ARTS : Doodling on the margins

EXHIBITIONS : The retrospective of his drawings proves one thing - despite his fame, David Hockney is not in the mainstream of modern art

DAVID HOCKNEY first went to art school because his precocious talent for drawing was spotted by teachers who had the liberal notion that it was no bad thing for a lad to become an artist. That was a long time ago, in 1953, but there is still a feeling of precocity in Hockney's work. There are many hints of laddishness too, and a pleasure in being taken up by senior figures, whether they be Thirties poets, museum directors or moguls of the international opera circuit. The Royal Academy's retrospective of Hockney's drawing demonstrates that work on paper suits his personality. His paintings are, by comparison, laborious. But where, one asks, are the drawings of Hockney's maturity? Why is the show so bright at first and latterly so sad, with no substantial achievement at its centre?

Mainly, I think, because of his departure from Britain as soon as his fashionable success was assured. He went to Los Angeles in 1964, just after he left the Royal College of Art. The decision was the crucial moment in Hockney's career. We are often told his reasons. Britain was grey, bureaucratic, and discriminated against homosexuals. In southern California there were boys, fun and sunshine. These were good reasons to leave (though not everybody thinks that Sixties London bore down too heavily on a free life). However, much was lost. Los Angeles has its place in the public imagination, but it is no art centre. And that's exactly what Hockney needed: the company of a serious, critical and inspiring avant-garde. Whatever his fame, he has always been on the margins of modern art.

Hence the importance of his earliest period as a student, when he really was surrounded by clever and creative people. The RA show begins with some exercises - in the form of conventional life drawings and an elaborate set-piece of a skeleton - then becomes much more vivid and personal, as Hockney looked around for his own kind of art. Obviously he wanted some sort of lightness, and it's interesting to see how he punctured the ponderousness of current British art. His very nice drawing of a Ty-Phoo tea packet, for instance, is almost a parody of the domestic grit favoured by painters of the kitchen-sink school. Then there are some cheerful sheets derived from public-lavatory graffiti. Hockney evidently liked putting words and signs in his drawings. This makes them even more puckish, as though a boy had done them in an exercise book. He may have learnt the trick from the US painter Larry Rivers, or perhaps Dubuffet. In any case, it suited Hockney very well and, on occasion, still does.

In the stimulating atmosphere of the RCA (and of London rather than his native Bradford) Hockney began to make his own style. It's rather elusive, though instantly recognisable. He has always - and vehemently - denied that he had anything to do with Pop Art, and I think this is true. Hockney might however have benefited from the bold outlines of Pop, for he never designed his pictures with any overriding and compelling forms. The same is true of the drawings, but unfinishedness and bits of inconsequential scratching don't matter so much on paper. And it's this faux-naif manner, derived from here and there without formal obedience, that suddenly made Hockney a star. Of course he was not the first artist to simulate naivety. But few other artists have so beguiled their audience with the pretence that they are not quite grown up. Looking at the early drawings today, one is still struck by their charm. But the style is utterly fragile. Someone should have told Hockney that you can't build on the faux-naif. It's a trap.

On one wall of the first room of the Sackler Galleries there's a sequence of drawings in coloured pencil from 1963. They are all of Egyptian subjects and were destined for a magazine project that, in the event, was never published. One reason why these sheets are so likeable is that they form a series, and make one curious about the circumstances in which they were made. In other words we look for a complementary text. And the fact is that Hockney's drawing is much closer to illustration (even for children's books) than it is to any contemporary fine art. Once he had gone through his student-period influences he cut himself off from the world of current painting. He does not look impressive in group exhibitions and in general avoids them. Hockney is at his best when he responds to a book or, occasionally, an opera. His drawings seem to demand a literary accompaniment. It's a pity he hasn't collaborated on more books.

For so many of the drawings don't stand up by themselves. After the Egyptian sequence there's a section devoted to California from 1963-67. Here the work becomes boring and often embarrassing. In terms of invention, technique and simple artistry there are dozens of illustrators who could give us more satisfying drawings than the Swimming Pool and Garden, Beverly Hills, or the Lawn Sprinkler, or the Bank Building, Los Angeles. I know they are harmless, but it is an obligation to the truth to say that they are not very good. Hockney is a minor artist with a major reputation, and such sheets as these would not detain anyone for more than a few seconds if they were not a part of his fame. De Longpre Avenue, Hollywood, drawn in 1976, is more accomplished, but nowhere near the standard that intelligent lovers of art should require.

The exhibition picks up again when Hockney turns to portraiture. There's something odd about this development. Hockney is so obviously gifted when looking at people's features that one can't understand why he didn't draw more of them in the earlier part of his career. I suppose the faux- naif manner precluded portraits. If you drew someone within those terms it would just look like an inept cartoon. Anyway, when Hockney really tackled portraiture his style changed. Ever so gently, the Hockney expert Paul Melia suggests in the catalogue that there was a crisis in the late Sixties and that Hockney resolved it by making naturalistic drawings in pen and ink. But he doesn't say where the new style came from. I think I have the answer. The model for the pen-and-ink manner was in the work of Don Bachardy. Nowadays he is known only as Christopher Isherwood's partner. They lived together in LA and welcomed Hockney to the local scene. But Bachardy was also a renowned portraitist of the famous. He was a master of chic. So his way of drawing was rapidly transferred to Hockney's own hand and eye.

And with excellent results. When Hockney draws Stephen Spender or Auden (a portrait inscribed to Spender), we observe an artist much younger than his subjects whose admiration for older homosexuals has a keen and touching edge. If only he would make an album of such portraits and accompany it with a text by an appropriate literary person. Then we might have a lasting monument to a fashionable gay world that had a happy existence before Aids, and then started to die its death.

As he declares, Hockney has been desolated by the recent loss of so many friends. In the past two years he has shown paintings of his dogs. At the RA, the last room contains pastiches of Picasso, inadequate opera designs and some hopeless new gouaches.

! 'David Hockney Drawings': Royal Academy, W1 (0171 439 7438), to 28 Jan.