Background and career
David Hockney (9 July 1937 – 11 June 2026) was a British painter, stage designer and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. He was known for his vivid, stylised realism and championed figurative work, often in a bold style, during a period when abstract art predominated. Hockney studied at the Royal College of Art before moving to Los Angeles in the 1960s. The light and lifestyle of California had a profound effect on his work; using acrylic paint, he worked on large portrait studies before turning to prints and photocollages in his later career. He used digital applications extensively in the final decades of his career and returned to the Yorkshire landscapes of his childhood with large en plein air pieces. He was also a celebrated operatic stage designer. Hockney exhibited internationally with several important retrospectives at leading institutions and was the recipient of major civic and institutional honours. Hockney came out as gay as a young man several years before the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Britain. He lived between the United Kingdom, France and the United States. In the late 2010s, auction sales established him as the most expensive living artist.
David Hockney was born on 9 July 1937 in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, the fourth of five children of Kenneth Hockney (1904–1978), an accountant's clerk who later ran his own accountancy business and who had been a conscientious objector in the Second World War, and Laura (1900–1999) née Thompson, a devout Methodist and strict vegetarian. He was educated at Wellington Primary School, Bradford Grammar School, Bradford College of Art (his teachers there included Frank Lisle, and his fellow students included Derek Boshier, Pauline Boty, Angela McCaul, Norman Stevens, David Oxtoby and John Loker) and the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, where he met R. B. Kitaj, Frank Bowling and Neil Stokoe. At the RCA Hockney featured alongside Peter Blake in the exhibition New Contemporaries, which announced the arrival of British Pop art. He was associated with the movement, but his early works display expressionist elements which are similar to some of Francis Bacon's works. When the RCA said it would not let him graduate if he did not complete an assignment of a life drawing of a live model in 1962, Hockney painted Life Painting for a Diploma in protest. He had refused to write an essay required for the final examination and said that he should be assessed solely on his artworks. Recognising his talent and growing reputation, the RCA changed its regulations and awarded him a diploma. After leaving the RCA, he taught at Maidstone College of Art for a short time. He taught at the University of Iowa in 1964. Hockney also taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1965. Next he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1966 to 1967 and then at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967.
In 1964 Hockney moved to Los Angeles, where he was inspired to make a series of paintings of swimming pools in the comparatively new acrylic medium using vibrant colours. He lived at various times in Los Angeles, London, and Paris from the late 1960s to 1970s. In 1974 he began a decade-long personal relationship with Gregory Evans, who moved with him to the US in 1976 and, as of 2019, remained a business partner. In 1978 he rented a home in the Hollywood Hills; he later bought and expanded the house to include his studio. He also owned a 1,643-square-foot (152.6 m2) beach house at 21039 Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, which he sold in 1999 for about $1.5 million (£1.2 million). In the 1990s, Hockney returned more often to Yorkshire, usually every three months, to visit his mother, who died in 1999. Until 1997, he rarely stayed for more than two weeks, when his friend Jonathan Silver who was terminally ill, encouraged him to capture the local surroundings. At first, he did this with paintings based on memory, some from his boyhood. In 1998, he completed his painting of the Yorkshire landmark Garrowby Hill. Hockney returned to Yorkshire for increasingly longer stays and, by 2003, was painting the countryside en plein air in both oils and watercolour. Hockney set up residence and studio in a converted bed and breakfast, in the seaside town of Bridlington, about 75 mi (121 km) from where he was born. The oil paintings he produced after 2005 were influenced by his intensive studies in watercolour, a series titled Midsummer: East Yorkshire (2003–2004). He created paintings made of multiple smaller canvases – two to fifty – placed together. To help him visualise work at that scale, he used digital photographic reproductions to study the day's work. In 2019 he created a studio at La Grande Cour, a rustic farmhouse near Beuvron-en-Auge in Normandy. He spent a year there, using a concertina sketchpad and an iPad to work outside painting the changing seasons in a series of images inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry.
Hockney experimented with painting, drawing, printmaking, watercolours, photography, and many other media, including a fax machine, paper pulp, computer applications, and iPad drawing programs. The subject matter of his interest ranges from still lifes to landscapes, portraits of friends, his dogs, and stage designs for the Royal Court Theatre, Glyndebourne, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.
Hockney returned to painting portraits throughout his career. From 1968, and for the next few years, he painted portraits and double portraits of friends, lovers, and relatives just under life-size in a realistic style that adroitly captured the likenesses of his subjects. Hockney was repeatedly drawn to the same subjects – his family, employees, artists Mo McDermott and Maurice Payne, various writers he had known, fashion designers Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark (Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, 1970–71), curator Henry Geldzahler, art dealer Nicholas Wilder, George Lawson and his ballet dancer lover, Wayne Sleep, and also his romantic interests throughout the years, including Peter Schlesinger and Gregory Evans. Perhaps more than all of these, Hockney turned to his own figure year after year, creating over 300 self-portraits. From 1999 to 2001 Hockney used a camera lucida for his research into art history, as well as his own work in the studio. He created over 200 drawings of friends, family, and himself using this antique lens-based device. In 2016 the Royal Academy exhibited Hockney's series entitled 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life which travelled to Ca' Pesaro in Venice, Italy, to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2017 and to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2018. Hockney called the paintings started in 2013 "twenty-hour exposures" because each sitting took six to seven hours on three consecutive days.
Hockney experimented with printmaking as early as a lithograph Self-Portrait in 1954 and worked in etchings during his time at RCA. One of his earliest lithographs, Fish & Chip Shop, was given to his local chip shop, the Sea Catch in Eccleshill in 1954. It was sold at auction at Christie's in London in 2017, with an estimate of £6,000–8,000. In 1965, the print workshop Gemini G.E.L. approached him to create a series of lithographs with a Los Angeles theme. Hockney responded by creating The Hollywood Collection, a series of lithographs recreating the art collection of a Hollywood star, each piece depicting an imagined work of art within a frame. Hockney went on to produce many other portfolios with Gemini G.E.L. including Friends, The Weather Series, and Some New Prints. During the 1960s, he produced several series of prints he thought of as 'graphic tales', including A Rake's Progress (1961–1963) after Hogarth, Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from C.P. Cavafy (1966) and Illustrations for Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm (1969). In 1973 Hockney began a fruitful collaboration with Aldo Crommelynck, Picasso's preferred printer. In his atelier, he adopted Crommelynck's trademark sugar lift, as well as a system of the master's own devising of imposing a wooden frame onto the plate to ensure colour separation. Their early work together included Artist and Model (1973–1974) and Contrejour in the French Style (1974). From 1976 to 1977, Hockney created The Blue Guitar, a suite of 20 etchings, each utilising Crommelynck's techniques and filled with references to Picasso. The frontispiece to the suite mentions Hockney's dual inspiration; "The Blue Guitar: Etchings By David Hockney Who Was Inspired By Wallace Stevens Who Was Inspired By Pablo Picasso". The etchings refer to themes in a poem by Wallace Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar. It was published by Petersburg Press in October 1977. That year, Petersburg also published a book in which the images were accompanied by the poem's text. In the summer of 1978 Hockney stayed for six weeks with his friend the printer Ken Tyler at Tyler's studio in New York, Tyler Graphics Ltd. Tyler invited Hockney to try a new technique with liquid paper. The process is painting with the paper itself, so the artist had to do it himself by hand. Each image becomes a unique work between printmaking and painting. In six weeks, Hockney created a total of 29 artworks with a series of 17 sunflowers and swimming pools. Many of the works are very similar, differentiated by changes in colour choice and application of the colour. Some are solely coloured using paper pulp, while some use spray paint to achieve certain details. Some of Hockney's other print portfolios include Home Made Prints (1986), Recent Etchings (1998) and Moving Focus (1984–1986), which contains lithographs related to A Walk Around the Hotel Courtyard, Acatlan. A retrospective of his prints, including 'computer drawings' printed on fax machines and inkjet printers, was exhibited at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London 5 February – 11 May 2014 and Bowes Museum, County Durham 7 June – 28 September 2014, with an accompanying publication, Hockney, Printmaker, by Richard Lloyd.
