Landscape is not exactly a widespread pursuit among painters these days. Maybe nature feels too threatened to be treated in a straightforward way. That hill, those woods? Only a matter of time before the frackers come in. And then there's David Hockney, long the Peter Pan of British painting, now, strange to say, its gray eminence at age 76. In the mid-2000s he took up residence in England after spending most of the previous four decades in Los Angeles--and not just in England but in Bridlington, a Yorkshire coastal town east of the more industrial city of Bradford, where he grew up. In the years that followed, though he continued making portraits, his obsession was landscape. An aging artist immersing himself in the cycle of the seasons, he made the fields and woodlands of East Yorkshire his equivalent of Monet's garden. Seven years ago I spent a couple of days with him there. On visits to the sites he was painting, you could sense the blood rush of renewal this project gave him. When he explained about the life force exploding through a mature tree, you didn't have to wonder who he was really talking about.
Last year London's Royal Academy of Arts staged a sizable survey of his landscapes, some 200 works, in a show called "A Bigger Picture." It turned out to be a huge crowd magnet. Now the de Young Museum in San Francisco has come up with "David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition," on view through Jan. 20. If nothing else it is truly bigger, with over 300 works that include dozens of portraits, pictures made on iPads and iPhones, multiscreen videos and room after room of landscapes, including colossal multicanvas views of the Yorkshire countryside, many of them in an eye-scorching palette beloved of Van Gogh and the Fauves, to say nothing of The Simpsons.
This summer Hockney settled back again in L.A., so the de Young show, organized by his longtime friend, curator and manager Gregory Evans, may represent the full arc of his years-long return to his roots, an interlude now drawing to a close. It produced some spectacular results, like the four monumental views of Woldgate Woods from various seasons, each composed of six canvases combined to make a single 12-by-6-ft. (3.7 by 1.8 m) image. Spread out as though on a proscenium, the woods unfold like one of Hockney's opera sets, with violet and citric lime providing the high notes instead of Mozart or Puccini. The effect is electric, all the more because it's counterintuitive. When was the last time the English countryside was rendered in the hothouse colors of Provence?
Having traveled in the American West, with these massive pictures Hockney is also envisioning English landscape in majestic American terms, larger even than the British painter John Constable's "6-footers" of the 1820s, matched instead to the wide-screen dimensions of Albert Bierstadt's views of the Rockies and the panoramas of Frederic Edwin Church. It's a scale Hockney had been thinking about as long ago as 1980, when he produced Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio, his almost cinematic conjunction of scenes along the road. When the combination of scale and palette works, the new pictures go off like a bomb. An explosive cartoon like May Blossom on the Roman Road, from 2009, with its pulsing sky of Van Gogh swirls and its shadows pooling on a rose pink road, gives the swelling bounty of spring a scary tumescence.