Hockney’s art of looking

To paraphrase Walt Whitman, one of his favourite poets, David Hockney contained multitudes. Across seven decades, he never stopped innovating or finding new ways to look at the world, his remarkable oeuvre encompassing painting, drawing, printmaking, photocollage, stage and costume design, stained glass, and work created using photocopiers, fax machines and iPads. With his round, thick-rimmed glasses and peroxide hair, he was an unmissable presence in the post-war art world, as instantly recognisable as Andy Warhol, and every bit as unconventional. Always going against the grain, he was an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was still illegal, a conscientious objector in the years after the Second World War, and an ardent pro-tobacco campaigner when smoking had been declared off limits by almost everyone. In 2001, he even managed to annoy art historians when his book Secret Knowledge dared to suggest that the Old Masters might have used camera obscuras to create their works.

His death on 11 June leaves an irreparable hole at the heart of the art world. Hockney was an artist who resonated with the public imagination like few others, especially in recent years, during which a string of exhibitions have brought his work – and especially his stunning late landscapes – to a new generation of viewers who have been enthralled by his bold reimaginings of the natural world. His 2017 retrospective at the Tate attracted almost half a million visitors, while a larger version at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art the following year outdid even that.

One of five children, Hockney was born into a working class family in Bradford, West Yorkshire, in 1937. His talent began to emerge at a young age, and he went on to study art at Bradford College and the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, quickly gaining a reputation not only for his impressive artistic abilities (winning the college’s gold medal in 1961) but also for his unconventional character. The latter almost cost him his diploma after he refused to complete an essay for his final examination, insisting that he should be judged on his artworks alone. It was a bold move for such a young man, but it paid off. Aware that they were nurturing a unique talent, the RCA backed down, bent their rules, and allowed him to graduate in 1962.

While at the RCA, he was briefly associated with the emergent British Pop art of the period, although early works like We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961) now seem a million miles away from the work of contemporaries such as Peter Blake or Richard Hamilton. Named after a poem by Whitman, the painting’s depiction of two men wrapped in a homoerotic embrace is more expressionistic than explicit, but it was still a radical, taboo-breaking statement at the time, and one of the earliest expressions of queer identity in British art.

After settling in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, Hockney’s work became more considered and restrained as he shifted towards an increasingly figurative, linear style. Using plastic-based acrylic paint, flattened perspective, and deeply saturated colours, he effortlessly evoked the sun-drenched artificiality of the southern Californian lifestyle while simultaneously infusing it with a profound stillness suggesting deeper, more complex emotions lingering under the surface.

Of course everyone in LA seemed to have a swimming pool, so he painted swimming pools. And this turned out to be an excellent career choice, with canvases like A Bigger Splash (1967) and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) now counting among his most famous works, the latter selling for $90.3 million in 2018, making it the most expensive artwork by a living artist to be sold at auction.

But there was a lot more to Hockney than swimming pools. He was one of the greatest portrait painters of the 20th century, creating unconventional, psychologically penetrating studies of friends and family, along with some 300 self-portraits – a feat of lifelong self-examination that rivals that of Rembrandt. In Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1971-2), for example, he captured the fashion designer Ossie Clark and textile designer Celia Birtwell in their Notting Hill flat shortly after their wedding, at which he had been best man despite the fact that Clark was also one of his ex-lovers. Deliberately disrupting the conventions of traditional wedding portraits, he allows the wife to stand while the husband remains seated, and litters the composition with symbolic hints of foreboding, not least of which is the open window that suggests an unsettling gulf between the newlyweds. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the marriage didn’t last.

From the 1970s onwards, his work became increasingly experimental. He branched out into theatre and opera, providing acclaimed stage and costume designs for London’s Royal Court, Glyndebourne and the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, among others. At the same time, he began to investigate new ways of depicting perspective while exploring the potential of emergent technologies as new means of picture-making. Photocollage became central to his practice in the 1980s, with seminal works such as Pearblossom Hwy (Second Version) (1986) blending hundreds of 6×4-inch photos into a dizzying cubist evocation of a road trip through California’s Antelope Valley, in which multiple viewpoints collapse into a single breathtaking whole.

Even the relentless rise of digital technologies in the 21st century proved a source of inspiration. Unlike some, he eagerly embraced the iPhone and iPad, excited by the freedom and immediacy they offered, especially when working en plein air. In his later years, he created scores of digital paintings, his fascination with new media culminating in an interactive audiovisual show at Lightroom, near London’s King’s Cross in 2022. Entitled Bigger and Closer (not smaller and further away), it employed large-scale projections across multiple surfaces to immerse viewers in his work in the most literal sense possible.

As the Lightroom show made clear, Hockney’s work was, at its heart, always about observation and the importance of looking at, and celebrating, our immediate environment. This was perhaps most evident following his move back to Yorkshire in the early 2000s, as he rediscovered the landscape of his youth, bringing it to life in a series of vibrantly coloured paintings, often executed on a monumental scale. A work like Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire (2011), for example, consists of 32 separate panels, plunging us into the midst of a vast forest rendered in a bold, almost fauvist palette echoing the work of Van Gogh, one of the painters he most admired.

These paintings resonated especially strongly when exhibited in the midst of the pandemic, when people were desperate for any glimpse of the natural world, and continue to do so now in our increasingly turbulent times, cementing his reputation as one of Britain’s best-loved artists. While he might have contained multitudes, in the end Hockney’s message seems quite simple. ‘I’ve always found the world quite beautiful, looking at it. Just looking,’ he once said. And the world will always seem particularly beautiful when we look at it through his extraordinary eyes.