The British have a term for people like David Hockney: national treasure. It is an informal title reserved for people who achieve such considerable success that their name becomes synonymous with the nation’s identity. When Hockney died last week, both the Prime Minister and the King issued statements praising his achievements and contribution to the arts. Hockney’s most famous paintings depict the swimming pools of 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 flat northern accent. There was something else he never lost in his 88 years on earth: his love of seeing and using whatever means he felt fit to capture what he saw.
Hockney was born in Bradford, an industrial city in the north of England, into a working-class family. His father carried tapestry carts and when Hockney began painting street scenes of his native Bradford, he loaded his paints and equipment into one of his father’s carts. It must have been a funny sight, but Hockney was not one to be shy or snobbish about anything, not least the tools of his trade. He embraced technology wherever it opened up new creative possibilities, his curiosity keeping pace with each new development. His works include painting, photocopying, Polaroid and iPad drawings. His methods of reproducing the world were not merely a means to an end, but an inspiration in themselves.
As a student at the Royal College of Art, he was a rebel; he almost didn’t graduate when he refused to complete his degree’s essay writing requirement, arguing that the work should be left to speak for itself. Hockney never wanted anyone to talk about him, nor did he want to censor himself in any way. He came out as gay while still a student, at a time when it was illegal to be gay in Britain. His signature look—the Californian water polo shirt, to be clear—has long been a part of queer visual culture. It was not activist art; no anger or attitude, per se, except a delight in beauty and living as you wish. Some of his early work was provocative—a cheeky wink at viewers able to read the queer desire between the lines. IN Teeth cleaning, Early evening (10pm) W11 (1962), two men brush their teeth with Colgate toothpaste, but the positioning of Colgate’s bodies and phallic tubes is clearly sexual. A famous work from a year ago is less provocative, but no less attractive. Two boys stuck together at first it looks rough, but the longer it looks, the smoother the work becomes. The title of the 1961 painting is borrowed from Walt Whitman’s Grass leavesan example of queer work inspiring later queer work, holding hands through time.
Another important event happened in 1961: Hockney visited America for the first time. Over the next few years, he would create works that symbolized the ease, leisure, modernity and solitude of Californian life. A bigger splash since 1967 it has entered the visual canon and is as good a representation of the duality of the Golden State – light and water, opulence and decadence, beauty and solitude – as any work of art in any medium. Its color palette is about as far from the gray skies of Bradford as you can get. Other paintings featuring Hockney’s swimming pools, solitude and lovers are among his most famous works. Peter Coming out of Nick’s Pool similarly plays with light and water, but is more clearly erotic. Peter in question is Peter SchlesingerHockney’s lover and muse, and we see it subtly through Hockney’s eyes. Portrait of an artist (pool with two figures) it is literally a painting to behold. This is located in St. Tropez, France, and depicts Peter again, this time swimming in the pool. (It sold for $90.3 million in 2018, the highest amount paid for a work by a living artist at the time.) How Joan DidionHockney helped shape the way we imagine California, but also desire and luxury in the second half of the 20th century: the very word Hockney brings to mind the calm, eerily unreal blue of swimming pool water.
What other colors does the name Hockney evoke? iPad greens of the British countryside. Salts Mill Orangery in Saltaire, a reproduction of which still hangs in my parents’ house. The pink of roses to match his mother’s skin My parentsa painting that shows, as much as any other, Hockney’s ability to capture his feelings for someone by painting them. Later in life, Hockney focused more on landscapes, especially those of England and France. In 2008, he donated his largest work, Larger trees near Warterat the Tate in London. He had painted the work the year before in the East Riding of Yorkshire, and the almost iridescent greens of the fields in the background are unmistakably Hockney.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Hockney moved to France. “I’ll show the French how to paint Normandy,” he joked, never one to resist a provocation. The result was A year in Normandya 90m 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 London’s Serpentine Gallery, I went in half expecting a trick. I ended up walking around the space five times. I felt like I wasn’t seeing Normandy or even the changing times, but one man’s enthusiasm to capture the world around him.
Hockney was never only interested in what he saw, but how seeing worked. He spent much of his career questioning whether conventional perspective or photography really reflected the way people perceive the world. His photographic “composites”, stitching together multiple photographs to create a single larger image, disrupted our understanding of what a photographic image was and how photography represents reality. The same fascination informed the controversial Hockney-Falco thesis, in which he argued (with the American physicist Charles Falco) that Renaissance masters relied on optical devices, namely the camera obscura, to achieve their realism. For Hockney, technology was never the enemy of art; it was another means of understanding how we perceive the world.
David Hockney liked many things. He loved the color. He loved smoking. He loved fashion. He loved the job. He had a rule: “Paint the things you love.” Apparently, he 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.” It may be the most fitting epitaph imaginable for an artist who has painted what he loves.
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