David Hockney

David Hockney (1937- ), British painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer who since 1976 has lived in the United States. He is the most highly acclaimed British artist of his generation, his work having a wide appeal because of its imagination, superb draughtsmanship, and visual wit. His international success has been aided by his colourful personality and ability to talk engagingly and unpretentiously about his work.

Hockney was born on July 9, 1937 in Bradford, Yorkshire, the third of four children of a working-class family. From 1953 to 1957 he studied at Bradford School of Art, where there was very little awareness of modern art. His early work, including portraits of his family and views of his surroundings, was in a solid, sober style. From 1957 to 1959, in lieu of doing military service, he worked in hospitals, and from 1959 to 1962 he studied at the Royal College of Art in London. He was the most brilliant student of his time there and by his graduation had already won several awards, including a gold medal awarded by the college.

In London Hockney had become aware of more modern developments (he very briefly experimented with abstraction), and in 1961 he and several other students at the Royal College of Art made a strong impact at the Young Contemporaries exhibition that launched Pop Art as a major force in Britain. His paintings of this time were often jokey in spirit, with graffiti-like lettering. He also had success as a printmaker with his series of 16 etchings A Rake’s Progress (1961-1963), inspired by the engravings of the same name by William Hogarth.

In 1963 the money that Hockney earned from the sale of these etchings enabled him to visit Los Angeles, where he settled in 1976. One consequence of his first visit was that he began using acrylic paints (American-manufactured acrylics were at this time superior to those available in Britain). Their bold, flat colours were well suited to capturing the strong Californian light, notably in a number of paintings that Hockney made on the theme of the swimming pool, among them A Bigger Splash (1967, Tate Gallery, London). (The swimming pool was a suitable context for the male nude—a favourite subject with Hockney and one to which he has often given a strong homosexual element.) He used acrylics virtually exclusively in his paintings until 1972, but then returned to oils because he had come to value their slow-drying qualities. Hockney’s wryness and wit, together with his talent for strong composition and design, led him, at the end of the 1960s, to a more naturalistic manner, particularly in his portraits. Although not fully realistic, these works provide sensitive, often heightened representations of their sitters.

In 1970, although he was still only in his early 30s, Hockney had a major retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, entitled Paintings, Prints, Drawings 1960-1970, and it later toured to several cities in continental Europe. His style had by this time become more solid, as in his famous double portrait Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-1971, Tate Gallery, London), which typifies the strong, clear, bright forms of Hockney’s work at this stage of his career.

In the 1970s Hockney branched out into stage design, beginning with costumes and sets for the Glyndebourne Opera production of The Rake’s Progress by Stravinsky in 1975. His love of experiment and interest in technology led him to various novel types of expression in the 1980s, including prints made on photocopiers and pictures made up of dozens of polaroid photographs, as for example Henry Moore (1982), arranged to give a fragmented image resembling a Cubist painting. David Hockney: Photographs (1982) is an exploration of the medium of photography and a partial record of his life. However, he has also continued with traditional painting, as in a series called Very New Paintings (begun 1992) showing the Pacific coastline and the mountains behind Santa Monica in dazzling colour. In early 2003 his first watercolours—a technique he had previously described as “wishy-washy” and for amateurs only—went on show in London. Hockney had been inspired by seeing the work of the 19th-century watercolourist Thomas Girtin, and painted several landscapes while travelling in Iceland and Norway, also exploring use of the Northern summer light. He went on to use watercolour for some portraits.

Hockney has published a number of books about art and his own work, including David Hockney by David Hockney (1976) and That’s The Way I See It (1993) (edited from hours of taped conversations), and, more recently, Hockney on Art (1999) and Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (2001).