has adopted an equally confected "painterly" way of seeing. The overall effect resembles Normandy run through a digital filter trained on paintings from the region between 1880 and 1940, from Monet's poplars to Raoul Dufy's wheatfields.
Highlights and Shortcomings in the Exhibition
The most successful works in the show are two portraits that demonstrate the close attention acrylic painting demands and that personal relationships facilitate. A portrait of Hockney's partner, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, captures him looking up from his phone with an expression that is both ironical and indulgent, reminiscent of Hockney's celebrated 1977 portrait of his parents. A second portrait of the artist's nephew offers glimpses of Hockney's ability to conjure character through affection.
However, even these portraits are marred by distractingly steep reverse perspectives in the table placements, which feel like violent nods to Van Gogh and Cézanne rather than subtle homages. This treatment of artworks as arguments or guessing games seems to betray Hockney's connection with audiences beyond the cultured elite.
The Enduring Lesson of Hockney's Best Work
Despite the exhibition's flaws, the lesson of Hockney's best work remains relevant: even in deeply dispiriting times, we must be allowed to take pleasure in the world. As visitors leave the Serpentine gallery, they might find beauty in the blooming Kensington Gardens or a magnolia tree on Exhibition Road, unconcerned with appearing derivative or kitsch.
David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts About Painting is on display at Serpentine North, London, from March 12 to August 23. While the digital frieze may not fully deliver in person, it sparks important conversations about perspective, medium, and the evolving role of technology in art.
