David Hockney, born July 9, 1937 in Bradford, United Kingdom, is a British portrait and landscape painter, draughtsman, printmaker, decorator, photographer and art theorist. He lives and works since 2019 in the Pays d'Auge, Normandy.
He is a major figure in the 1960s pop art movement and hyperrealism, and one of the most influential British painters of the 20th century.
Using acidic and attractive colors, David Hockney paints portraits and landscapes where painting and photography are mixed.
David Hockney's Biography
David Hockney was born into a modest family, the fourth child of five.
He became interested in art at a very young age and was enrolled in Bradford Art School at the age of eleven.
His father, who had gone to art school before giving up his passion, had been a conscientious objector during the Second World War. David Hockney refused to do his military service from 1957 to 1959. His mother is Catholic.
He studied at the Royal College of Art in London, where he met Allen Jones, Patrick Caulfield and graduated in 1962. He began his career as a painter and made a first trip to Egypt as a press cartoonist for the Sunday Times.
In 1964, he discovered California, Polaroid snapshots, acrylic paint, beautiful villas and their pools, which became a motif in many of his works. There he met Peter Schlesinger who became his lover and the subject of many remarkable paintings by the British painter. He then lived in the United States until 1968.
On November 15, 2018, a painting by the artist, "Portrait of an Artist (Pool with two figures)," was sold for $ 90.3 million at an auction at Christie's in New York, which becomes the auction record for a living artist, dethroning Jeff Koons.
Paris
Far from the most avant-garde currents, David Hockney practices an almost expressionist figurative art where portraits, photographs and videos are mixed.
In 1963, the year he exhibited at the Paris Biennale, his works became more autonomous and autobiographical. He painted self-portraits, portraits of his parents, friends, series of interior scenes, boys in the shower, swimming pools, wooden animals, travels.
Winchester city post painted in the style of A Bigger Splash.
He met Andy Warhol in New York in 1963. Warhol later visited him in Los Angeles and suggested that he do his swimming pool series.
A self-proclaimed homosexual, he frequented gay bars. He taught drawing at the University of Iowa, the University of Colorado at Boulder and then, in 1966, at the University of California at Los Angeles.
David Hockney returned to London in 1968 for the love of Peter Schlesinger, at the time of Swinging London. Cecil Beaton, Rudolf Nureyev and John Gielgud came to pose in his apartment. He is famous for presenting the collections of the fashion designer Ossie Clark (en), whose lover he is.
For Vanity Fair magazine: "Failing to have the notoriety of Dali or Picasso, David Hockney established himself, in the early 1970s, as a major figure of the international artistic bohemia and a certain deviant aristocracy of arts and letters, in the same way as William Burroughs, Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon", at a time when "a number of creators continue to upset the moral prejudices of the bourgeoisie in this era of generalized protest.
In 1973, Jack Hazan directed a documentary-drama dedicated to him entitled A Bigger Splash, which established his international reputation (the film won an award at the Locarno International Film Festival) and echoed the painting A Bigger Splash, which presents Californian swimming pools in luxury villas.
In 1974, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris organized his first retrospective.
In 1977, he posed naked with the painter Ron Kitaj on the cover of The New Review.
David Hockney returned to live and work in Los Angeles in 1978, when he became almost totally deaf at the age of forty.
International recognition
In 1999, in Paris, the Georges Pompidou Center Museum presented a retrospective of his work on landscapes, entitled: ESPACE / PAYSAGE. It shows the questions asked and the answers that David Hockney brings, since the sixties, to the representation of landscapes with other means than linear perspective. In 2003, he posed for the painter Lucian Freud.
Return to England, then installation in Normandy
David Hockney returned to England in 2005 and lived in East Yorkshire, the region of his childhood. In a vast studio, he paints landscapes in very large formats. First, he presents watercolors in a single frame containing 36 watercolors, to show the general atmosphere of the sites.
Then, in 2007, he exhibited his large format paintings in Venice, California, which are often composed of several canvases. His paintings do not have only one point of view like a camera, but several, the human eye gives much more information than a photographic lens.
It is now his goal to show a legible landscape with different points of view, to allow the "viewer" to enter the landscape to feel it like the painter.
He is also interested in digital works. In 2010 he exhibited in Paris, at the Pierre-Bergé - Yves Saint-Laurent Foundation, his works made on iPhone and iPad, he also highlights the possibility on software to replay the creative process, stating: "The only similar experience is when we see Picasso draw on glass for a film" (referring to the film The Picasso Mystery by Henri-Georges Clouzot)
On January 2, 2012, he was appointed by Queen Elizabeth II, member of the British Order of Merit.
A major exhibition opened on January 23, 2012 at the Royal Academy in London, "A Bigger Picture" which shows large works on the theme of the English landscape. These are mostly very large formats but he also shows works made on an iPad which he uses as a sketchbook with more extensive possibilities. More surprising is the perception of a landscape by 18 cameras placed at different points of view.
He continues his exploration of the reproduction of landscapes, begun some fifty years ago, without constraining himself to perspective. This is the case for his painting "Chaises longues" inspired by a vision of the French artist Ludivine Thiry.
He multiplies the points of view on an assembly of several canvases and believes that painting is the only way to give this reading of a landscape. The exhibition lasted until April 9, 2012 in London, then moved to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao for the summer of 2012, and continued at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany from October 27, 2012 to February 3, 2013.
In March 2013, his assistant Dominic Elliott died accidentally in his home after a party.
In 2017, the Centre Pompidou in collaboration with the Tate Britain in London and the Metropolitan Museum in New York presents the most comprehensive retrospective exhibition devoted to the work of David Hockney.
Since 2019, he has been living and working in France again, decades after residing in Paris, this time in a village in Calvados, Rumesnil, about 30 kilometers east of Caen.
Personal life of David Hockney
While homosexuality was still punishable by prison in the UK in his youth, he was supported by his parents. He painted several works with references to homosexuality, such as We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), Cleaning Teeth, Early Evening (1962), which depicts two men doing a 69, and Domestic Scene, Los Angeles (1963), depicting two boys showering together.
He formed a relationship with Peter Schlesinger, both professional and romantic. He was also the lover of Ossie Clark. His two other important love relationships are Gregory Evans and John Fitzherbert.
On the subject of marriage, he says, "I always thought I would never get married because I was gay. The world before gay marriage was so different. My only regret is that I didn't have children. Would I have been a good father? Probably not, because I always put work first." He has taken a stand for LGBT rights several times.
In the mid-2000s, he lived temporarily in Bridlington (UK), but generally lived for a long time from 1979 in a Hollywood house that belonged to the actor Anthony Perkins.
He became deaf in 1978 at the age of forty.
David Hockney's Painting and photography
In 1970, Hockney created for the first time what he called Joiners, that is to say photographs assembled "in joint". He takes a picture of a scene from different angles and then places the photographs next to each other to recreate an image.
This quote from David Hockney in his book David Hockney, Cameraworks, helps us to understand his motivations for making his Joiners:
"After a while I bought a better camera and tried to use a wide-angle lens because I wanted to take whole rooms or a whole standing figure. But I hated the photographs I got. They looked extremely unreal. They described something that you never actually see. These lines curved in a way that they never do when you look at the world. In fact it was this falsification: our eye never sees that much in one glance. It is not plausible. I noticed that these Joiners had more presence than ordinary photographs. With five photographs, for example, you have to look five times."
Also, as Hockney explains, our eye does not capture the entire image at once. We are forced to look at the thing several times to then form an image in our mind. The Joiners recreate this process of perception:
the complete image is based on the collage of several small images that our eye captures and then assembles. This mental image then relies on our ability to recall what we have seen before. Hockney was therefore very interested in the functioning of memory and noticed that it plays a real role in the perception of the world.
He was also very interested in the Cubist perception of the world, because Cubism is concerned with representing an object from different points of view.
These photocollages made with a polaroid were inspired by the cubist movement since they bring together several points of view within the same image as can be seen in his work Don + Christopher, Los Angeles, 6th March 1982.
This echoes his desire to create an image as the viewer sees it, not as the photograph represents it, as evidenced by Alain Sayag's quote in the exhibition catalog David Hockney, photographer: "The later Polaroid works were an opportunity to push his photographic experience beyond his everyday practice to make it the very object of his research, taking us from a monocular view of the world to a subjective gaze."
Then, in May 1982, Hockney bought a conventional camera because he wanted to give up the collages that form a grid because of the white frames of Polaroid photographs.
From then on, he focused on creating images that were not limited by a frame as he said in the article "Interview with David Hockney" by Partick Mauriès published in the newspaper Libération: "What photography made me discover is that we are only limited by the sky and our feet, never by the sides."
The photocollage of his mother called My Mother, Bolton Abbey, Yorkshire, Nov. 1982 illustrates this quote as the frame has completely disappeared and his image is limited by the artist's own feet below and the sky. The sides do not form a vertical line which shows that the view to the sides is unlimited.
Thus, even though Hockney was wary of photography, he used it to create new works and it is important to note that he also used it as a model for his paintings.
For example, he paints A Closer Grand Canyon from hundreds of shots that are offset from each other. He puts a very thin layer of paint on the canvas, which gives an impression close to that of a photograph.
In 1986, he began a large-scale work that would not see the light of day until 1998. It is the Bigger Grand Canyon. He began with an assemblage of 60 photographs, Collage No. 2, which is 113 × 322 cm in size. Then he takes these views on three strips of paper and draws them with charcoal and pencil.
The drawing makes the necessary connections of all these photographs. He then begins some details of this Grand Canyon, of six panels, to the size of the final painting. The final painting will be done in 1998 with 60 assembled canvases (5 × 12 cm each) and measures 7.40 long.
The Hockney-Falco thesis
In 2001, he published an essay: Savoirs secrets, les techniques perdues des Maîtres anciens, published by Seuil. He demonstrates through texts and images, the use of optical devices by many painters since the fifteenth century.
In 2006, he completed this work with a new edition. This very detailed and scholastic demonstration made many painters and art historians react and debate because it applies historical knowledge. By displaying on the wall of his studio color photocopies of paintings from before the Renaissance to the present day, he saw notable differences from certain periods.
At the same time, the designs of pleated fabrics become perfect, the reflections of the armor are like photographs, the characters who hold a cup in their hands to drink are almost all left-handed.
The use of mirrors is likely. Jan van Eyck in his painting "The Arnolfini couple" shows a convex mirror representing what the characters facing us see, which we could not see otherwise. Later painters, such as Canaletto, did not shy away from using the "camera oscura", others used sets of mirrors or concave mirrors that projected the image onto the canvas to be painted.
His demonstrations are fascinating, especially the one he made in Florence with his assistants to reproduce the famous tablet of Brunelleschi, of which we only know the posthumous descriptions.
As the sun shone on the baptistery in front of the Duomo, he set up a concave mirror in the shadow of the porch that faithfully reproduced the image of the baptistery on a white cardboard in front of it. As Brunelleschi himself had most likely done, using a mirror to illustrate the invention of perspective.