Newsnight Review discussed the David Hockney exhibition at the Annely Juda Fine Art gallery in London.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
I love it unreservedly. Even if you live in Sheffield, you should go and see this exhibition. Hockney is a great artist and we can trust him. He's looking for speed and directness and making watercolours into something that are sexy and fast, rather than timid cousin of oil paintings. The light coming from them is extraordinary, and the painting reflect and generate light. Your eyes have to adjust to the light before you can really look at them. Then they are something which is quite curious and new for him.

TOM PAULIN:
He should never have been let near a paintbrush, absolutely awful. He's a Polaroid painter, he handles paint coarsely, he can't paint hands, everything is utterly revolting about both exhibitions. All this stuff about the optical device he uses. Angre is a deeply third rate painter, he gives you Polaroid shots of people, you can almost see them chewing gum. They are absolutely dreadful. It was like being let into a cheap sweet shop with these revolting purple colours, horrible colours, utterly awful.

WINTERSON:
I think the colours are fabulous.

WARK:
Hang on a minute. Does it matter that he hasn't captured the hand? What you are trying to get in a portrait is capturing the spirit of people.

WILL SELF:
I have had dinner with some of these people and I didn't recognise them from the portraits. I was thinking, who are they and I looked at the name tags and realised I had sat across from some of them for some hours.

PAULIN:
They look terribly incomfortable, don't they?

SELF:
He's fine art light. To paraphrase Wilde, it's that combination of clever ideas and stupid execution that qualifies somebody to be a representative English artist.

WARK:
Yet it has to be a complicated execution because there are no mistakes. He has seven hours to do each of them.

SELF:
Apart from a puce anger about the faces, it is difficult to see what is lent to them by the speed of execution. I did not believe he had investigated the tension of the relationships.

WINTERSON:
I think it comes across. He has the same background, the same floor and chairs, and all you can do is focus on the individuals. I liked the quickness and directness from it. I got great energy from the pictures. They are pickled specimens.

WARK:
The northern landscapes, because he went to Norway and loved the light, they are light suffused.

PAULIN:
I think they are utterly disgusting, coarse, crude, really terrible, embarrassing. The good things are his drawings, for example the drawing of Lucian Freud, the one of Johnson, who looks as though he has come in from a Dostoevsky novel. His command of line is very good. His colour is hopeless.