Hockney: Printmaker, Dulwich Picture Gallery

Dulwich Picture Gallery is going through something of a renaissance. Hot on the heels of its outstanding Whistler and the Thames exhibition, the south London suburbs are about to be hit with a second printmaking installment from a contemporary British master of no less dashing brilliance than that American Aesthete.
David Hockney’s paintings, bold in colour, flat in perspective and often involving beautiful naked young men, have earned the artist the cumbersome ‘Pop Art’ tag, at least in the popular imagination. You can see why up to a point: The Splash (1966) and A Bigger Splash (1967) are infamous pictorial jokes germane with many of Pop Art’s tropes.
But look beneath Hockney’s self-styled celebrity and the similarities go no further. Hockney’s prints – etching and lithography – are the products of a breathtakingly sensitive draughtsmanship. Many of the greatest painters in the Western world, including Dürer and Rembrandt, worked in etching and engraving due to the special line the medium yields: more delicate than paint but more permanent than pencil, and somehow more spontaneous than both. 
Hence it’s very exciting to see Dulwich paying etching the dues it deserves. In no small part we have the curator, Richard Lloyd, to thank - who as Head of Prints & Multiples at Christie’s New York is fully invested in the idea of printmaking’s special class within art. 
Hockney exploits the medium to its full potential. His A Rake’s Progress (1961-3) is a re-make of William Hogarth’s eponymous narrative in eight paintings, and speaks of Hockney’s ambitions for a serious place in the history of art. In his scratchy, blotted re-versioning, Hockney casts himself as the ‘rake’ (instantly identifiable with that unmistakeable shade of dyed blond hair in one of the sixteen prints), but whereas Hogarth’s Rakewell ends up bankrupt and destitute in London’s Bedlam asylum, Hockney’s protagonist winds up in the disturbing mad-house world of ‘Other People’ – everyone else. By the end of the series he’s just another face in the identikit, droid-like crowd, and except for a very tiny etched arrow pointing him out, all traces of artistic individuality have been erased.
In total there are over 100 prints on show, including portraits of Hockney’s artistic and Society friends, illustrations for the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, and some computerized preludes to his contemporary ‘iPad drawings’. And as this is Hockney the Printmaker, expect a number of unique glimpses into his changing technical processes over the decades. All in all, the show is a fascinating portrait of one of our grandest old artists, soon surely to be canonised as a British master, and his persistent knack for making a splash.