paul cézanne
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alfred sisley

David Hockney was born on July 9, 1937 in Bradford, England.

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He has lived in Los Angeles since 1979, and is the most important English artist living today. The central theme of his paintings and prints is space: from the intimate close-up views of his early nudes to the broad panorama views of his monumental pictures of the Grand Canyon, executed in late nineties.
 

In a similar way, Hockney also investigates the temporal dimension of painting in all its extremes: from the momentary nature of a splash of water left behind by a bather after diving into the pool, to the meditative tranquillity and duration of a precisely composed still-life.

In the sixties, David Hockney was among the leading members of the Pop Art movement. It was not until 2001, however, that one of his characteristic Swimming Pool paintings achieved the remarkable price of $ 550,000 (Stanley Seeger Collection) at Sotheby's in New York.

But what brought Hockney to today's place as one of the best know artists in the world?

David decided at the young age of eleven to become an artist. In his hometown of Bradford, he attended grammar school and later studied at the Bradford School of Art from 1953 to 1957, when he received the National Diploma of Design. The training was traditional and his courses included anatomy, perspective and nude drawing.

Hockney created his first oil paintings and colour lithographs in the late 50s and, in 1957, was confronted with abstract painting for the first time at an exhibition of the works of Alan Davie in Wakefield. In 1959, after working in hospitals in Bradford and Hastings, he was accepted into the Royal College of Art in London, where he studied together with Ron B. Kitaj, Allan Jones, Peter Phillips, Derek Boshier and Patrick Caulfield.

In 1960, Hockney began the series of Vegetarian Propaganda Paintings (now lost) and the Homosexual Propaganda Paintings. "My paintings at the Royal College were about fantasies, my own fantasies. They had absolutely nothing to do with what we actually saw", the artist stated later (1977). Since he didn't have enough money for canvases at the time, in 1961 Hockney began to experiment with etchings.

At around this time, David Hockney made his first trip to the United States - to New York. William Lieberman bought two of his etchings for the Museum of Modern Art and assisted the artist with other sales.

Hockney travelled to Los Angeles and rented a small studio in Santa Monica. Man Taking a Shower in Beverly Hills was his first painting in acrylic. "In 1965 or 1966, I began to paint California in California the way it actually appeared to me."

In 1968, he painted the first large-scale double-portraits: American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman) and Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. In November, Hockney had a solo exhibition at the André Emmerich Gallery in New York. The art critic Clement Greenberg judged: "This is no art for a serious gallery."

In the spring of 1973, Hockney moved to Paris, where he lived first in the Rue des Beaux-Arts and later in an apartment in the Quartier Latin, which once belonged to the painter Balthus. His main interest at the time was in drawing and etching.

It wasn't until 1974, after a ten year interruption, that he began painting again. Numerous exhibitions follow, including the retrospective at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, the retrospective of his prints at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk, and the participation in the Documenta VI in Kassel.

Hockney and his artist friend Kitaj discussed the dilemma that the contemporary art world neglected the figurative tradition and favoured abstraction and conceptual art. They wrote an essay, which was published in 1977 in The New Review.

He stayed for several weeks in New York to test new printing techniques. The result of this was the series of Paper Pools, for which he used dyed and pressed paper pulp. "The highly structured surfaces (of these works) would change his approach to painting" (M. Friedman, 1983).

With the group exhibition A New Spirit in Painting in 1981, the Royal Academy of Arts in London manifested the revival of figurative painting and also exhibited four new paintings by David Hockney. The first monograph, written by Marco Livingstone, was published.

In 1982, Hockney purchased a house in Hollywood Hills. He painted the outer walls red and blue and covered the bottom of the swimming pool with blue "French marks". Hockney pursued his studies of the human figure with the medium of the photo-collage.

In the offset lithographs Moving Focus Prints from 1983, he applied the knowledge gained from his work with photography to printmaking. "A few people have remarked that, since about 1980, the human figure has been missing in my work. The main reason for this is that I wanted to make the viewer the figure."

Hockney created subtle drawings and masterly prints, in which, in some cases, he combind varying printing techniques. He was also active in stage design and photography. In 1998, the Englishman was awarded the Prize of the German Society for Photography.

Present, infinite

Time and again, the artist has longed for the isolation of his small house in Malibu Beach. He paints the ocean. "The waves come right up to my window. Once again I am aware of an enormous space. The house is small, with very comfortable rooms, and outside is infinity."

Future, indefinate

Whether the future will consider Hockney's gentle revolution in art as fondly as the present remains to be seen. His work is loved by middle England because despite what the subject matter the colours are soft and safe. The beautiful blue of his work is an idyllic ideal to the greyness of an English winter. Perhaps this kind of gentle revolution is the only way forward in the UK, a country still steeped in tradition and the past. It doesn't like revolution in your face but whispered and wrapped in soft velvet - well that's another story.

As long as the colours are blue and we can bring our dogs then the future might follow Hockney down the path he may or may not want to take us.

Selected Solo Exhibitions:

1970 First retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London.

1988 Retrospective in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Tate Gallery in London.

1995 Retrospective of the drawings at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

1998 David Hockney. Retrospektive Photoworks. Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Ohter venues: Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, the Kunsthalle Krems in Lower Austria. Catalogue, Edition Braus.

1999 David Hockney. Espace / paysage. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

2001 David Hockney. Exciting Times Are Ahead. Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublic Deutschland, Bonn.

Current Literature:

David Hockney's book, Secret Knowledge, on the role of optical aids in the history of pictorial representation, was published in the autumn of 2001. Further editions in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and German are planned.

Gallery:

Cards:

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David Hockney Archives. ihuppert5@aol.com.