Touching, tender, ribald, raunchy, innovative, annoying: there are many pleasures in David Hockney’s Tate Britain retrospective, but just as many exasperations. The earliest work, in an exhibition that spans more than 60 years of Hockney’s art, is buried among a large display of the artist’s drawings. A spare, perspicacious little self-portrait, it has the 17-year-old Bradford School of Art tyro, already owlish in his glasses, fiddling with his tie. Butter, you think, wouldn’t melt. By 1960, fresh from National Service and the Royal College of Art, he was drawing a boy with the word Queen on his jacket, just so you know. And here’s a young man wearing a peaked cap, the words “Fuck You Cunt” hovering over his head like a shouted insult.
With their mix of intimacy and distance, observation and a lively, though often reserved, touch, Hockney’s drawings are always worth one’s time. They have a sensitivity his paintings have for a long time lacked. The best of Hockney’s art spans 1960 to 1980. If one wanted to be brutal, the best of all was the first full decade.
At the beginning, his art was a queering of British abstraction – both Alan Davie and Roger Hilton come to mind – from which emerged men in flimsy negligees and carrying handbags; a ticker tape of toilet graffiti, cottaging and sex in the shower. Hockney’s art was brave, unrestrained and flagrantly out. In one early painting, two monstrous, cartoonish men, one chained to the bed, perform a 69, their cocks replaced by squirting tubes of toothpaste. A tube of Vaseline pokes out from under the bed. It is a sweaty riot in there, art brut by fun-loving brutes.
What came later was surprising, not least because of its air of quiet restraint. In his double portraits – reunited here for the first time – there is a kind of flatness that verges on illustration. Light rippling on a swimming pool, sprinklers shushing on a verdant lawn, a backward look from a boy on a bed, the flat facades of California buildings: Hockney developed a sophisticated shorthand for the world about him. His abbreviated language and the things he painted could make you smile. He wore his sophistication lightly. Then he went on to make jokes about art and illusion, riffing on Matisse and playing ill-advised games with Picasso. Play against Picasso and you always lose.
At best, he introduced a palpable tension: between Christopher Isherwood and his partner Don Bachardy, and between a seated Henry Geldzahler and a standing Christopher Scott, belted-up in a trenchcoat with a frayed hem. I love how static he is. Any second you expect him to pull out a gun. Weirdly, the room they occupy feels uninhabited, the tulips in the vase and the standing lamp as much protagonists as the people. Homing in on the objects in a room and using them to punctuate the distances between people, Hockney created psychological as well as physical space (though I have never felt the famous double portrait of Mr and Mrs Clark and their cat Percy worked).
His LA buildings and boulevards, which bear the influence of Ed Ruscha – the master of affectless urban flatness – also have a kind of static thrill. They stare back, oblivious. Apart from the photographic collage Pearblossom Hwy, 11-18 April 1986, pictured here, Hockney’s forays into photography feel strained – clever but a bit pointless. They are a cluttered game with cubism and the Polaroid camera, as much as with the multiple shifts of attention and focus that go into our apprehension of the things about us. They don’t add much.
Hockney began to perform cumbersome pictorial distortions of space and places. The landscapes – and even a room cluttered with furniture – heave and undulate with distorting, seismic aftershocks. His palette becomes shrill and nasty. One minute he is going all bloated and pneumatic, swooning and swooping all over the place, the next invoking fauvism. Here are some pointillist dots, there are some Mondrian plus-and-minus signs. You want stripes? I got stripes. The colour gets lurid, with the temperature turned up too high. Look at me, the paintings shout, but I really don’t want to.
Halfway through, the exhibition, and Hockney’s art, flags. Juxtaposing paintings of the Yorkshire Wolds and the Grand Canyon is a bad idea. Hockney’s paintings of the Wolds, given full reign in a big exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2012, return. The more straightforward they are, the better his work feels. His series of 25 charcoal drawings of a wooded road coming into spring is better than any of the paintings or videos he made of the same subjects. Here, in concentrated form, the varieties of touch, and the different and sometimes innovative solutions to the questions nature and light and shade propose to him, come together. These drawings are a delight, not least because everything works in consort.
His videos of the same road, made with cameras fixed to his Land Rover on sunny days in spring, summer, autumn and winter, feel unnecessary. The drawings already say much more about being there, and the subjectivity of even the most dispassionate, careful observation.
It gets worse. His recent conflations of painting and digital photography are a clever conceit, but an artistic disaster. I had hoped never to see his 2012 video of people juggling, hula-hooping and semaphoring ever again, but here it is, at the entrance to the exhibition. It puts you off even before you have started. The jaunty accordion music makes me want to run away.
• David Hockney is at Tate Britain, London, 9 February-29 May. Box office: 020-7887 8888.
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