David Hockney – Drawing from Life review: He’s as magnetic with a pen, pencil or paintbrush

Moving portraits of his mother. Coloured pencil etchings of his coolly beautiful friend Celie Birtwell. A peppy sketch of a cosily cardiganed Harry Styles. David Hockney’s life in drawing makes for a gripping show at the National Portrait Gallery

‘Lucie-Lune Lambouley and Louis-Martin Lambouley, 8th January’, 2022 (David Hockney)

David Hockney is justifiably proud of his drawing skills. Like most artists of his generation, he underwent years of enforced practice at art school, drawing from the nude model. This left him with a confidence and fluency in capturing immediate reality with pencil, pen or brush that today’s young artists can only dream about.

This major show of Hockney’s portrait drawings first opened in February 2020 and ran for only 20 days before it closed due to Covid. It reopens at the recently refurbished National Portrait Gallery in a reworked form with 30 new portraits, painted in the artist’s Normandy studio immediately post-lockdown. It provides the perfect opportunity to assess whether Britain’s favourite artist has lived up to his formidable gifts as a draughtsman, or if he’s sold them out in a succession of ever more glib exercises in populism – as some would certainly claim of his experiments with iPad drawing.

A selection of the latter appear in animated form at the beginning of the show: Hockney smoking morphs into Hockney sneezing. They’d be great on children’s TV (if it wasn’t for the smoking), but I couldn’t get more involved in them than that.