One wouldn't automatically think of David Hockney as a landscape painter. True, he has a painterly affinity with the suburban playground of the Los Angeles hills, with its swimming pools and manicured lawns. But an outstanding retrospective exhibition, David Hockney: Espace/Paysages, currently at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, shows he has bridged the gap between suburbia and landscape on a considerably grander scale.
Espaces/Paysages marshals a formidable body of work, from 1962 to 1998. The earliest picture is an imaginary Swiss landscape, in which the folded strata of the Alps, colour-coded as if for a geological diagram, mock the conventions of abstract colour field painting. The latest are two vast studies of the Grand Canyon, as big as theatrical sets, which let our eyes roam freely over an epic landscape. As bright, stylised and cheerful as cartoons, these exhilarating images position us on a ledge looking out over a network of plunging valleys cut through the terraced strata of brilliantly coloured stone. They are startling, bravura pieces of painting, and you cannot but leave the Pompidou with a smile on your face. As we entered, a man passing on his way out smiled and said simply: "Wow!"
The Grand Canyon paintings and a group of Yorkshire landscapes occupy the final room of the show and mark the triumphant resolution of pictorial problems that have preoccupied Hockney on and off for over two decades. These problems were eventually expressed in his ambition to synthesise the lessons of Chinese scroll painting with those of Cubism, though it was actually 1983 when he first became excited by the example of Chinese scroll painting. He liked the fact that the viewer cannot take in everything at once but sees the painting bit by bit. By the end "you've walked through a landscape".
One of the things that appealed to Hockney about this was the way it underlined the inherent impression of duration in painting. The nearest western equivalent is Cubism, which deconstructs the notion of a single, overall view of the subject, and he has combined ideas from both ever since. His photographic "joiners" - collages built from myriad, individual snapshots, with inevitable disjunctures in time and space - rework Cubism for the era of the Polaroid and one-hour photo shops.
As his photographic experiments fed back into his painting, they produced some interesting results, including Mulholland Drive, a colourful description of the drive to his studio, with a succession of views from the winding road, and the self-explanatory A Walk Around the Hotel Courtyard, Acatlan. Interesting, but inconclusive. As could be said for a series of more abstract Very New Paintings from the early 1990s.
All this work was good and, because Hockney worries away at pictorial problems like a dog with a bone, consistently interesting. "I don't really paint very well," he remarked candidly in an interview in 1977. "I have technical problems . . . There are always struggles. I never paint very easily." But he works hard, and this feeling of really working things out comes across in the paintings, and he has, in any case, learned a great deal over the years. All the same, it wasn't until he got around to making paintings of Yorkshire and the Grand Canyon that his Sino-Cubist experiments finally paid dividends.
His Yorkshire landscapes are oddities in that he has not readjusted to the subdued light of northern England - though, despite the vibrant reds and yellows that leap out at us, he has toned down his palette somewhat. Against the odds, the pictures really work. The patchwork of fields, the houses tucked into sheltered valleys, the rolling countryside are all rendered in a style of heightened, almost naive realism. His view of the Salts Mill at Saltaire is just the sort of industrial landscape he was often criticised for never making.
With Yorkshire sorted out, he turned his attention to the Grand Canyon. The notion of an Englishman, even one as Americanised as Hockney, painting one of the US's mythic landscapes seems presumptuous until you consider that his 1960s paintings of Los Angeles taught Americans how to look at part of their own country. His Los Angeles, with its impeccable lawns, its pools, its blank facades, became the city's image of itself.
In the same way, there is something quintessentially American about his vision of the Grand Canyon. The paintings are very big indeed, both close to 7.5 metres in width. One is made up of 60 constituent panels, the other of 96. They are brash, with boldly simplified, geological forms and bright, garish colours. One of them features just a thin strip of blue sky along the top. In the other, the sky is filled with regularly spaced cotton-wool clouds. It wouldn't really be surprising if Roadrunner appeared racing across one of the plateaux. Yet, again, it works incredibly well. Hockney leaves you in little doubt that, if you're going to take on, in painting, the Grand Canyon and its unique position in American culture, this is the way to do it.
Throughout Hockney's extraordinary career, he has been a perpetual outsider who shrugs off exclusion and gets on with things. A gay, working-class Bradford boy in London; a representational painter at a time of abstract orthodoxy; an Englishman in Los Angeles: any or all of these roles might have left him with a giant chip on his shoulder. Instead, at every turn he has cheerfully subverted the stereotype and transformed his situation through sheer imaginative flair, and a willingness to work - for, as this show convincingly demonstrates, he is a genuine artist who lives most fully in his work.
David Hockney: Espace/ Paysages is at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, until April 26th. There are two related exhibitions in Paris. David Hockney: Dialogue with Picasso is at the Picasso Museum until May 3rd, and David Hockney: Photographs 1968-1997, is at the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, 5-7 rue de Fourcy, until March 15th