David Hockney | Signed Editions

About David Hockney

David Hockney was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, on 9 July 1937, the fourth of five children in what he described as a radical working-class family. He studied at Bradford College of Art before winning a place at the Royal College of Art in London, where he arrived at exactly the right moment. His generation at the RCA, in the early 1960s, was among the most remarkable cohort British art education has produced, and Hockney stood out even within it. He was awarded the gold medal on graduation in 1962.

By his early twenties he had already achieved something remarkable: depicting gay love and desire in paint, openly, at a time when homosexuality was still a criminal offence in Britain. He was, as novelist Edmund White later put it, doing it before anyone else, and somehow getting away with it. Those early canvases, raw and knowing, established the emotional directness that would run through all the work that followed.

In 1964 he moved to Los Angeles, and California changed him. The light, the colour, the heat-shimmer off water, all of it fed directly into a body of work that would define a particular moment in art history. A Bigger Splash (1967) is perhaps the most reproduced of these paintings: a frozen instant, a diving board, a column of disturbed water, and an implied human presence that remains absent. Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) went further still, selling at auction in 2018 for over $90 million, at the time a record for a work by a living artist.

Hockney was never content to stay still. The swimming pools gave way to monumental landscape painting, to the wooded hills of his native Yorkshire and, later, the fields and orchards of Normandy. He explored photography through his famous Joiner collages, constructing multi-perspectival images from hundreds of overlapping Polaroids or prints, taking aim at what he considered the single-point tyranny of the lens. His book Secret Knowledge (2001) caused considerable controversy by arguing that Renaissance masters had made covert use of optical devices, a thesis that divided art historians sharply.

In his later years he turned to the iPad with the same curiosity he had brought to every previous medium, producing vivid, luminous drawings on the device that toured major galleries worldwide. He was, into his eighties, still experimenting, still provoking, still watching the quality of light.

The honours came, though not always on terms he accepted. He was appointed to the Order of Merit in 2012, one of the most distinguished recognitions the British state can offer, having previously declined a knighthood in 1990. He had been, in the view of many critics and curators, the defining British artist of his era: Norman Rosenthal, former exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy, called him the Picasso of our times.