Hockney, David

views updated

HOCKNEY, David

HOCKNEY, David (b. 9 July 1937), artist.

David Hockney—like Andy Warhol—led a generation of artists who in the 1960s openly affirmed a gay identity forged in relation to popular culture. Born and educated in provincial Yorkshire, England, Hockney won a scholarship to London's Royal College of Art in 1959. Under the influence of city life and an American classmate, Hockney, in his own words, "came out" in 1960. In this "exciting moment," he recalled, he realized that his art could become an expression of his sexual identity (Livingstone, p. 21).

Hockney's paintings from this period record his efforts to align himself with a legacy of homosexual artists. His titles—often written into the paintings as part of the composition—quote or allude to homosexual poets W. H. Auden, Constantine Cavafy, Antonin Artaud, and especially Walt Whitman. Though his imagery recalls Marsden Hartley's coded expressions of homosexuality, the simplicity of Hockney's numeric codes (1=A, 2=B, and so on) and pervading humor mark him as a member of a less secretive and more hopeful generation. The title of one of his paintings, We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), for instance, quotes Whitman's poetry, but also alludes to a newspaper headline, "Two Boys Cling to Cliff All Night Long," a reference to a hiking accident that Hockney chose to imagine as a sexual fantasy involving the handsome pop music star Cliff Richards. According to Hockney's simple numeric codes, Richards is also signified by the number "4.2.":D.B. or "Doll Boy" in reference to his hit song, "Living Doll." Throughout these

works, Hockney's affirmation of gay identity is suggested by brightly colored cartoonlike figures of lovers that stand out against drab backgrounds scrawled with graffiti, as if to claim the potential for delight even in bleak surroundings.

Hockney's interest in emerging forms of gay community drew him to New York City and California. In the summer of 1961, he used prize money from a printmaking competition to travel to New York City, where he acquired a boyfriend and reveled in the city's gay bars and bookstores. In New York City, Hockney dyed his hair blond as a way, he recalled, to reinvent himself. This episode appears in a series of prints he created that fictionalized his New York City trip after the model of illustrated satires popular in the eighteenth century, which showed young men tempted by wicked city life. Although Hockney's version of A Rake's Progress ends, following its eighteenth-century models, in an insane asylum, Hockney himself moved to California in 1963 because, he later explained, "California in my mind was a sunny land of movie studios and beautiful semi-naked people. My picture of it was admittedly strongly colored by physique magazines published there" (Hockney, 1976, p. 93). Reality did nothing to dim Hockney's enthusiasm. His popular paintings of suburban Los Angeles idealize its low-slung houses, mechanically sprinkled yards, palm trees, fancy bathrooms, and swimming pools—these last often populated with attractive men.

Hockney's shower and pool paintings often included figures culled from the physique magazines that had inspired him to move to Los Angeles, combining them with his own snapshots of places and people he knew well. This fusion of documentary veracity with mass-media fantasy associated Hockney with Pop Art. A documentary impulse is reflected in his participation in the film A Bigger Splash, a study of the relationship between Hockney's life and work shot in 1971 (released in 1974). Remarkable in that era for its frank, unsensationalized acknowledgment of gay identity, the film documents Hockney's emotional turmoil at the end of a five-year relationship.

Hockney's interest in documentary also helped prompt his move, around 1980, toward photography as a medium. Again insisting on his art's roots in his sexual identity, Hockney claimed that his collages of snapshots of the same scene from different angles derived from his frustration with how "erotic photographs" lacked "life," which he defined as "lived time" (Hockney, 1984, p. 9). His photographic collages expanded far beyond their erotic origins, however, creating a complex visual diary of his corner of the gay community. Here gay identity is enmeshed in other aspects of life. Mainstream newspapers, novels by gay writers, and gay porn magazines mingle in Hockney's interiors, just as portraits of heterosexual couples and children mix with images of Hockney's lovers and his older gay mentors and friends, among them the novelist Christopher Isherwood. The variety of Hockney's interests is reflected in the diversity of his output, which includes not only paintings, drawings, and photo collages, but stage and costume designs as well as a book, Secret Knowledge (2001), on the history of artists' use of lenses.