Visiting Hockney's latest show is like stepping aboard the MaryCeleste: the dachsunds are there - and the ghost of Picasso - but, beneaththe camouflage of colours, the artist himself has gone missing. By Andrew Graham-Dixon
Underneath a red chaise-longue on a wedge of blue carpet in the large but unpeopled living room of a luxurious modern house a dachsund with blank and baleful eyes malingers. Close by another dachsund sleeps, oblivious to the faintly oppressive atmosphere in here. There is a bottle of wine but no glasses on a sideboard and a black grand piano, unplayed, stands in the background.
David Hockney painted Montcalm Interior at Seven o'clock in 1988. It hangs at the heart of "You Make the Picture" at Manchester City Art Galleries, an exhibition of paintings and prints made by Hockney between 1982 and 1995. Montcalm Interior is a lonely and melancholic work, despite the sensual Matissean bluster of Hockney's colour; and despite the slightly forced Cubistic exuberance with which space has been telescoped and an array of patterns - an orange-striped floor and a blue-striped floor and orange and red rafters above - have been juxtaposed with one another. It is a busy painting but all its busyness, the saturated yellow and red and green, the herringbone of stripes adjacent, cannot disguise the emptiness at its centre. There is no one home and life is at a standstill.
Hockney in his later years has let it be known that his chief preoccupation is space. There are those who may feel, as they contemplate paintings such as this one, or his multi-panelled panoramic collages of photographs - Kodacolor Cezannes of subjects such as Zion Canyon, Utah, October 1982, or Pearblossom Highway, 11-18 April 1986 - that Hockney was a more interesting artist when he thought...
