David Hockney life and biography

David Hockney, born July 9, 1937 in Bradford, Yorkshire, England is a British writer and artist.

"Sidelights"

"No other English artist has ever been as popular in his own time, with as many people, in as many places, as David Hockney," Robert Hughes asserted in Time. Throughout Hockney's career, his reputation as a serious artist has depended on the attention of critics, but his versatility and willingness to reveal his artistic processes have earned him admirers around the world. Like Pablo Picasso, Hockney refuses to limit himself to a single discipline or style and has continually expanded his practice to include engraving, painting, illustration, photography, graphic design, and stage design. Hockney has also filled the role of critic and theorist, and his writings have found a significant readership. It is Hockney's desire to engage his audience in narrative, both as a visual artist and writer, that underscores his success. Unlike the work of many of his counterparts, Hockney's art is primarily figurative (that is, representational). Hockney's narratives, then, begin in pictures which tell stories and are continued in the artist's ready explanation of his intentions. The demonstrative relationship between image and narrative is characteristic of Hockney's most highly regarded work. Hockney, the artist, captures his viewer's imagination as a storyteller.

Hockney was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, England, in 1937. He attended Bradford Grammar School and as a teenager entered the Bradford College of Art. When Hockney became a student at the progressive Royal College of Art in London, his skills as a draftsman were already firmly established. During these student years, Hockney experimented with the most visible styles of the time, Abstract Expressionism (which demanded non-representational, purely visual expression) and Pop (which appropriated the imagery and reproduction techniques of mass media). In 1960 Hockney viewed his first Picasso retrospective, and in the same year, according to Kay Larson in New York, invented his singular manner of drawing. Larson described the typical Hockney drawing as "a cross between Saul Steinberg and Dr. Seuss, though the more common references are Francis Bacon, English Pop, and modern magazine illustration." Hockney's early influences also included classmates from the Royal College who later gained considerable reputations, including the American painter R. B. Kitaj.

In 1961 Hockney was chosen to participate in an exhibit titled "Young Contemporaries." The show was immediately recognized as a turning point in contemporary British art and is today viewed as something of a landmark. Hockney and several of the artists selected were still students when the show was mounted. Nearly thirty years later, Nation critic Arthur C. Danto opened his review of a major Hockney retrospective with an analysis of a painting included in "Young Contemporaries." The Most Beautiful Boy combines obscure imagery at the canvas margins, such as an Alka Seltzer label, with a rough portrait of a figure wearing what appears to be a woman's nightclothes. As is usual in early Hockney, text is also forced into the space surrounding the figure, adding an articulate layer of meaning to the work. Danto noted that in 1961 British critic Lawrence Alloway declared that Hockney's imagery was fundamentally urban and likened his use of text to graffiti. The Most Beautiful Boy and its companion paintings were presumed to demonstrate a new concern for the depiction of the city.

Without denying the presence of the urban environment in these works, Danto contended that The Most Beautiful Boy, and Hockey's art in general, is more personal. The sexual ambiguity of the boy is taken as reference to Hockney's homosexuality (an issue which the artist has dealt with frankly in other works), while the symbolism and the alternating crude and delicate aspects of the portrait are understood as expressions of desire. "It is a witty and confessional piece of work," Danto proclaimed, "a declaration of love, and sexually explicit,... and it engages the viewer in the artist's own emotional affairs, as if he wore his heart on his canvas." This was unique in 1961, according to Danto, because Hockney's work was neither abstract nor pop but full of people he had actually seen, interiors he observed, and landscapes that might be located on a map. As a result, Hockney communicated something about the world, as well as something about his relationship to the objects of his affection. "Hockney's art is to be found between the work and its viewers," Danto declared, "a space curiously filled by the artist himself."

Upon graduating from the Royal College in 1962, Hockney became a popular personality, sporting large round-rimmed glasses and playboy clothes. In 1963 Hockney traveled to Los Angeles; he became a resident of the city a year later. During this period Hockney turned his attention to his new surroundings, and his paintings of the L.A. landscape are often credited with establishing the iconography of the city. While Hockney's observation of the intense light of Southern California was not always accurate, wrote Hughes, "he fixed other things--those pastel planes, insouciant scraggy palms, blank panes of glass, and blue pools full of wreathing reflections and brown bodies." Hockney's most frequently seen works from this period are paintings of swimming pools, where the surface of the water is treated as if it held spiritual implications for the culture of Los Angeles. Hockney evoked meaning from these oases of water in the middle of the desert and depicted the swimming pool as a representation of the California lifestyle.

A Bigger Splash, painted in 1967, utilizes the pool and the pool deck as a landscape. A diving board cantilevers from the front of the picture into the scene and out over the pool, where the surface of the water has just been broken, the splash and spray frozen in the air. With the exception of the taut energy of the splash, the scene is curiously still: the light is intense and uninflected, an empty deck chair faces the pool, and the diving board is flat, without indication of the shock of the implied dive. Noting the importance of this work, Time's Hughes called A Bigger Splash "the quintessential L.A. painting... a radiant acceptance of Now--an eye blink, picture perfect."

Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) painted in 1972, is among the most naturalistic of the pool paintings. In addition to the quality of the rendering, the ten foot by seven foot canvas lends a certain life-size authority to the figures. In the painting a man swims underwater, from left to right, arms ahead of him and body fully extended, toward the edge of a pool. The second figure, also male, stands at the pool edge fully clothed, facing the swimmer and peering down into the pool. In the background the green hillsides of Southern California momentarily frame the scene, then overlap into the distance. In a Film Comment article, David Thomson asserted that the painting's power springs from the visual relationship of the figures: the standing figure waits unnoticed, that is, unseen. The painting depicts the moment before the revelatory moment when the swimmer surfaces and confronts the watcher. "That is how it is such a study of yearning," Thomson concluded, "that is why there is a feeling of fragility or danger in this secluded Eden up above L.A."

American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman), from 1968, presents another facet of Hockney's study of Los Angeles. Here two figures stand on opposite sides of a courtyard containing a few outdoor pieces from their art collection. Fred is presented in profile, staring intently in the direction of Marcia, who faces the viewer. Thomson pointed out the similarity of this situation to the setup in Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), but here "one figure has turned to look at the other, while the other resolutely fails to notice the attention." In his comments on American Collectors, Hughes noted that Marcia's features are slightly distorted to resemble a totem in the background and that paint is dribbling from Fred's hand, as if the couple have actually become artifacts in the process of collecting art.

Hockney continued to paint into the 1970s, but in the second half of the decade his production dropped precipitously. During this period Hockney was approached by the Glyndebourne Opera about doing stage design for a production of Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress. "To begin with, the music seemed very difficult," Hockney recalled in his 1993 book, That's the Way I See It. "I listened and there was probably very little I got.... But slowly the music came to me. The more I listened, the more beautiful it became, and I saw how exciting it was." Hockney proposed a sequence of sets inspired by the engravings of William Hogarth, the eighteenth-century originator of The Rake's Progress and a series of prints with the same title that Hockney had done in the early sixties. Cross-hatching became the central motif of the designs, a stylized version of the technique Hogarth employed in his engravings. The production received wide acclaim, and Hockney has continued to design sets for a variety of opera companies in England and the United States.

It was during his sabbatical from painting that Hockney began to explore photography as a vehicle for his art. In Lawrence Weschler's essay "True to Life" (originally published in New Yorker and later as a preface to Hockney's 1984 volume Cameraworks), Weschler illuminated Hockney's practice of using photographs as an aid to memory while painting. Some of these photographs had even been assembled for an exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1982. Despite its value as a recording device, Hockney maintained what he characterized as an ambivalent relationship to photography. "It's not that I despised photography ever," Hockney told Weschler, "it's just that I distrusted the claims that were made on its behalf--claims as to its greater reality or authenticity." That suspicion of the limitations of photography launched Hockney on a series of photographic experiments that resulted in the photocollages presented in Cameraworks.

Initially, Hockney combined dozens of polaroid photos in a grid; the individual photos created a composite image, with several points of view and locations in time represented. As the work progressed, the grids gave way to compositions which adapted to the forms of the subject matter: sprawling collages of the Grand Canyon, strongly vertical arrangements showing a telephone pole bursting from the ground in L.A., portraits which present several views and facial expressions. "There is, in some of these collages, as in some of Hockney's finest pencil drawings, a remarkable psychological acuity at work," Weschler declared. "In the [Stephen] Spender combine, for example, the face itself develops out of six squares--three tall and two wide--those aspects to the left are alert, inquisitive and probing; to the right, they are tired, weary, resigned. Spender, Hockney seems to be suggesting, is both." In another collage, The Scrabble Game from 1983, Hockney incorporates an element from his earlier work, creating a fragmented narrative with the words played on the Scrabble board.

According to Larson in New York, Hockney's photography allowed him to resume painting with a new sense of perspective that avoided the "claustrophobic intimacy" of some of his earlier paintings. Larson found Hockney's narratives more "systematic" following the photographic experiments as well and pointed to the mural Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio as evidence. The intense colors used to depict the vegetation of the California hills are reminiscent of the Fauvist landscapes painted by Derain and Matisse, while the road is a sinuous line running up the center of the composition. In That's the Way I See It Hockney offered this insight on the painting: "When you look at Mulholland Drive--and drive is not the name of the road, but the act of driving--your eye moves around the painting at about the same speed as a car drives along the road." Despite the stylization of images in the painting, Hockney maintained that the work is the result of intense observation and that the presentation of the vegetation and color, especially, are more realistic than they might initially seem.

Since he resumed painting, Hockney has continued to experiment with perception and has explored Cubism as well as other styles. While his concerns have changed since the early days of his celebrity, most notably with respect to naturalism, Hockney continues to challenge audiences with works of dedicated craftsmanship. Hockney's reflections on his work and his interests in new technology, such as photo reproduction, are collected in That's the Way I See It. This "lively, unpretentious memoir," as a Publishers Weekly reviewer described it, presents the text of recorded and unrecorded conversations between David Hockney and Nikos Stangos. Much of this book is devoted to Hockney's "break with naturalism," as well as his explorations of spatial perception and new printing or reproduction techniques, which include faxing and laser color printing. During the five years of discussions between Stangos and Hockney presented in That's the Way I See It, Hockney recalls his travels through China and Egypt, reflects about the death of his father, and expresses his thoughts about his own loss of hearing. Hockney also explains the production of his acclaimed opera sets for Tristan and Isolde and The Magic Flute. Throughout the book, drawings, paintings, and collages illustrate Hockney's creative process.

While Stephen Galloway in the Los Angeles Times Book Review found the work to be repetitive at times, he felt that "it is impossible not to be drawn" to Hockney and concluded that the artist's "endless questioning and genuine delight in all the processes of creation make it difficult not to admire him." In the Times Literary Supplement, Rosemary Hill asserted that That's the Way I See It is "the friendliest and most enjoyable book about art since David Hockney by David Hockney appeared in 1976." "Readers are in for an insightful journey," exclaimed Booklist's Alice Joyce.

In That's the Way I See It, Hockney touches the subject of AIDS as he discusses death. "The first friend of mine to die was Joe MacDonald.... He was the first person I knew to become ill with AIDS, just after 1981." Hockney went on to describe MacDonald's death of pneumonia and related, "Then there were more deaths, each person dying in a different way." In the early 1990s, Hockney contributed his talent and reputation to an AIDS fundraising project with editor Stephen Spender. The result, Hockney's Alphabet, is a "picture book for adults of the highest order" as Ray Olson in Booklist described it. Each of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet is rendered in Hockney's unique style and accompanied by short literary pieces written by respected contemporary writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Susan Sontag, and Ian McEwan. Hockney's letters, according to David Bryant in Library Journal, are "bright, cheery, surprising mini-artworks." One hundred percent of the net proceeds of Hockney's Alphabet were promised to the fight against AIDS.

While Hockney continues to live in the Los Angeles area, his reputation as an artist reaches around the world. He has also worked in variety of locations, particularly as a stage designer, and his travels are a source of inspiration and influence. Hockney's willingness to experiment, his craftsmanship, and his unfailing ability to evoke narrative through the image, have expanded the importance of the figure, especially the human figure, in contemporary art. Hockney expressed his commitment to the figure in the form of a question posed to Weschler: "Cezanne's apples are lovely and very special," Hockney confessed, "but what finally can compare to the image of another human being?"

PERSONAL INFORMATION

Born July 9, 1937, in Bradford, Yorkshire, England; son of Kenneth and Laura Hockney. Education: Attended Bradford College of Art, 1953-57; Royal College of Art, graduate (gold medal), 1962. Addresses: Office: 7508 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, CA 90046-6407.

AWARDS

Guinness award and first prize for etching, 1961; Gold Medal for drawing, Royal College of Art, 1962; Graphic prize, Paris Biennale, 1963; First prize, 8th International Exhibition of Drawings, Lugano, Italy, 1964; First prize, John Moores Exhibition, Liverpool, England, 1967; German award of excellence, 1983; Kodak photography book award, 1984, for Cameraworks; First prize, International Center of Photography, New York City, 1985; Honorary degree, University of Aberdeen, 1988; Praemium Imperiale, Japan Art Association, 1989.

CAREER

Maidstone College of Art, England, instructor, 1962; University of Iowa, Iowa City, lecturer, 1964; University of Colorado, Boulder, lecturer, 1965; University of California at Los Angeles, lecturer, 1966, honorary chair of drawing, 1980; University of California at Berkeley, lecturer, 1967. Exhibitions: (One-person shows) Kasmin Gallery, Ltd., London, 1963-89; Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1964, 1968; Alan Gallery, New York City, 1964-67; Stedlijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1966; Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, England, 1969; (retrospective) Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1970; Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York City, 1970, 1972--; Galerie Springer, Berlin, 1970; Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 1971; Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, 1974; Michael Walls Gallery, New York City, 1974; Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris, 1975; "Travels with Pen, Pencil, and Ink," Touring U.S.A., 1978-80, and Tate Gallery, London, 1980; "Paper Pools," Andre Emmrich Gallery, and Warehouse Gallery, London, 1979; (retrospective) Hayward Gallery, London, 1983; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, 1984; L.A. Louver, 1986, 1989-90; Nishimura Gallery, Tokyo, 1986, 1989; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, 1988; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1988; Tate Gallery, 1988. Designer for stage productions, including: Ubu Roi, Royal Court, London, 1966; Rake's Progress, Glyndebourne, England, 1975; Magic Flute, Glyndebourne, 1978; Parade Triple Bill, Stravinsky Triple Bill, Metropolitan Opera House, New York City, 1980-81; Tristan and Isolde, Los Angeles Music Center Opera, 1987; Turandot, Chicago Lyric Opera, 1992; Die Frau ohne Schatten, Covent Garden, 1992, and Los Angeles Music Center Opera 1993; San Francisco Opera, 1993.

WRITINGS

* David Hockney by David Hockney, edited by Nikos Stangos, Thames & Hudson, 1976, 2nd edition, with introduction by Henry Geldzahler, Abrams, 1977.
* Paper Pools, edited by Stangos, Abrams, 1980.
* David Hockney: Looking at Pictures in a Book, Petersburg Press, 1981.
* Cameraworks, including essay "True to Life," by Lawrence Weschler, Knopf, 1984.
* Martha's Vineyard: My Third Sketchbook from the Summer of 1982 (facsimile reproduction), Abrams, 1985.
* Hockney on Photography: Conversations with Paul Joyce, Harmony Books, 1988.
* Picasso, Hanuman Books, 1990.
* Hockney's Alphabet, written contributions edited by Stephen Spender, Faber & Faber, 1991, Random House, 1991.
* That's the Way I See It, Chronicle Books, 1993.
* David Hockney: Zeichnungen 1954-1994, a Drawing Retrospective, Verlag G. Hatje, 1995.
* David Hockney: Paintings and Photographs of Paintings, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 1996.
* (Co-contributor) Stamberg Aferiat, Rizzoli, 1997.
* David Hockney, L. A. Louver, 1998.
* David Hockney's Dog Days, Bulfinch Press, 1998.
* (Contributor) Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt, Abrams, 1999.
* (Contributor) A Degas Sketchbook, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000.
* Secret Knowledge: Reiscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, Thames & Hudson, 2001.

Also author of introduction for Draw: How to Master the Art, by Jeffery Camp, Dorling Kindersley, 1994, and Making It New: Collected Essays and Writings of Henry Geldzahler, by Henry Geldzahler, Turtle Point Press, 1994.

ILLUSTRATOR

* David Posner, A Rake's Progress: A Poem in Five Sections, Lion & Unicorn Press (London), 1962.
* Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, Petersburg Press (in association with the Kasmin Gallery; London), 1970.
* William Hogarth, A Rake's Progress, translated into German by Alfred Hrdlicka, Oesterreichisches Museum fuer Angewandte Kunst (Vienna), 1971.
* Wallace Stephens, The Man with the Blue Guitar, Petersburg Press, 1977.
* Tor Seidler, The Dulcimer Boy, Viking, 1979.
* Stephen Spender, China Diary, Abrams, 1982.
* Horst Bienek, Selected Poems: 1958-1988, Unicorn Press, 1989.

COLLECTIONS

* 72 Drawings Chosen by the Artist, Cape, 1971.
* 18 Portraits by David Hockney, photographs by Malcolm Lubliner and Sidney B. Felsen, Gemini G.E.L. (Los Angeles), 1977.
* David Hockney Prints, 1954-77, Petersburg Press, 1979.
* Pictures by David Hockney, selected and edited by Stangos, Thames & Hudson, 1979, 2nd edition, Abrams, 1979.
* David Hockney, 23 Lithographs, Tyler Graphics (New York), 1980.
* David Hockney Photographs, Petersburg Press, 1982.
* Hockney's Photographs, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1983.
* Kasmin's Hockneys: 45 Drawings, Knoedler Gallery (London), 1983.
* David Hockney fotografo, Alinari (Florence), 1983.
* David Hockney in America, introduction by Christopher Finch, W. Beadleston (New York), 1983.
* Hockney Posters, Harmony Books, 1983.
* Photographs by David Hockney, edited by B. J. Bradley, Art Services International, 1986.
* David Hockney: Etchings and Lithographs, text by Marco Livingstone, Thames & Hudson, 1988.
* David Hockney: Graphics, Distributed Art Publishers, 1992.
* Off the Wall, Pavilion Books (London), 1994, published in the United States as David Hockney: Poster Art, Chronicle Books, 1994.

EXHIBIT CATALOGS

* Paintings, Prints, and Drawings, 1960-1970 (Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibit, 1970), Boston Book and Art, 1970.
* David Hockney: tableau et dessins: Musee des arts decoratifs, Palais du Louvre, Pavillon de Marsan, 11 Octobre-9 Decembre 1974, Petersburg Press, 1974.
* David Hockney: dessins et gravures, Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris, Avril 1975, introduction by Marc Fumaroli, Galerie Claude Bernard, 1975.
* David Hockney: Prints and Drawings Circulated by the International Exhibits Foundation, Washington, DC, 1978-1980, International Exhibits Foundation, 1978.
* Travels with Pen, Pencil, and Ink (first major Hockney exhibition to tour North America), introduction by Edmund Pillsbury, Petersburg Press, 1978.
* David Hockney: Sources and Experiments: An Exhibition Held at the Sewall Gallery, Rice University, September 7 to October 15, 1982, text by Esther de Vecsey, Sewall Art Gallery, 1982.
* David Hockney: Frankfurter Kunstverein, Steinernes Haus am Romerberg, Frankfurt am Main, 15.3.-24.4. 1983, introduction by Peter Weiermair, Der Verein (Frankfurt), 1983.
* Hockney Paints the Stage, text by Martin Friedman with contributions by John Cox and others, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), 1983.
* Photographs by David Hockney: Organized and Circulated by the International Exhibitions Foundation, Washington, DC, 1986-88, introduction by Mark Haworth-Booth and essay by Hockney, International Exhibits Foundation, 1986.
* David Hockney: A Retrospective, Organized by Maurice Tuchman and Stephanie Barron, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1988.
* David Hockney: Fax Cuadros, Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporaneo (Mexico), 1990.

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