Tate show traces Hockney's journey from England to the US

For curators of a major retrospective opening this week at Tate Britain , Hockney is an innovator whose 60-year career has taken in sketching, painting, printmaking, photography and digital iPad experiments.

To the tabloid, he's a British icon, a "Yorkshire working-class lad made good," famous for his round glasses, shock of blond hair (now gray) and contempt for smoking bans and other governmental intrusions.

Hockney's iPad drawings fill the final room of the exhibition, which contains some 250 works in all: drawings, paintings in acrylic and oil, photo collages and videos.

Wilson said Hockney has spent his career trying to answer a fundamental question: "How do you as an artist represent the world of three and four dimensions, feeling and emotion, on a two-dimensional surface?"

Hockney left gray Britain for southern California in the 1960s, and strove to capture the intense LA light and the rippling surface of swimming pools in paintings like "A Bigger Splash."

In the early 2000s he looked afresh at the fields and forests of Yorkshire in a series of exuberant landscape paintings that combined bold color with minute attention to the texture of snow on a hillside or blossom on a hawthorn hedge.