David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, at the Royal Academy.  

Who on earth is David Hockney? His blockbusting new show at the Royal Academy leaves the question open. One thing is for sure: who he is not, nowadays. He is no longer the owlishly bespectacled, Pop-inclined, ironic young man he was back in the Sixties and Seventies: the painter of graffiti-esque protestations of a love that still, back then, dared not speak its name; the emigre to sun-kissed Los Angeles; the celebrant of swimming pools and lithe male bodies, creator of A Bigger Splash. No, he is none of those. The Hockney of now is a man come home, back to his native North Yorkshire, back to Bridlington, to paint "A Bigger Picture", as the title of the current exhibition would have it.

Most of the 150 works in the show were painted during the last eight years. Nearly all are landscapes. They are mainly strident and often panoramic, painted in an almost gratingly joyous palette of zinging yellow, sappy green, fluorescent purple, screaming pink and candied orange. Yet despite the willed consistency of tone and the relentless focus on a single place, these paintings suggest that Hockney’s identity remains as curiously fractured as the Polaroid collages with which, three decades ago, he announced his turn towards landscape as a theme.

A number of those collages have been included in "A Bigger Picture" as part of the back-story to the new work. Pearblossom Highway, 11-18 April 1986 is a juddering, stuttering, mildly disorientating view of a stretch of sun-baked California as seen from Highway 138, formed from hundreds of interlocking Polaroid photographs. It is a reminder of Hockney’s longstanding preoccupation with the truancies of vision, the ever-mobile nature of the human eye. It is also a homage of sorts: Cubism revisited by mechanical means.

David Hockney-Picasso is just one of several Hockneys on view in "A Bigger Picture". The new North Yorkshire paintings are positively haunted by ghosts of the artists of the past. A series of "watercolours and first oils from observation", with which the Bridlington paintings are introduced, includes several depictions of vibrant yellow wheatfields under churning blue skies: meet David Hockney-Van Gogh. Several pictures of the old Roman road at Bridlington recall the tree-lined vista of Meindert Hobbema’s The Avenue at Middelharnis, of 1689, in the National Gallery. Even the painter’s idiosyncratic visions of Yorkshire hawthorn, white blooms fuzzed to incandescent brightness, might have been picked straight from Samuel Palmer’s Shoreham garden.

Not to be outdone by David Hockney-Palmer and David Hockney-Hobbema, David Hockney-Hokusai contributes a series of massive prints enlarged from i-Pad sketches of Yosemite National Park, done on a fleeting trip back to California in the autumn of last year. Despite the American subject matter and modern technology, these cloud-steamed vistas of pine trees and mountains are self-evidently japoniste, with a nod too in the direction of Chinese scroll-painting (another of Hockney’s art historical enthusiasms). Hockney the mad inventor and restless experimentalist also puts in an appearance, contributing a number of eerily high-definition eighteen-screen videos of the Yorkshire landscape in summer and winter, simultaneously shot from a multitude of cameras rigged to various parts of the artist’s four-by-four.

Even more intriguing is a series of paintings done in homage to Claude Lorrain’s Sermon on the Mount. The largest resembles an illustration to the happy-ever-after scene in some fairytale. Humble swain gather at the base of a bright red rocky outcrop set in a picture-perfect landscape, straining to hear the words of the saviour. Is that pink-faced Christ sermonising from the mount yet another of Hockney’s alter-egos? Might he be preaching Hockney’s new religion, the wide-eyed worship of the natural world? It certainly looks like it.

Collectively, to judge by the catalogue and the wall captions, the works assembled in "A Bigger Picture" do have a strong proselytising intent. They are Hockney’s way of preaching two messages: his stated passion for the vibrancy of the natural world; and his faith in the languages of art, as opposed to what he calls the monocular tyranny of photography, to represent that world as no other medium can. Hence perhaps his magpie eclecticism, his multiple borrowings from the canon of past art: by attaching himself to a particular tradition, he is proclaiming his belief in its continuing vitality.

But Hockney’s exuberant ventriloquism and quasi-pantheistic devotion to Nature are not always convincing. There is often the suspicion of a gap between what the artist has willed himself to create and what he has actually created. There is a suppressed charge of melancholy behind the bright surfaces of many of these pictures, hints even of a conscious morbidity and loneliness in some of their most insistent motifs: the recurring barren trunk of a stricken tree, the road or passage leading to some ominous, mysterious horizon. Glummest of all are those multi-camera movies: split-screen meditations on a natural world that often appears a blank and forbidding place, seen from a car moving with the funereal slowness of a hearse. This is supposedly joyful art, supposedly affirming the power of painting. But that is not the whole story, despite the best efforts of the many David Hockneys to keep darker strains of feeling at bay.