Frothful without frivolity, vivid but never lurid, never deadpan, ever up-beat, the work of David Hockney attracts an increasingly strange response. The dandy darling of the sixties and seventies, as eccentric as the English can go, makes an art that thrives on a certain Frenchness of line — and of mind, since he is nothing if not a thinker. It’s all quite puzzling, especially when it seemed so easy to say ‘swimming pools’ and move along to something serious like a heap of bricks, yonder decade’s unmade bed.

The French triple bill took New York by surprise in the early 1980s and is part of the watershed years that saw Hockney’s career expand widely even beyond the already international acclaim established in the 1970s. The evening opened with Satie’s ballet Parade, famous for the old Picasso curtain filled with a circus of commedia dell’arte figures; then came Poulenc’s opera Les Mamelles de Tiréseas; then Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges. It was largely the brainchild of the late lamented John Dexter, who trusted Hockney’s depths as well as his innate sense of stage to hold together a three-part evening, traditionally regarded as a sure recipie for disaster. The teamwork and mutual respect were the stuff of legend, Dexter happy to tear Hockney’s working sketches in half if they weren’t what would go, Hockney happy with the mucking in. Sales were cautious till after the opening night, when New York realised that it had on its hands one of the most unforgettable nights in the theatre for years.

The list of Hockney’s productions, too few seen in this country, is long, including works by Mozart (Magic Flute), Strauss (Frau ohne Schatten), Stravinsky (notably The Rake’s Progress and Le Rossignol), Puccini (Turandot) — and Tristan, lamentably his only Wagner. His working method is enormously detailed; he builds full models of the stage and could never be content with a few hazy sketches handed over to the technicians. Once in the theatre he also has the endearing habit of checking the sightlines from all the seats, even from the standing room in the gods, just in case an improvement can be made by shifting something a foot or less. He is, after all, the true enfant du paradis if ever there was one.

The scherzo of Dexter’s three-part structure was the Poulenc, of course, with farcical stage business and all the exuberance of vaudeville. It’s not a piece to be done half-heartedly and it is hard to imagine a more romping production than this, cast at strength, what’s more, with the unique Michel Senéchal heading a cast drilled in perfect diction by the veteran conductor Maurice Rosenthal.

In the Ravel, the tingling transition when the child enters the garden, reds and fathomless blues bristling with magic and wonder, was to become a pervasive image in Hockney iconography for years to come, and the subject of special installations made for exhibitions around the world. Bold perspectives, to give the child’s eye view, also gave premonitions of the artist’s subsequent crazy-paving cubism and the kaleidoscope of costumes and set pieces left the audience unaware of their watches.

Yet the image I recall most of all when I saw the production at a revival in Paris in 1991, was the spare stage at the opening of Parade, scanned by a chill searchlight and surrounded by barbed wire. Here the picture matched with eerie precision the menace and prowl of this raucous, maddened score, expressing with alarming energy that feeling of a society under the shadow of collapse and war, amidst the noise of whips and typewriters. The image of a ringmaster, who appears at the very start, is close to a cliché in other circumstances, imprinted as it has become with unpleasant overtones as of a debauched Berlin cabaret between the wars, but was all the more arresting here, even frightening, for being set amidst supposedly light-hearted French frou-frou.

As Parade gets under way, the now famous quasi-Picasso harlequin comes on with the boy who will figure in L’Enfant, and shows him the stark, then cluttered world that is peopled in frenzy and encircled with barbed wire. The message might have been a gloss on the circumstances of a Europe that saw two world wars but has an even more extreme poignancy now that Downing Street is locked off and the United States wishes to be surrounded by an equivalent fence. If we feel under threat we have every need of these lessons of joy, wonder and forgiveness that were so intricately conjured by Poulenc and Ravel and which received from Hockney an uncanny, creative sympathy — and commentary.