“In Hockney’s art there is none of the omnipotence that Picasso’s work exudes, and, instead, there is a sensibility close to Watteau’s, in which the trivial suddenly, abruptly, but still abjuring solemnity, stands for the transient. But in the work of both men we find ourselves, quite unmistakably, in the presence of a sombre power from which we thought ourselves a million miles away.”With Francis Bacon, Hockney has been credited with liberalising attitudes towards male homosexuals in Britain through his work. And, in the case of Hockney at least, this was the result of a conscious effort “to propagandise something I felt hadn’t been propagandised as a subject. I felt it should be done.”In the catalogue to the 1988 Hockney retrospective, Henry Geidzahler, an old friend and frequent subject, wrote about “the relentless, clanging toxin of Aids, which seems every month to toll for still another great friend or colleague”. Aids is a subject which Hockney has chosen not to address directly in his work. To those, though, who believe the grief of recent years is reflected nowhere in the paintings, his advice is: look again “Some people have said to me: You never dealt with Aids Well, I thought I did.

I thought there were paintings of mine full of pain, actually. But I’m not going to say to that: You don’t look hard enough. If people don’t see it, it’s up to them.”Geldzahler thinks “the end of innocence” for Hockney came in 1973 with the death of Picasso. Picasso’s death, Geldzahler believes, became in some indefinable way entangled with the decline and eventual death of David Hockney’s own father five years later. At the beginning of last year, Hockney painted a series of portraits of his 95-year-old mother in which she is barely recognisable as the woman in the pictures of even 20 years ago.

At around the same time, he painted Jonathan Silver, the director of the Hockney Gallery in Salts Mill, near Bradford, who was recovering from cancer surgery.”David Plante was just telling me he remembers Francis Bacon saying to him: Give me tragedy, give me tragedy,” Hockney says. “For somebody who spent his whole time on uproariousness and getting drunk, gambling and fucking, it’s a kind of mad remark The tragedy’s in the paintings I’m probably the reverse. I’ve always said to people: The painting might look happy, it doesn’t mean to say the artist is; don’t be deceived It’s a rather shallow view to think that, I always feel. Francis Bacon was probably a lot happier than I am.”You were never happy, even in the early days in California, painting the boys and the swimming pools?”Happiness,” he says, “is something which seems a retrospective thing, frankly. It’s only when you are firstly, deeply unhappy that you realise you were happy at some other time. But until you’re absolutely unhappy, you wouldn’t know that, would you?”Ushered into a side-room off the main gallery, housing a Mondrian and a Naum Gabo sculpture, Hockney had immediately produced a tiny silver box from his jacket pocket.

The box’s mirrored lid had me thinking for a second that something was going to happen connected to drugs. It turned out to be a portable ashtray, to collect the ash from his cigarettes Hockney’s an inveterate smoker. The No Smoking rule in almost all California restaurants is an additional reason why he chooses not to eat in them. He had just written a letter to the New York Times, he said, defending the late Deng Xiaoping’s right to smoke Panda cigarettes. (“Mr Deng might say, in 93 years of my turbulent life, thank goodness for Panda cigarettes keeping me calm And calm to a ripe old age Wouldn’t you deduce that? I would.

I think some people would be a lot better off smoking.”)Oh, it’s an ashtray, I’d said when he first produced the box. I thought it was something illegal.”Well,” he said, “it used to be stuff like that Now, believe it or not, it holds cigarette ash. That tells you a lot about us, doesn’t it? But that’s what everybody used to think.”When did you stop doing young people’s things like drugs?He seemed slightly hurt. “Why do you assume I’ve stopped? Actually, I haven’t stopped, really I’m a bit of an old.. I like dope, actually Smoking dope and listening to music Wagner Yes Very good Most people take drugs They call it ‘medication’. If you know anything about drugs, you can see what’s coming, can’t you? I assume we’ll go from them being absolutely illegal to them pushing them down our throats.