The work consists of 130 paintings of views near Hockney’s home in Normandy, executed on an iPad. They were made in 2020, amidst the pandemic lockdown. The successive scenes tell a story of the seasons, beginning with snow on the bare branches of trees in winter, through to the bright blossoms of Spring, saturated colors of Summer, glowering clouds and rain of Autumn and back to the first snow of Winter. Hockney’s iPad paintings which he has been making since 2010 have never looked so alluring. So, 10/10 for the exhibition design.

As for the art… Hmmm. It’s just the kind of stuff that the art critics like me are meant to dislike: a relentless panorama of prettiness. Pretty flowers, pretty trees, pretty paths, pretty skies, pretty half-timbered houses, runs my internal monologue. Pretty inane. It reminded me of what I used to draw when I was a teenager with my box of Caran d’Ache felt-tipped pens. I found myself wondering how many of the effects were accomplished with tabs you can just click on in the app he downloaded. Hockney said the display was inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry which he visited every fortnight in the first year he lived in Normandy. But hang on, the Bayeux Tapestry will be exhibited at the British Museum from September this year. Mightn’t he have decided to show his iPad drawings in this format because the idea is topical?

The critical voice inside my head continued: “He’s coasting on his celebrity status these days, isn’t he? This is typical ‘late work’ when the artist indulges himself…” Except… except… except I can’t stop looking at them. And the more I look at them, the more I like them. Even though I am trying not to! I can’t turn my head away.

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I am hardly alone in this response, as I discovered when I canvassed the opinions of some of the punters looking at the show. Of course, some people simply love Hockney’s art. “It’s the usual David Hockney because he always brings joy,” one art lover told me unambiguously. “I’ve been here a couple of times. The first time I left happy, the second time I left very happy,” another beamed. There’s a second group who don’t rate it but respect Hockney’s devotion to pleasing the average gallery-goer: “It is not breaking any boundaries, but it is giving people what they want,” whispered a visitor to me. Lastly, there’s an ambivalent and confused third group. “I can’t quite decide if I l like it or not,” murmured one. “There are bits where I think I can’t bear this, but I can’t put my finger on why.” It was a sentiment with which I could heartily concur.

And as I retraced my steps around the exhibition several times, a thought slowly dawned on me. Could this be exactly the dilemma that Hockney seeks to evoke in my mind – and the minds of any other over-educated art critics and gallery-goers who might dare to visit his show? For this work goes against the conceptual grain of contemporary art deliberately, defiantly but also skillfully. It also dovetails with long-running themes in Hockney’s art: his return to early 20th-century “ism”s; his pop art sensibility; his interest in technology; and his commitment to beauty.

And then there is the defining aspect of his personality. Hockney loved to wind up the powers-that-be. If the art establishment of the moment decided that the important art was conceptual, “explores” trauma, “references” the identity of the artist, and so on — Hockney would say, uh-uh. I will make art that simply gives pleasure.

Hockney made his name with sleek and cool pop art images of people and swimming pools in LA in the sixties, but from the Eighties onwards, his art became increasingly inspired by modernist art movements. His large canvases of Californian landscapes were painted in a Cubist style, which also inspired his collages of polaroids. At the beginning of this century his work looked increasingly like Matisse’s. When he died, he was making iPad paintings outdoors in front of his subject, en plein air, to use the parlance of art history, just like the Impressionists. If it was raining, he would sit in a van with his tablet. He would use pure colors to build up and model his forms rather than adding a layer of shading over colors — again, just like the Impressionists did. In some scenes, a myriad of colored dots recalls the pointilliste movement, while the spidery branches dotted with blossom are very Van Gogh. The colors are hyper-intense, too — a tree in shadow might be purple or crimson — in a manner redolent of the Fauves. I spotted one of those classic metal white-painted garden chairs, sitting in the sunlight; its scrolling ironwork and chipped paint is, deliciously, painted in bold brown, white and black just like Matisse might have done. The hay bales in changing light, Hockney himself declared, are inspired by Monet.

So who was Hockney trying to be? Fauvists André Derain or Raoul Dufy? Van Gogh? Pissarro? Matisse? There are traces of all of them in Hockney’s Year in Normandie, without anything which amounts to imitation. Rather Hockney comes across in these works as the French Post-Impressionist who never was — Monsieur David Huq-Nez, perhaps — working a century too late. Those artists were dedicated to painting beauty, which they might find in a view out of a window, in a back garden or down the road, and that was enough of a purpose for art. In 1908, Matisse wrote: “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity… something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.”

Today art is expected to supply psychological angst or radical concepts, but Hockney always defiantly maintained the right of art to just be great to look at: “I have always believed that art should be a deep pleasure… There is always, everywhere, an enormous amount of suffering, but I believe that my duty as an artist is to overcome and alleviate the sterility of despair.”

To this artistically retro project, he added a tech element. Hockney’s art was back to the future. His engagement with digital media began in 1985 when he was invited to draw on the Quantel Paintbox for the BBC programme Painting with Light. “I think I was the only one who grasped the possibilities of it as it developed,” he told Serpentine director Hans Ulrich Obrist in an interview. He was invited to the launch of Adobe Photoshop in Silicon Valley around 1989 and could see “the end of chemical photography.” Every image at the Serpentine is made in a new hi-tech medium, the iPad with the drawing/painting app, Brushes, customized for Hockney by a software company specializing in immersive computer-generated environments, Reflex Arc,  whose past clients include BBC, Marvel and Manchester’s National Science & Media Museum. Reflex Arc designed special virtual brushes for Hockney, one of which was designed to put down bursts of dots in a pointilliste style. So, yes, to answer my earlier question in the gallery — he really did use a special tool from a drop-down menu.

And what of it? The technology adds its own artistic feel to the work. Look closely and you see how Hockney would build up the image with a simple repertory of fields of color, dots and squiggles. Hockney’s always been a brilliant draftsman, and he applies his marks and colors with such deftness that you can identify the weeping willows, oaks and apple orchard trees, along with most of the flowering plants. Although printed onto paper, Hockney’s palette has the electronic intensity of the screen. It’s all clearly structured as layers, which gives it the quality of cels in animation. There’s an anime quality to the world Hockney leads us into, as if he is making Post-Impressionist style cartoons — which leads us back to his Pop Art roots.

Finally we come to David Hockney the life-long anti-elite contrarian. As a Student at the Royal College of Art in London in the early Sixties, he refused to write the obligatory degree essay and demanded to be graded on his paintings and drawings alone. The RCA changed their rules and gave Hockney his degree. Hockney criticizes perspective, that pillar of Western art, at every opportunity; the human eye, he likes to say, doesn’t see in perspective from one point of view at one frozen moment in time. He wrote a book, Secret Knowledge, arguing convincingly that artists were using camera-like tools long before the invention of photography itself. It became a BBC TV series in 2003. Beyond the confines of the art world, he honed a public persona as a cantankerous Yorkshireman. He came across in his interviews as what the Germans call a Besserwisser — someone who always knows better. He was a proud smoker and complained in most of his interviews about the ban in public places: “I think that writing ‘Smoking Kills’ on a packet of cigarettes is just part of the uglification of Europe,” he once said.

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So, as tranquil and serene as Hockney’s scroll of Normandy landscapes are, they are also part of his life-long campaign against the establishment. He painted when art critics and curators said painting was dead. He made figurative paintings, when abstraction was all the rage. These days he’s painting on computers — anathema for those who think painting is all about the original hand of the artist. As we have seen, he paints beauty like it’s going out of fashion (which it did long ago). But, it’s not just any kind of beauty: it’s a particular populist, much-maligned, generic kind of beauty, the one you find on postcards and biscuit tins, of landscapes with cottages, blossoms and sunsets. Hockney always trolled us with prettiness. 

David Hockney: A Year in Normandes and Some Other Thoughts About Painting is at the Serpentine Gallery until 23 August.

Her other signature work, “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995”, from 1995, fared little better. A camping tent with the names of her lovers sewn inside, it was a sardonic riff on the art historical tradition of the mausoleum and war memorial. But even the softly-spoken Martin Gayford, biographer of Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Constable and others, politely suggested it was “pretty nondescript to look at”. Members of the public joined in. The BBC reported that a South Wales housewife, Christine de Ville from Swansea, drove 200 miles to London to the Turner Prize show in 1999 and attempted to tidy up Tracey’s bed.

There was no let-up. In 2003, Spectator art critic Philip Hensher described Emin as “thick”, “half-witted” and “gormless”. With her copious artworks about her libido, abortions and masturbation, it was easy to slag her off for being a slag. She had a semi-famous boyfriend, Billy Childish, who was a Stuckist, and it was a miracle no one called her a Sluttist. Perhaps it was only Charles Saatchi and a few others who noticed that in “My Bed”, Emin had taken the classic still-life painting and reimagined it as a real-life installation, artfully arranged, meanwhile channeling Marcel Duchamp’s early 20th-century invention of the “readymade” artwork — the urinal, wine rack, bicycle wheel on a stool, etc — in tongue-in-cheek fashion. Here was an “unmade”. Saatchi bought the bed for £150,000 and reputedly set it up in his own dining room.

And now, look how far we have come. Emin is the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Modern — and note that this is Tate Modern, not Tate Britain, where the apparently lesser Cornelia Parker and Sarah Lucas had their retrospectives. Tate Modern tends to be where the foremost contemporary artists have their grand surveys, including Damien Hirst at the height of his influence in 2012.

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The art critics have duly changed their tune. In a review of her 2011 exhibition at the Hayward, Searle found “a far greater range of tempos and registers of feeling than we might expect”. In 2024, in a video made by her gallery, Jay Jopling’s White Cube, Gayford called her “a painter absolutely at the top of her game”, which I am sure was a sincerely held opinion, rather than one purchased with a check from the gallery. In 2007, Emin was appointed professor at that conservative bastion of the British art establishment, the Royal Academy — only the second woman to attain the position. That same year, she had the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 2014, that bed was auctioned for £2.5 million at Christie’s. In 2018, she emblazoned the Eurostar station St Pancras with one of her neon sentences, each of which packs a sigh-inducing, or heart-quickening emotional story into one line. “I want my time with you”, this one says. In 2024, she was knighted: it’s Dame Tracey Emin to you now. She’s gone from Enfant Terrible to Grand Dame to national treasure. She is the Lady Di of contemporary art.

All of this makes Emin the most admired and — alongside Hirst — the best known of the YBA generation, the punky Young British Artists who emerged in the Nineties. They were a bunch of brash pop conceptualists mostly from Goldsmiths, who included Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Gillian Wearing, Michael Landy, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Sarah Lucas. At Goldsmiths, under the tutelage of Michael Craig Martin and Richard Wentworth, they were encouraged to make artworks like adverts and to act as provocateurs. Emin was at one remove from this crowd. She wasn’t at Goldsmiths, she was at the Royal College of Art, by this time an entirely post-graduate institution. Where Goldsmiths emphasized concept, the RCA emphasized craft. Emin found it traditional to the point of alienating. “I felt very lost at the RCA. It was very conservative, non-experimental and non-political.”

In terms of fame and income, she brought up the rear. At the beginning of the Nineties, Hirst was already famous for his formaldehyde animals, cigarette butts and medicine cabinets, the Chapmans for their arrangements of naked mannequins, Gary Hume for supermodels painted with tubs of Dulux, and Wearing for her photos of people holding signs. Emin’s first solo show came in 1993 at White Cube, memorably featuring a crumpled packet of cigarettes that belonged to her dead uncle. However, she only really made a major impact when her tent was shown in Charles Saatchi and Norman Rosenthal’s epoch-defining Sensation show at the Royal Academy in 1997.

Emin wasn’t really part of the great art boom of the YBA era, either. You could buy a Hirst Spot Painting at the beginning of the Nineties for around a grand; by the mid-Nineties, you’d pay almost £30,000; by the early 2000s you could sell it for six figures and in 2008, someone paid a record price of $3.48 million for one at Phillips de Pury & Company in London. Likewise, you could pick up a work by the Chapmans for under £50,000 – but in 2000, Saatchi paid £1 million for an entire exhibition of their work at White Cube. However, Emin came from behind and overtook her rivals on the final stretch. The value of Hirsts in the art market has halved since the 2007 peak of his “Beautiful Inside My Head” auction at Sotheby’s. Few have anything good to say about his recent work, whether it is the paintings full of colorful dots (“Veil Paintings”, 2018), the mock-shipwreck trophies (“Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable”, 2018), or the crypto stunts (“The Currency”, 2021). Little is heard of Gillian Wearing. Reviews of Hume’s shows are dutiful. No one wishes to be reminded of the Chapman’s mannequins of children with genitals attached to their faces in the age of Epstein — so I apologize for reminding everyone. Meanwhile, the reputation of Emin has only grown over the past two decades and her auction prices have done similar. Charles Saatchi bought her bed for £150,000 in 1998, and it sold at auction for £2.5 million in 2014. In February 2005, one of Emin’s paintings went for £722,000 at Christie’s, but in October 2022, it auctioned another for £2.3 million.

Full disclosure: I have long been a fan. In 2009, I reviewed Emin’s hand-drawn animated film of a woman masturbating, “Those Who Suffer Love”, stating that henceforth “no museum exhibition about feminist art, art about the body or sexual identity in art will be complete without this work”. Yes, even in those pre-social-media days, wildly exaggerated statements got you the readers’ attention — but it was my genuine opinion. In those days, with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of youth, I used to think she was good, but now, as I approach dotage, I think she’s Britain’s greatest living artist.

I can hear the disgruntled murmurs of outraged readers, who remember how she appeared drunk on a late-night TV talk show (Is Painting Dead? Channel 4, 1997) or recall reading in various interviews in the 2000s how she had to pop off to the toilet to vomit. And, no doubt, some cynics will put the great Emin reappraisal down to the age of wokeness. It’s because you can’t criticize a public figure like Tracey Emin. She’s a woman from a working class, immigrant background, and a victim of sexual abuse. That’s what explains all the positive reviews her shows have been getting over the past 15 years. Then there is her generous philanthropy in her hometown of Margate, which shields her from negative press. Emin returned there in 2017 to set up her studio. Since then, she’s turned dilapidated buildings into artists’ studios, bought cheap flats for them to live in and funded residencies. Now, she’s building community centers, gyms and restaurants. Other hardened anti-Eminites might put it down to her narrow escape from death. Her bravery is undeniable and who wants to knock a cancer survivor?

But there’s more to Emin than her bravery or philanthropy. She is an artist, not a social worker or medical miracle — and it’s her art that makes her great. In an era when so many contemporary artists have built an entire career on one method, like cast the undersides and insides of things, mentioning no names, there’s a dazzling, restless variety to her work, as the Tate show reveals: paintings, photos, quilts, videos, sculptures (some in bronze, others knocked up with wooden planks and nails), all sharing the same aesthetic of opposites held in tension, tenderness and bolshiness, self-pity and empathy, victim and victor, lust and love.

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Every great artist should be a little ahead of their time, and from today’s perspective, Emin’s self-obsessed, sex-obsessed, confessional art anticipated our era of public intimacy, of sex positivity, of talking about one’s mental health: even of victimhood.

She is unapologetic about enjoying sex, a proto-Charli XCX in this respect, but equally frank about her experiences of rape — a frankness that has, in time, helped to destigmatize other women who have come forward with stories of male sexual violence. The Tate show opens the week after Gisele Pélicot published her memoir about the banality of male sexual violence, and with the horrific details of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual exploitation of young girls still emerging. It includes her video “Why I Never Became a Dancer” (1995), in which she recounts how as a young teenager she had sex with men in their twenties: “the reason why these men wanted to fuck me, a girl of 14, was because they weren’t men, less, less than human”. Also present is “How it Feels” (1996), about Emin’s experience of abortion.

In short, all the things we used to think were gross about Emin’s art now appear to be intrinsic to and prophetic of the times we live in. But at the same time, unlike most influencers’ TikToks, Emin’s oversharing does not feel curated or calculated. There is a convincing naivety and directness in the stories she tells.

Art critics and historians can rightly complain that there is a shamelessly derivative quality to Emin’s art — as if she were shoplifting tins of postwar artistic formulas from a supermarket shelf. Her collections of framed mementos and sketches are pure Sophie Calle; her quilts fit right in with those of Judy Chicago’s and Faith Ringgold’s; and her neon texts come straight out of the Bruce Nauman playbook. But in each instance, Emin has made them her own. Her paintings are a good example of that. Those drips, mulched nests of brushstrokes and scrappy fields of colors owe an obvious debt to Joan Mitchell and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The ghostly muted palette comes from the Nineties’ “bad painting” movement led by Luc Tuymans. Her brushwork is scrappy, yes, but if you peer at those quick messy lines, they capture emotions, poses and identities. You can often identify distinct outlines of her own face in her wan black brushstrokes, and detect on her face her recurring vocabulary of emotions — sadness, agony, desire. Trust me, it’s quite a skill to appear that clumsy yet communicate with such precision. Not every picture is a winner (nor indeed, every kind of artwork; I don’t care for her blobby sculptures blown up from little clay maquettes), but Emin’s washes of pinks, grays and blues, from which the outlines of bodies begin to emerge, evoke the delicate and tentative effort to express feelings. All her own.

Emin is also an artist rooted in place: in her beloved Margate but also in her Britishness. (By contrast Hirst, Gary Hume’s, and the Chapmans’ art could have been made anywhere.) In one of her early provocative videos, she runs down streets half-naked, trailing a Union Jack. The beach huts, drunkenness and classic vernacular phrases like “fuck off and die you slag” place her art in a working-class experience of Britain in the Nineties and ever since. She is part of a “kitchen sink” tradition of British culture, tracing back to the plays of John Osborne in the Fifties and forward to Mike Leigh, Irvine Welsh and the films of Andrea Arnold and Clio Barnard. Unlike most contemporary art of the past 20 years, there’s nothing shiny and glitzy about Emin’s art. As she wrote on one of her quilts, she’s Tracey from Margate. Always was, still is.