The British have a term for people like David Hockney: national treasure. It is an unofficial title reserved for people who achieve so much success that their names become synonymous with the nation’s identity. When Hockney died last week, both the Prime Minister and the King issued statements praising his achievements and contributions to art. Hockney’s most famous paintings depict swimming pools in California. Later works show the changing light of Normandy over the course of a year. Yet he was born in Yorkshire, died in London, and never lost his pronounced northern accent. There was something else he never lost in his 88 years on Earth: his love of looking and using any tool that was suitable to capture what he saw.
Hockney was born in Bradford, an industrial city in northern England, to a working-class family. His father upholstered prams, and when Hockney began painting street scenes in his native Bradford, he carried his paints and equipment in one of his father’s prams. The scene must have been funny, but Hockney was not one to be embarrassed or conceited when it came to anything, least of all the tools of his trade. He embraced technology wherever it opened up new creative possibilities, and his curiosity kept pace with every new development. His works include drawing, copywriting, Polaroid drawings, and iPad drawings. His methods of reproducing the world were not merely a means to an end, but an inspiration in themselves.
When he was a student at the Royal College of Art, he was a rebel. He had barely graduated when he refused to fulfill the essay requirements for his degree, arguing that the work should be allowed to speak for itself. Hockney never wanted anyone to speak for him, nor did he want to censor himself in any way. He came out as gay while still a student, at a time when being gay was illegal in Britain. Its distinctive look — the blue of California water, most obviously — has long been part of queer visual culture. His art was not activist. There is no anger or attitude as such other than enjoying the beauty and living the way you want. Some of his early works were provocative, a cheeky wink to viewers able to read strange desire between the lines. in Teeth brushing, early evening (10pm) W11 (1962), two men brush their teeth with Colgate toothpaste, but the pose of bodies and Colgate phallic tubes is unambiguously sexual. The famous work from the previous year is less provocative but no less exciting. We are two boys clinging together At first it looks rough, but the longer one looks, the more delicate the work becomes. The title of the 1961 painting is taken from a Walt Whitman painting Grass leavesan example of queer work inspiring later queer works, Holding Hands Through Time.
Another important event happened in 1961: Hockney visited America for the first time. Over the next few years, he created works that came to symbolize the ease, leisure, modernity, and solitude of California life. Bigger splash From 1967 it entered the visual canon and is as good a representation of the duality of the Golden State – light and water, wealth and decadence, beauty and loneliness – as any work of art in any medium. Its color palette is a far cry from the gray skies of Bradford. Other paintings depicting swimming pools, solitude and Hockney’s lovers are among his most famous works. Peter emerges from Nick’s pool He similarly plays with light and water but is more explicitly dramatic. The Peter in question is Peter Schlesinger, Hockney’s lover and muse, and we see him strictly through Hockney’s eyes. Portrait of an artist (combined with two figures) It is a literal painting about looking. This story takes place in Saint-Tropez, France, and again depicts Peter, this time swimming in a pool. (It sold for $90.3 million in 2018, the highest amount ever paid for a work by a living artist at the time.) Like Joan Didion, Hockney helped shape the way we perceive California, but also desire and luxury in the second half of the twentieth century: the very word Hockney conjures the calm, unreal blue of swimming pool water.
What other colors does the name Hockney evoke? Green iPad in the British countryside. Saltaire’s Salt Mill Oranges, a copy of which still hangs in my parents’ house. The pink color of roses that matches his mother’s skin my fathera painting that shows, like no other, Hockney’s ability to capture his feelings about someone through painting. In later life, Hockney focused more on landscapes, especially those of England and France. In 2008, he donated his largest work, Larger trees near Warterto the Tate in London. He had painted the work the previous year in the East Riding of Yorkshire, and the bright green of the fields in the background is clearly Hockney’s.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Hockney moved to France. “I’ll show the French how to paint Normandy,” he joked, and no one resisted any provocation. And the result was A year in Normandya 90-metre-long digital frieze created on his iPad. It depicts the seasons over the course of a year, and Hockney clearly relished the opportunity to use a range of colors to capture the changing nature. When I saw the work a few months ago at the Serpentine Gallery in London, I expected it to be a gimmick. I ended up walking around the place five times. I felt like I wasn’t seeing Normandy or even times changing, but rather a man’s enthusiasm for capturing the world around him.
Hockney was never interested simply in what he saw, but in how vision worked. He spent most of his career wondering whether traditional perspective or photography truly reflects how humans perceive the world. His photographic “joiners,” who stitched multiple images together to create one larger image, disrupted our understanding of what a photograph is and how photography presents reality. The same fascination contributed to the controversial Hockney-Falco thesis, in which he argued (with American physicist Charles Falco) that Renaissance masters relied on optical devices, specifically the camera obscura, to achieve their realism. For Hockney, technology was never the enemy of art; It was another tool for understanding how we perceive the world.
David Hockney loved many things. He loved color. He liked to smoke. He loved fashion. He loved to work. He had a rule: “Draw things you like.” He clearly followed his own advice. In a 2020 letter to Ruth MacKenzie that has been widely circulated since his death, he wrote simply: “I love life.” This is perhaps the most appropriate elegy imaginable for an artist who painted what he loved.
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