How do we categorize David Hockney? Over the nearly six decades since he first declared himself a boy wonder, when he was in his early twenties (he’s now eighty), he has been at various times (and often simultaneously) an ambitious painter, an incisive draftsman, an inventive designer of stage sets, and an enthusiastic explorer of such “alternative” media as computer-generated imagery, Polaroid photography, video, and iPhone and iPad drawings—and I’m probably leaving something out. Even if we concentrate chiefly on his paintings and drawings, as “David Hockney”—the focused, well-selected, elegantly installed retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—mainly does, it’s clear that the Yorkshire-born artist has always been something of a chameleon, restlessly changing his approach in response to new stimuli, new places, and new materials.1

The Yorkshire-born artist has always been something of a chameleon.

Jointly organized by Tate Britain, London, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Metropolitan, where the curator is Ian Alteveer, of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, the exhibition begins with paintings made in 1960—when Hockney was still a student at the Royal College of Art, London—and ends with newly minted works from 2017. The selection includes more than eighty paintings and drawings, along with some of the photo collages that the artist calls “joiners,” and a three-channel animation of iPad drawings, presented on three large screens. Perhaps because the exhibition’s portraits are some of the most compelling works on view and because the images of particular places feel