Hockney, David

Hockney, David (1937– ). British painter, draughtsman, printmaker, photographer, and designer, active mainly in the USA. After a brilliant career as a student, Hockney had achieved international success by the time he was in his mid-20s, and he has since consolidated his position as by far the best-known and most critically acclaimed British artist of his generation. His phenomenal success has been based not only on the flair and versatility of his work, but also on his colourful personality, which has made him a recognizable figure even to people not particularly interested in art—so much so that a film about him, A Bigger Splash (1974), enjoyed some popularity in the commercial cinema.

Hockney was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, into a working-class family, and studied at Bradford School of Art, 1953–7. His early work—including portraits and views of his surroundings—was in the tradition of the Euston Road School. After two years working in hospitals in lieu of National Service (he was a conscientious objector), he went to the Royal College of Art in 1959 and graduated with the gold medal for his year in 1962. His fellow students included Derek Boshier, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj, and Peter Phillips, and with them Hockney was regarded as one of the leaders of British Pop art after the Young Contemporaries exhibition in 1961. Hockney himself disliked the label ‘Pop', but his work of this time makes many references to popular culture (notably in the use of graffiti-like lettering) and is often jokey in mood.

In 1963 he had his first one-man show at the gallery of the London dealer John Kasmin (1934– ), and his first retrospective came as early as 1970, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (it subsequently toured to Hanover, Rotterdam, and Belgrade). By this time he was painting in a weightier, more traditionally representational manner, in which he did a series of large double-portraits of friends, including the well-known Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (Tate Gallery, London, 1970–1). These portraits are notable for their airy feeling of space and light and the subtle flattening and simplification of forms, as well as for the sense of stylish living they capture. Hockney often paints the people and places he knows best (his art is frequently autobiographical) and he has memorably celebrated his romance with Los Angeles (he first visited the city in 1963 and settled there permanently in 1976), particularly in his many paintings featuring swimming pools (A Bigger Splash, Tate Gallery, London, 1967). R. B. Kitaj has written of these works: ‘It is a rare event in our modern art when a sense of place is achieved at the level of very fine painting. Sickert's Camden Town comes to mind, and above all Hopper's America, in which I grew up. Hockney's California is one of the only recent exemplars.’

Another contemporary of Hockney's, Tom Phillips, has written that ‘his seemingly effortless draughtsmanship is the envy of fellow artists', and he has indeed been as outstanding as a graphic artist as he has as a painter. His work in this field includes etched illustrations to Cavafy's Poems (1967) and Six Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (1969), as well as many individual prints, often on homoerotic themes. In the 1970s he came to the fore also as a stage designer, notably with his set and costume designs for Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress and Mozart's The Magic Flute, produced at Glyndebourne in 1975 and 1978 respectively. In the 1980s he experimented a good deal with photography, producing, for example, photographic collages and—since 1986—prints created on a photocopier. Painting has continued to be his central activity, however. His works of the 1990s include a series entitled Very New Paintings, begun in 1992, in which he depicted Californian scenery in almost abstract terms. The loose handling of such works has disappointed some critics who admired the clarity of his earlier paintings. Hockney is a perceptive commentator on art and has published several books on his own work and other artistic topics, including David Hockney by David Hockney (1976) and That's the Way I See It (1993). See also ACRYLIC and PHOTO-WORK.