How David Hockney depicted a spring for self-isolationists

Artists have long been fascinated by spring, but their blossoming buds can feel like a sick joke when we’re stuck inside. Thankfully, Hockney’s new iPad paintings look to the true master of the season – Van Gogh

David Hockney, who has spent a lifetime looking on the bright side, recommends spring as the cure for our ills. The 82-year-old artist has released his latest iPad paintings – intense observations of daffodils and fruit trees in blossom in Normandy. They are, as the title of one work puts it, a reminder that even in a locked-down world “they can’t cancel the spring”. Hockney is on cracking form in these keen-eyed pictures of nature. But is he serious that spring can cheer up a world shadowed by coronavirus?

Before seeing Hockney’s floral postcards of hope, the image of spring 2020 running through my mind was the much less comforting one with which TS Eliot opens The Waste Land – “April is the cruellest month …” When Eliot published these words in 1922, the first world war and the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-20 had made conventional hymns to spring seem corny. Even before those disasters, early 20th-century modernism scorned chocolate-box seasonal celebrations. Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet The Rite of Spring, with its designs by the artist Nicholas Roerich, is not a soothing pastoral but a chopping vision of primitive sacrifice. That same rejection of pious joy in spring continues in modern art, right up to Andy Warhol’s painting-by-numbers daffodils, which perfectly capture the poverty of cliche: to paint a spring flower, suggests Warhol, is to restate an empty affirmation.

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