What's David Hockney's Beef with Abstraction, Anyway?

David Hockney, Another Abstraction Resting on a Blue and White Checkered Tablecloth, 2025. On view at Serpentine North, London

I was going to write about art during wartime (a variation on the Talking Heads’ Life During Wartime) but I have decided to put that off until next week. The war with Iran will still be going on, no doubt; and, anyway, someone is always waging a war somewhere in the world. If there is a problem with art during wartime it is always there to be addressed. I am dropping the subject for now because I want to respond to something I just found online: an anti-abstract painting remark by David Hockney, that indefatigable representationalist. In a Times of London piece about his current show at Serpentine North, Hockney tells the reporter that “there’s much too much abstract painting being done now.” As far as he is concerned, painters have been grinding out much too much of the stuff for a very long time. Among the paintings in his exhibition is a picture of a Rothko-like canvas standing on—or levitating above—a tabletop. “I did that,” explains Hockney, “because they made a book of Rothko’s paintings and when you see a whole book … Well, Francis Bacon said when he committed suicide, ‘I’m surprised it took so long.’” Hockney seems to believe that abstract paintings are so absurdly empty that when he approximates the look of a Rothko, he reveals the emptiness and absurdity of every abstraction ever painted. His demeanor is cheery, even as he dismisses one of the most important developments in the history of the medium. Bacon’s tone was less kind. The art critic David Sylveter once told me that Bacon had a nickname for Jackson Pollock: “the old lacemaker.”

Photography, Hockney says, “can’t replace painting at all, but painting has to be of something.” The trouble with abstract paintings is that they aren’t about anything. Rothko disagreed. “There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing,” he and Adolph Gottlieb declared in a letter to the editor of the New York Times, in 1943. Moreover, “We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.” Rothko and Gottlieb were writing to defend paintings of theirs that had “befuddled” the Times’s art critic despite the unmissable, if ambiguous, figures they contained. What Hockney and abstraction’s myriad other detractors cannot abide is Rothko’s belief that his “tragic and timeless” subject matter came through full force only when his figures dissolved into luminously dark rectangles of color. Only with images untethered to any definite subject could he offer us convincing “intimations of mortality,” or so he said in 1958. Many, of course, have not been convinced. In a Hockneyesque spirit we might ask: if Rothko had not issued his statements, would themes of tragedy and mortality hover around his mature paintings? I doubt it. Yet I don’t feel that these canvases are about nothing. What, then, are they about? And how can we know? We can’t. If we let them, Rothko’s statements will guide our interpretation of his imagery, but they do not have the power to inject it with subject matter. So where does that leave me and everyone else disinclined to join Team Hockney? How do abstract paintings manage to mean anything?

Mark Rothko, Four Darks in Red, 1958. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Whenever I puzzle at length about the meaning of abstraction I return to a moment when I was standing in a grade school cafeteria looking up at a blackboard. I was in kindergarten and still figuring out the function of things like parentheses. On the blackboard a left-hand parenthesis curved across its large surface. I could see how it framed a list of menu items. More than that, I saw how beautiful it was. This judgment was not the upshot of a detached formal analysis. I had sensed the grace and confidence of the gesture that produced the parenthesis. Its beauty brought to mind the idea of a graceful person—or our neighbor’s Irish Setter, whose inveterate leaping and twirling was wonderfully elegant. She didn’t just look beautiful. She had a beautiful, if frantic, way of being,

When we perceive creatures, objects, textures, spaces, and light we do not merely register facts. Our perceptions imbue the perceived thing with feelings, qualities, meanings. And this happens even when we can’t name what we are seeing or hearing or touching. Incapable of experiencing anything neutrally, we live in a world saturated with significance. So, if you let it happen, the interplay of form, color, and pictorial light in a maroon Rothko will draw you into a current of strong feelings and vast but elusive meanings. It may even persuade you that the human condition is timelessly tragic, especially if you have a personality as saturnine as Rothko’s. If not, the painting’s effect on you will be different. Only if you are dogmatically opposed to abstraction will you say that it has no effect and is therefore meaningless.

I don’t know why Hockney thinks abstraction is empty. I do know that the landscape paintings in his Serpentine North exhibition do not rely on subject matter for their value, as charming as his trees and hedgerows and half-timbered houses are. It is true that over the past century critics and curators have often favored abstraction over representation, a fact of art-world life that troubles Hockney. It’s also true that his paintings generate their deepest value from something they share with abstractions: the emotionally and intellectually lively relationships between their pictorial elements. For abstraction and representation are not utterly different from one another. They are different ways of realizing the same set of pictorial possibilities.

David Hockney, A Year in Normandie, 2020-21, detail

Edward Alden Jewell’s review of paintings by Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb and their response are online at From the Archive: The Jewell Letters, “There’s no such thing as good painting about nothing” — Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation

For Rothko on “intimations of mortality,” see “Public Forum” 1958, in Clifford Ross, Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990, p. 173

David Hockney’s exhibition, A Year in Normandie and Other Thoughts About Painting, will be on view at Serpentine North, London, until August 23, 2026