David Hockney

British painter

• Born: July 9, 1937
• Place of Birth: Bradford, Yorkshire, England

Hockney has been in the forefront of postmodern art since the mid-1960s and has been immensely popular worldwide. He brought to postmodern art a freshness and originality that, although modern, harked back to traditional art sources, employing figurative and narrative elements.

Early Life

David Hockney was born in Yorkshire, England, in the northern industrial working-class town of Bradford. He was the fourth child in a family of four boys and one girl. On scholarship, he attended Bradford Grammar School, where he was “terribly bored,” relieved only by making posters for school events and cartoons and drawings for the school magazine. At age eleven, he knew he wanted to be an artist, but when he announced that to the headmaster, he was told that there was plenty of time to pursue art later.

Hockney went with his father to the Alhambra Theatre every Saturday, regardless of the fare, and from the age of ten to twenty, he went to a concert two or three times a week during the concert season. This early introduction to lively arts, however provincial, would stand him in good stead later, when he would be asked to design sets for theater and opera.

In 1953, at age sixteen, Hockney managed to convince his parents to send him to Bradford Art School; there he majored in painting, supposedly so that he could teach (the only other alternative was to become a commercial artist). He worked between twelve and sixteen hours a day at whatever he was told to do—such as perspective or anatomy exercises—immensely relieved to be away from the stifling, antiart atmosphere of grammar school. At the end of four years, he began to question whether he had learned or done anything of value, only vaguely aware of contemporary art and unsure of his own relationship to it. He had visited London for the first time at age nineteen, and then and only then did he have a chance to look at a wide variety of art, especially non-British contemporary art.

Beginning in 1957, Hockney did national service as a conscientious objector and made little art, working instead in hospitals, one in Bradford and one in Hastings, and reading Marcel Proust. Also in 1957, he earned a national diploma in design with honors. In 1959, he was accepted for entrance into the Royal College of Art, where he became part of the pop art scene along with classmates Ron Kitaj, Allen Jones, Joe Tilson, and Peter Blake. There, he experimented with abstract expressionism but found it barren and spent the next years searching not only for his style but also for his subject. It was Kitaj, an American studying abroad on the GI Bill, who urged him to paint what interested him. After that, Hockney’s art became more figurative, although it was still abstract. For example, he wrote the word “Gandhi” on a very abstract picture of Mahatma Gandhi in the painting Myself and My Heroes (1961). While other members of the Royal College avant-garde, such as Jones, were being thrown out of the school because of their “dangerous,” left-leaning, abstract art, Hockney was left alone because of his considerable drawing ability, which continued to be his clearest link to the traditional art world.

In January 1961, the Young Contemporaries Exhibition created quite a stir with its paintings of toothpaste tubes and the like; it was in this context that Hockney sold his first works. Also, in 1961, a work by Hockney, along with one by Kitaj, received recognition and a small prize of three pounds from Richard Hamilton, an artist and teacher in the Royal College of Interior Design. From that time on, the staff stopped dismissing Hockney’s paintings. He finished his Royal College of Art studies with a gold medal for outstanding distinction.

Also around 1961, the dark-haired, slouch-shouldered, bespectacled Hockney dyed his hair blond, reinventing himself, as it were, on a trip to New York City, where he got the idea of doing his own version of William Hogarth’s engraving The Rake’s Progress (1735). Hockney titled his work A Rake’s Progress ; it was set in New York and based on his experiences there. Also, around a year earlier, Hockney began to be open about his homosexuality, something he claims made his work more honest and relevant, as evidenced in Doll Boy(1960–61), a painting loosely about the British pop singer Cliff Richard, and We 2 Boys Together Clinging(1961), the title taken from a Walt Whitman poem. Finally, in 1960, Hockney saw a large exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s work at London’s Tate Gallery eight times and became deeply enthralled with it, particularly with Picasso’s draftsmanship and range of styles.

Life’s Work

In 1963, the London Sunday Times invited Hockney to travel to Egypt to do some sketches for the newspaper, none of which were used. This trip produced Shell Garage, with its interesting commingling of styles. With the money he had earned from A Rake’s Progress, Hockney went to California in 1964 to live for a year; he ended up in Los Angeles, a place he thought was very Mediterranean and sexy. Los Angeles was a venue that suited him well, and he would live on and off there for the next decade and produce some of his most famous works, flattened and shadowless, with the Los Angeles lifestyle either as subject or background. These works included A Bigger Splash (1967) and American Collectors (1968). Also in Los Angeles, he met English expatriate author Christopher Isherwood.

In 1964, Hockney had a one-man exhibition of prints at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and in 1965, his first collector, John Kasmin, organized a group exhibition of paintings in London called The New Scene, with Hockney representing London. From 1964 to 1967, Hockney taught at various American universities, the first being the University of Iowa. There he would complete the painting Boy About to Take a Shower (1964) from a sketch made in Los Angeles. The shower, like the swimming pool, was for Hockney a representative image of California.

In 1966, Hockney was asked to design the set for the English absurdist play Ubu Roi (1896) by Alfred Jarry, a project that consumed his energies for three months; he then flew back to California in 1967 to teach at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he met Peter Schlesinger, who would become his companion. In 1968, with his painting Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, he would begin his well-known explorations of twosomes and their psychodynamics; most of the subjects were his friends, some of them famous in their own right. These pictures are more naturalistic, and many are loosely based on photographs.

Deciding that he had gone as far with naturalism as he wanted to go with the painting Mr. and Mrs. Clark with Percy (1970–71), Hockney started on a series of etchings based on the tales of the Brothers Grimm, most of which he etched spontaneously onto the plate. Commuting from England to California, he finished these etchings in 1969.

In 1973, Hockney moved to Paris and had a retrospective of his work from 1961 to 1974 shown at the Louvre. There he worked with Aldo Crommelynck, Picasso’s master printer, on a series of etchings in Picasso’s honor. In 1974, he designed the costumes and set of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (1951) for the Glyndebourne Festival Opera in England. He would later do the same for productions of Ronald Petit’s new ballet Septentrion (1975) and, in 1977, Lev Ivanov’s ballet The Magic Flute (1893). In 1974, Jack Hazan completed a biographical film about Hockney, A Bigger Splash, which examined his California swimming pool paintings and his romantic interests. In 1978, the Tate Gallery, where Hockney had first seen Picasso’s work, gave him a major exhibition that later circulated through the United States and Europe.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hockney experimented with Polaroid collages in a cubist tribute to Picasso that Hockney said captured the way people see: in separate, disparate glimpses. The collages, which he called “joiners,” would also improve on the photograph, because they could illustrate the concept of a subject in time and be much more than something caught in a thousandth of a second. He would later use the Pentax thirty-five-millimeter camera to make his photo collages; he called this technique drawing with a camera. There were several exhibitions of these collages in 1982, the largest at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

The French edition of Vogue magazine commissioned him in 1985 to produce cover art and page designs. For the magazine he painted Celia Birtwell, his friend and frequent model, from a variety of perspectives. Later that same year he experimented with a computer program, Quantel Paintbox, in sketching directly onscreen; the results were not only popular with the public but also featured in a brief documentary by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). He later used fax machines and computer printers to explore modern communication technology and art further. In 1987, AT&T agreed to underwrite a Hockney retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Los Angeles Opera’s production of Tristan und Isolde, for which Hockney designed sets and costumes. The exhibition coincided with the artist’s fiftieth birthday and was called UK/LA ’88.

Through the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, Hockney’s works continued to find great public and critical favor. His 1998 exhibition of drawings at the gallery L.A. Louver illustrated Hockney’s ability to blend caricature and the theme of homosexuality with remarkable color and life. Mr. and Mrs. Clark with Percy, at the Tate Gallery, was named among England’s favorite paintings in a 2005 poll. From October 2006 until January 2007, the National Portrait Gallery in London displayed a collection of Hockney’s self-portraits made throughout his career, a show that proved to be among the gallery’s most popular. He also organized a special exhibition in 2007–08 at the Tate, Hockney on Turner Watercolours, devoted to sketches by the nineteenth-century British painter J. M. W. Turner.

Hockney also won admiration for his immense landscape A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998), a series of sixty oil paintings that form one vividly colored panorama. The National Gallery of Australia purchased the series for $4.6 million in 1999. (In 2006 one of Hockney’s California swimming-pool pieces, The Splash, sold for an equivalent amount.)

Hockney, with physicist and optics expert Charles M. Falco, attracted much attention for a maverick and controversial pronouncement. In 2001, Hockney published a book titled Secret Knowledge, featured in a television program of the same name, which claimed that many of the old masters used camera obscura techniques to project images on canvas and then fill in the colors with paints. Known as the Hockney-Falco thesis, the argument purports to explain the rise of naturalism beginning with Renaissance art. Most art historians reject Hockney’s thesis, however.

Furthermore, in 2004, Hockney argued that the digital manipulation of photographs had degraded the art of photography by calling into question its faithfulness to truth, and it also made images that are mannered and dull. In 2005, he surprised many observers with his public opposition to the British government’s campaign to end smoking in public places, complaining that the campaign was an example of the British losing their individual liberties to “bossy” politicians.

Hockney was named a Companion of Honor in 1997 and became a member of the Royal Academy of Arts. Throughout the early twenty-first century he continued to experiment with new means of creating art, including using iPad apps to create striking digital drawings and paintings. Hockney has been called Britain’s most recognizable painter, well known for his striking hats, worn to protect his sensitive eyes, and for his defiant public smoking. Many of his paintings are on permanent display at the galleries at Salts Mill in his hometown of Bradford. In 2016, Hockney unveiled his series of paintings 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life at the Royal Academy. He then designed the Queen's Window, a stained-glass window at Westminster Abbey that celebrates Queen Elizabeth II, using an iPad in 2018. The same year, Hockney's 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at auction for $90.3 million, making it the most expensive work of art by a living artist sold at auction at the time.

In March 2020, Hockney's show David Hockney: Drawn from Life opened at the National Portrait Gallery in London but was shut down by the global COVID-19 pandemic. An expanded version of the exhibition, featuring 160 works in ink, pastel, pencil, and watercolor, opened at the gallery in late 2023. In addition to the works shown in the 2020 show, Hockney added 33 acrylic portraits that he had completed during the pandemic, including one of singer Harry Styles. Also in 2023, Hockney installed his first immersive exhibition, Bigger & Closer (Not Smaller & Further Away) at Lightroom in London. The immersive experience, which combined projections of Hockey's art, audio recordings of the artist speaking about his work, and classical music by Nico Muhly, demonstrated his longtime interest in technology.

Significance

Henry Geldzahler, an art collector, critic, and curator of the New York Museum of Modern Art, said that Hockney conducted his education in public. He moved from style to style and from subject to subject, exploring his options and trying to make his meaning clear with each new style while never letting style dominate or become academic. He called himself a narrative painter, and in that sense he is clearly within the tradition of English art. His means, however, are his own, and not a reaction against tradition or abstraction but a unique blend of the two. Since 1966, Hockney has affirmed that he has been competing not with artists of his own generation but with the history of art itself.

Hockney’s art is popular and accessible, in part because of his skill as a draftsman and portrait painter and because his subject matter strikes a chord with audiences. His art is a show-within-a-show, emotion buried beneath a calm facade, indifference hiding the real attachment, the frozen moment, the familiar made into the fabulous, the story beneath the surface. As demonstrated in his art from the 1950s to the first decades of the twenty-first century, his work reveals a knowing innocence, a cool detachment masking and highlighting passion, a powerful technical ability, and a deep understanding of art.

Bibliography

Beadleston, William. David Hockney in America. New York: Beadleston, 1983. Print.

Cahill, James, Marina Vaizey, and Michael Lovell-Pank. Homeland: David Hockney and the Yorkshire Landscape. London: CV, 2012. Print.

"David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist ( Pool with Two Figures)." Christie's, 8 Nov. 2018,www.christies.com/features/David-Hockney-Portrait-of-an-Artist-Pool-with-Two-Figures-9372-3.aspx. Accessed 4 Dec. 2018.

David Hockney: Paintings and Drawings. Paris: Museum of Decorative Arts, 1974. Print.

David Hockney: Prints and Drawings. Washington,: International Exhibitions Foundation, 1978. Print.

Feldman, Ella. "David Hockney Is the Subject of His Own Immersive Experience." Smithsonian Magazine, 24 Feb. 2023, www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/david-hockney-immersive-experience-london-bigger-closer-180981695/. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Friedman, Martin, and John Dexter. David Hockney Paints the Stage. New York: Abbeville, 1983. Print.

Hockney, David. David Hockney. Ed. Nikos Stangos. New York: Abrams, 1977. Print.

Hockney, David. Portraits. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006. Print.

Hockey, David. Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters. New York: Viking Studio, 2006. Print.

Hockney, David, and Lawrence Weschler. Cameraworks. New York: Knopf, 1984. Print.

"'It's stuck with me all my life’: David Hockney on Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ." The Art Newspaper, 9 July 2024, www.theartnewspaper.com/2024/07/09/its-stuck-with-me-all-my-life-david-hockney-on-piero-della-francescas-baptism-of-christ. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Livingstone, Marco. David Hockney. New York: Holt, 1981. Print.

Livingstone, Marco, et al. David Hockney: A Bigger Picture. New York: Abrams, 2012. Print.

Nowakowski, Teresa. "David Hockney Show Opens in London—and Features a New Portrait of Harry Styles." Smithsonian Magazine, 7 Nov. 2023, www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/expanded-david-hockney-show-opens-at-the-national-gallery-of-london-including-new-harry-styles-portrait-180983196/. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Sykes, Christopher Simon. David Hockney: The Biography, 1937–1975. New York: Random, 2012. Print.