One of David Hockney’s favourite quotations is from Tchaikovsky – “Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy.”
The quote certainly applies to Hockney, whose vast, new show opens at Tate Britain this week. The exhibition covers all the phases of his career: his portraits, swimming pools and Yorkshire landscapes.
Work just keeps on pouring out of him, constantly changing and almost always in the first division. At 79, Hockney, and the Tchaikovsky quote, are ripostes to the idea that good art must be produced with great pain and only rarely.
