David Hockney’s clumsy late style

David Hockney’s clumsy late style

In, say, 50 years, when time has done some sifting, how will David Hockney be viewed? Will it be as the painter of the 1960s and 1970s who could capture fashionable figures in immaculate west London drawing rooms as brilliantly as light-saturated Californian swimming pools, or as the older painter entranced with the fecund Yorkshire landscape and the possibility of super-size and hyper-coloured landscape art? Maybe it will be as an early-adopter…