Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Exhibiting next to Old Masters, David Hockney’s work more than hold its own, its dazzling hues sometimes making the rest look dull in comparison
David Hockney has never patented a colour, as far as I know. But there’s a Hockney blue and a Hockney red, in fact a whole palette of bright subtle hues that are totally his own. That has never been more lusciously apparent than in his scintillating takeover of the Fitzwilliam Museum, one of Britain’s best collections of Old Master paintings. Those oldies have met their match. Next to Domenico Veneziano’s 15th-century Annunciation hangs Hockney’s version of the Virgin Mary being hailed by an angel that’s an intense, almost psychedelic rave of colour, a rich pink against blue shadows on an emerald lawn, all set off by the yellow floor with radiating terracotta lines.
Roll over, Quattrocento. Yet Hockney would never say anything like that. He competes with artists from 500 years ago in a friendly familiar way, as if he went to the Royal College of Art with Veneziano and Fra Angelico rather than Allen Jones and RB Kitaj. What was he thinking of, painting his own Renaissance Annunciation after Angelico, in 2017? Experimenting with the theory of perspective, which the show enhances with a computer analysis of how Veneziano cheats on the idea of a single vanishing point. So from imbibing Hockney’s hot colours, you are led to think about western art’s discovery of how to picture the world in realistic depth.
