David Hockney

David Hockney was born on July 9, 1937, in Bradford, a wool town in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the fourth of five children of Kenneth and Laura Hockney ^[1]. His father, an accountant's clerk with a stubborn independent streak, was a conscientious objector during the Second World War; his mother was a devout Methodist and vegetarian. The household had little money but a strong sense of principle, and Hockney later credited his father's indifference to other people's opinions as a lasting influence on his own willingness to go his own way ^[2].

He won a scholarship to Bradford Grammar School, where he decided early that art was the only subject worth his full attention. At sixteen he persuaded his parents to let him transfer to the Bradford School of Art, where he trained in a traditional curriculum of drawing and painting from life between 1953 and 1957 ^[1]. Registered as a conscientious objector like his father, he satisfied his national service obligation by working as a hospital orderly for two years before moving to London in 1959 to begin postgraduate study at the Royal College of Art ^[2].

The Royal College of Art in the years around 1960 was an unusually fertile place, and Hockney studied alongside R. B. Kitaj, Allen Jones, and Derek Boshier, a cohort later associated with British Pop art ^[3]. Hockney himself resisted the Pop label. His student paintings mixed graffiti-like lettering, references to Walt Whitman's poetry, and coded declarations of his own homosexuality at a time when sexual activity between men was still a criminal offence in Britain. Works such as We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961) were quietly bold statements for their moment ^[3].

Recognition came fast. He was included in the influential Young Contemporaries exhibition of 1961, won a gold medal at the Royal College in 1962 (which he collected wearing a gold lamé jacket, his hair newly bleached), and had his first solo show at John Kasmin's London gallery in 1963, which sold out ^[2]. That same year he produced A Rake's Progress, a suite of sixteen etchings reworking Hogarth's moral tale through his own first visit to New York ^[4].

In 1964 Hockney moved to Los Angeles, a city he had imagined from physique magazines and movies before ever seeing it. California gave him his great subjects: sunlight, lawns, sprinklers, modernist houses, and above all swimming pools, whose shifting surfaces posed the painterly problem of how to depict transparent, moving water ^[1]. He switched from oil to acrylic paint, which suited the flat, saturated color of his new surroundings.

The pool paintings of the mid to late 1960s, including A Bigger Splash (1967), now in the Tate collection, became some of the most reproduced images in postwar art ^[3]. Hockney followed them with a series of large double portraits of friends and patrons, among them American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman), Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, and Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-71), a portrait of the fashion designer Ossie Clark and the textile designer Celia Birtwell that British gallery visitors have repeatedly voted among their favorite paintings ^[3].

Any account of David Hockney achievements has to reckon with his refusal to stay inside one medium. In the 1970s he began designing for opera, creating celebrated sets and costumes for The Rake's Progress and The Magic Flute at Glyndebourne and later for productions at the Metropolitan Opera in New York ^[1]. In the early 1980s he made hundreds of photocollages he called "joiners," assembling dozens of Polaroids or prints of a single subject into fractured composite images, an approach he connected to Cubism's multiple viewpoints ^[4]. He drew on a Quantel Paintbox for television, sent pictures by fax machine, and from 2009 made thousands of drawings on the iPhone and iPad, insisting that new tools were simply new kinds of pencil ^[5].

His market standing eventually matched his fame. In November 2018 Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), painted in 1972, sold at Christie's in New York for 90.3 million dollars, setting a record at the time for any living artist at auction ^[6]. Major retrospectives marked his later decades, including A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy in 2012 and a career survey that opened at Tate Britain in 2017, his eightieth year, before traveling to Paris and New York and drawing some of the largest attendances in those museums' histories ^[3].

Hockney was as interested in how pictures work as in making them. In 2001 he published Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, arguing that many European painters from the early fifteenth century onward secretly used optical aids such as concave mirrors and the camera lucida to achieve their startling naturalism ^[7]. Developed with the physicist Charles Falco, the claim became known as the Hockney-Falco thesis. Art historians disputed much of it, but the book provoked a genuine debate about optics and Western art and reflected Hockney's lifelong obsession with the limits of single-point perspective ^[7].

That obsession also shaped his own late work. He built multi-camera video pieces showing the same country lane in different seasons across a grid of screens, and painted vast multi-canvas landscapes designed to surround the viewer rather than sit inside a window-like frame. His conversations with the critic Martin Gayford, published in several books, set out his view that photography had trapped picture-making in a single frozen viewpoint and that painting could still show more of what seeing actually feels like ^[5].

Hockney was open about being gay from the start of his career, decades before it was safe or fashionable, and his relationships fed directly into his art. His long involvement with the American artist Peter Schlesinger, whom he met in California in 1966, ended around the time he painted Portrait of an Artist, and the strain of that breakup is part of the subject of Jack Hazan's semi-documentary film A Bigger Splash (1974) ^[2]. Celia Birtwell remained a close friend and favorite model for more than half a century.

He was a lifelong heavy smoker and an unapologetic campaigner against smoking bans, a stance he defended in letters to newspapers with characteristic cheek ^[8]. Deafness ran in his family, and from the late 1970s his own progressive hearing loss pushed him, he believed, toward a sharper perception of space and color. He turned down a knighthood in 1990 but accepted appointment to the Order of Merit in 2012, and in 1997 he was made a Companion of Honour ^[1].

Hockney divided his life among Los Angeles, London, and Yorkshire, with a later period in Normandy, where he moved in 2019 and recorded the arrival of spring 2020 in a stream of iPad drawings made during the pandemic lockdowns ^[5].

Returning often to East Yorkshire in the 2000s, partly to be near his mother and his friend Jonathan Silver in their final illnesses, Hockney rediscovered the Wolds landscape of his youth. He painted it en plein air on a scale rarely attempted outdoors, culminating in Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007), a work spanning fifty canvases that he gave to the Tate ^[3]. The Royal Academy's 2012 exhibition of these Yorkshire pictures drew enormous crowds and confirmed that, in his seventies, he was producing some of the most popular work of his life ^[3].

His final decade was among his busiest. From his Normandy farmhouse he produced the 220 for 2020 iPad series and a frieze-like work inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry's continuous narrative. In 2023 the immersive show Bigger and Closer (not smaller and further away) filled a purpose-built venue in London with projected animations of his work, and in spring 2025 the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris mounted David Hockney 25, billed as the largest exhibition ever devoted to him, with more than 400 works ^[9]. He attended in a wheelchair, still smoking, still drawing. Hockney died in London on June 11, 2026, at the age of 88 ^[9].

Who was David Hockney, finally? On the evidence of nearly seventy working years, he was the rare artist who was both genuinely popular and genuinely serious. Casual viewers know the blue pools and the bright Yorkshire hillsides; historians of art credit him with keeping figurative painting alive and argumentative through decades when it was widely declared finished ^[3]. His openness about his sexuality in the early 1960s made him a quiet forerunner of gay visibility in British public life, well before decriminalization in 1967 ^[2].

Any David Hockney biography also has to note his influence on how artists think about technology. He treated the Polaroid camera, the fax, the laser printer, and the tablet not as gimmicks but as instruments for drawing, and his iPad landscapes gave institutional legitimacy to digital mark-making ^[5]. Basic David Hockney facts, the Bradford birth in 1937, the Royal College gold medal, the move to Los Angeles, the 90.3 million dollar auction record, sketch the outline of the career, but his deeper legacy is an attitude: that looking hard at the world is a lifelong pleasure, and that there is always another way to make a picture ^[1].