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| David Hockney, British (1937-) |
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David Hockney has always denied being a Pop artist but is included under this heading because this is how the public perceives him. The most highly publicized British artist since the Second World War, Hockney was born in Bradford in 1937, the fourth of five children. By the time he won a scholarship to Bradford Grammar School at the age of eleven he had already decided that he wanted to be an artist. He drew for the school magazine and produced posters for the school debating society as a substitute for homework. At sixteen Hockney persuaded his parents to let him go to the local art school, and this was followed by two years of working in hospitals as an alternative to National Service, as he had registered as a conscientious objector.
Hockney went to the Royal College of Art in London to continue his studies, arriving there in 1959: “Immediately after I started at the Royal College I realized that there were two groups of students there: a traditional group, who carried on as they had done in art school, doing still life, life painting and figure compositions; and then what I thought of as the more adventurous, lively students, the brightest ones, who were involved in the art of their time. They were doing big Abstract Expressionist paintings on hardboard.”
Hockney duly tried his hand at abstraction, but found it too sterile. He was at this moment in a phase of rapid self-discovery on both artistic and personal levels, coming to terms with his own sexuality, and at the same time searching for a style. Since figure-painting seemed 'anti-modern' Hockney began by including words in his paintings as a way of humanizing them, but these were soon joined by figures painted in a deliberately rough and rudimentary style which owed a great deal to Jean Dubuffet. Hockney's ebullient personality soon made him well known, even outside the Royal College, and he made his first major impact as a painter with the January 1961 Young Contemporaries Exhibition. This show marked the public emergence of a new Pop movement in Britain, with Hockney considered one of its leaders.
In the same year Hockney made a series of discoveries. He visited New York, where he met Andy Warhol and Dennis Hopper among others, and was struck by the freedom of American society. It was at this stage that he bleached his hair and began to present a new image, fuelled not only by the United States but also by his discovery of the poetry of Walt Whitman. Hockney had begun to make etchings, and on his return to England began a series of prints which reflected his American experiences. He also visited Italy for the first time in December 1961 and Berlin in 1962.
Hockney's success was so rapid that he became independent very soon after leaving the Royal College and did not, like the vast majority of his contemporaries, have to rely on teaching in order to make a living. In 1963 he travelled to Egypt at the invitation of the London Sunday Times, then at the end of the year went to Los Angeles, a city he had always fantasized about: “Within a week of arriving there in this strange big city, not knowing a soul, I'd passed the driving test, bought a car, driven to Las Vegas and won some money, got myself a studio, started painting, all within a week. And I thought, it's just how I imagined it would be.”
The Los Angeles landscape & lifestyle became important features of Hockney's work. There were other important changes in his work as well as he started using acrylics rather than oil paint and he made increasing use of photography for purposes of documentation. His life was professionally successful--he had no fewer than five one-man exhibitions in Europe in 1966--and personally happy. In 1970 Hockney had his first major retrospective exhibition, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.
In 1973 Hockney went to live in Paris. While there he took the opportunity to work with Aldo and Piero Crommelynck, who had been Picasso's master printers, and produced a series of etchings in memory of Picasso who had died earlier that year. Picasso had been one of Hockney's heroes since he saw the Picasso exhibition at the Tate Gallery in the summer of 1960. In 1974 there was a large exhibition of Hockney's work at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. His easel paintings made during the 1980s show the influence of Matisse and Picasso.
Hockney was also experimenting both with large composite photographs and with works made of paper pulp impregnated with color--the Paper Pools. From 1982 Hockney explored the use of the camera, making composite images of Polaroid photographs arranged in a rectangular grid. Later he used regular 35-millimetre prints to create photo-collages, compiling a 'complete' picture from a series of individually photographed details.
After working with California master printer Ken Tyler in the 1980s making etchings and lithographs, Hockney explored ways of creating work with color photocopiers in 1986. “The works I did with the copying machine ...were not reproductions,” he said later, “they were very complex prints.” Subject to the same curiosity about new technical methods, he began to experiment with the fax machine, and in 1989 even sent work for the Sao Paulo Biennale to Brazil via fax. Experiments using computers followed, composing images and colors on the screen and having them printed directly from the computer disk without preliminary proofing. Major retrospectives of Hockney's work have been held in New York, Los Angeles and Europe. Technical experimentation has continued to inform and develop his work.
In 2008, Hockney called on Britian’s most celebrated artists to donate atleast one piece of their work to the Tate Modern saying that it was the duty of artists to give something back to an institution whose support had ensured that they not struggle in their early years. David Hockney primarily works in his studio in the Hollywood Hills near Los Angeles in California, where he has lived permanently since 1978.
QUOTE:
“The mind is the limit. As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it, as long as you really believe 100 percent.”
Select Museum Collections:
Art Institute of Chicago, IL
Tate Gallery, London
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
National Gallery of Australia
Royal Academy of Arts, London
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
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