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Lubaina Himid in her studio in Prestonjames glossop for The Times<\/p>\nThere are many ways to rebel. You can smash the status quo, tear up the rule book, do it like it\u2019s never been done before. Or, if you\u2019re feeling really revolutionary, you can go conservative.<\/p>\n
When David Hockney, then an outrageous young turk with peroxide hair, now a nearly nonagenarian national treasure, first showed his Love paintings at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s, the really shocking thing about them wasn\u2019t that they were images of young men in love and intimately enmeshed, but that they were paintings. <\/p>\n
Proper, old-fashioned, oil-on-canvas paintings. Nothing could have been more counter-cultural, out-there and obscene. Not just paintings, but figurative paintings. Somewhat abstracted, sure, but recognisably paintings of human figures more or less as we see them.<\/p>\n
In 1961, representative painting was dead. Buried under a black slab Malevich-style. Abstract Expressionism was still the biggest beast. Jackson \u201csplatter\u201d Pollock had died in 1956, but Mark Rothko was painting his fearsome colour fields and Willem de Kooning was going strong. <\/p>\n
Elsewhere, Minimalism was whispering its way into public consciousness. In 1966, Carl Andre would present Equivalent VIII: 120 firebricks stacked in a rectangle two-bricks high. Robert Ryman was making white paintings to hang on white walls in white cube galleries.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019d said to the average graduating art student in Hockney\u2019s year, \u201cAbstraction\u2019s had it. What the buyers of the future are really going to want on their walls are lyrical pictures celebrating the changing of the seasons in the Yorkshire Wolds,\u201d they\u2019d have rolled their eyes. Sure, grandad. How Edwardian.<\/p>\n
After 65 years championing the infinite expressive possibilities of figurative art, Hockney still hasn\u2019t come round to abstraction. In an interview in the Sunday Times, to discuss his new exhibition at the Serpentine, the artist told Andrew Marr: \u201cThere\u2019s too much abstract painting being done now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lubaina Himid in her studio in Prestonjames glossop for The Times<\/p>\n
I hate to pick a quarrel with David Hockney, RA, OM, Distinguished Honouree and best beloved painter of the British public, but: you\u2019re wrong on this one. Abstract art\u2019s old hat. At least for now. The most surprising story of the last decade or so has been the triumphant return of painting \u2014 and figurative painting at that.<\/p>\n
Who is representing Britain at the Venice Biennale this year? Not a video artist, not a piler-up of reclaimed rubbish, but Lubaina Himid, a woman who knows her way around a paintbrush and who puts figures, reclaimed from history, at the centre of her work. <\/p>\n
At Tate Britain, the big contemporary spring show is Hurvin Anderson, painter of barbershops and gardens and public swimming pools. Over the bridge from Hockney at Serpentine South, Cecily Brown is about to open an exhibition of paintings, that while not strictly photorealistic, are unmistakably landscapes with all ye olde landscape paraphernalia of riverbanks, fallen logs, willows and reeds. John Constable would get them in a way he wouldn\u2019t necessarily have got Andre\u2019s firebricks.<\/p>\n
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Peter\u2019s Sitters II by Hurvin Anderson, 2009\u00a9 Hurvin Anderson. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery. Photo: Catherine Wharfe<\/p>\n
At the London Art Fair in January, the biggest crowds gathered under one of Nikoleta Sekulovic\u2019s gorgeously overdone portraits of historical figures reclining in interiors that make Vuillard look restrained. <\/p>\n
At Frieze last autumn, the buzz was about Sarah Ball, a painter of crystalline clarity hailing from \u2014 God\u2019s and Hockney\u2019s own country \u2014 Yorkshire. A month ago, every third post on my Instagram feed seemed to be another rapturous recommendation of the sensuously sinister, poisonously particular paintings of Georg Wilson on show at the West End gallery Pilar Corrias.<\/p>\n
The American artist Kerry James Marshall was a hit for the RA last year, with his immaculate paintings in the manner of Ingres. When Lily Allen wanted an image for her Spotify-smashing album West End Girl last year, she turned not to a Cond\u00e9 Nast photographer, but to the young Spanish painter Nieves Gonz\u00e1lez who gave Allen\u2019s Miu Miu puffer and polka-dot Valentino boots the Vel\u00e1zquez treatment. <\/p>\n
The Allen portrait has just gone on display at the National Portrait Gallery. For my part, I can\u2019t get enough of the tumbledown, overgrown California gardens and flowers of Hayley Barker. Not forgetting Caroline Walker, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Chantal Joffe\u2026 Figuration is the hottest show in town.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s right, of course, that there\u2019s still a lot of abstraction around. The star lots at Christie\u2019s forthcoming New York auctions this spring are a Rothko and a Cy Twombly. Paintings by the abstract expressionists go on breaking records year after year.<\/p>\n
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Cecily Brown\u2019s Nature Walk with Paranoia, 2024Cecily Brown, 2026. Photo: Genevieve Hanson<\/p>\n
In his interview, Hockney takes a pot-shot at Rothko. It was Rothko, note well, who had the big Fondation Louis Vuitton exhibition in Paris in 2023, the year before Hockney\u2019s own mighty retrospective at the same venue. In his present Serpentine show, Hockney riffs on a series of abstract painters, including Rothko. He told Marr: \u201cI did that because they made a book of Rothko\u2019s paintings and when you see a whole book\u2026 Well, Francis Bacon said when he committed suicide, \u2018I\u2019m surprised it took so long.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
My take on Rothko would be slightly different. I came away from the Rothko show almost vibrating with the strange, glowering power of it all. Not depressing, at least not for the viewer, but inspiriting.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s Rothko. I\u2019ll admit that a tour of print-to-order abstract art on the walls of offices and hotels will remind you just how bad bad abstraction can be.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a common misconception that abstract art is easy. It\u2019s just a squiggle, a square, a smear. My toddler could do that. Etc. etc. Actually, it\u2019s the other way around. Abstraction is hard. With a bunch of daffodils there\u2019s leeway. We fundamentally like daffodils and are inclined to like a daffodil picture. Much harder to make a single square sing. <\/p>\n
Hockney, who seems to have a gift for looking on the bright side, should take heart. Too much abstract art? I\u2019d say it\u2019s the opposite. Begone black slab. It\u2019s the representation resurrection! And it might never have happened if the young Hockney hadn\u2019t dared to be so damned old-fashioned.<\/p>\n