David Hockney: The Complete Story
David Hockney is the most famous living British artist, the painter of sun drenched California pools, sharp double portraits and bright iPad landscapes who has reinvented himself for sixty years.
From A Bigger Splash to Yorkshire winters drawn on a screen, he has chased one question his whole life: how do we really see the world?
Most painters find a style and stay. Hockney keeps tearing his up and starting again, which is why at nearly ninety he still feels new.
Three stories, one click away
These go past the caption and into what actually happened:
Inside Monet house at Giverny, room by room, including his own bedroom
The Ambassadors, detail by detail, the object at the bottom that only works from one side
Luncheon of the Boating Party, detail by detail, who everybody at that table actually was
The California pools
A working class boy from Bradford, Hockney moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s and found his subject: flat sun, clean lines and blue swimming pools.
A Bigger Splash and Portrait of an Artist became the image of California itself. The full story of his most famous pool picture is told in this piece on Pool with Two Figures.
Painting gay life when it was a crime
In early 1960s Britain, sex between men was still illegal. Hockney painted gay love and desire openly anyway, tender and matter of fact, years before the law changed. It was quiet courage as much as art.
Always chasing how we see
Hockney has never stopped picking at the problem of vision. He built photo collages he called joiners, stitching many snapshots into one restless image, and argued in his book Secret Knowledge that the old masters secretly used lenses and mirrors.
Right or wrong, the obsession drives everything he makes.
The oldest new artist
When most painters his age had slowed down, Hockney picked up an iPad and started drawing enormous, glowing landscapes with his finger, the changing seasons of Yorkshire and Normandy, then emailing them to friends.
He brought Pop art energy into the age of the touchscreen.
Bigger and bigger
Hockney likes scale. In 2007 he painted Bigger Trees Near Warter, a single Yorkshire wood spread across fifty canvases into one wall sized picture, among the largest works ever painted outdoors, and then gave it to the Tate.
He pieced it together with the help of a computer, photographing each section as he worked, the same restless curiosity about seeing that runs through his whole career.
For Hockney a landscape is never just a view, it is a problem to solve.
The record
In 2018 his Portrait of an Artist, also known as Pool with Two Figures, sold for ninety million dollars, at the time the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist. A boy from Bradford had become the most valuable living painter on earth.
Quick answers about David Hockney
Who is David Hockney? The most famous living British painter.
When was he born? In Bradford, England, in 1937.
What is he famous for? His California pool paintings and his iPad landscapes.
What movement is he linked to? Pop art and a lifetime of work beyond it.
What is his most famous painting? Portrait of an Artist, or Pool with Two Figures.
Where can I see his work? Tate Britain and major museums worldwide.
Hockney is still working into his late eighties, still asking how to see an ordinary tree or pool as if for the first time. For the story behind his record breaking pool picture, read the piece on Pool with Two Figures.