david hockney artist research page

David Hockney

British-American Painter

Summary of David Hockney

David Hockney's bright swimming pools, split-level homes and suburban Californian landscapes are a strange brew of calm and hyperactivity. Shadows appear to have been banished from his acrylic canvases of the 1960s, slick as magazine pages. Flat planes exist side-by-side in a patchwork, muddling our sense of distance. Hockney's unmistakable style incorporates a broad range of sources from Baroque to Cubism and, most recently, computer graphics. An iconoclast obsessed with the Old Masters , this British Pop artist breaks every rule deliberately, delighting in the deconstruction of proportion, linear perspective, and color theory. He shows that orthodoxies are meant to be shattered, and that opposites can coexist, a message of tolerance that transcends art and has profound implications in the political and social realm.

Accomplishments

• Like other Pop artists, Hockney revived figurative painting in a style that referenced the visual language of advertising. What separates him from others in the Pop movement is his obsession with Cubism. In the spirit of the Cubists, Hockney combines several scenes to create a composite view, choosing tricky spaces, like split-level homes in California and the Grand Canyon, where depth perception is already a challenge.
• Hockney insists on personal subject matter - another thing that separates him from most other Pop artists. He depicts the domestic sphere - scenes from his own life and that of friends. This aligns him with Alice Neel , Alex Katz , and others who depicted their immediate surroundings in a manner that transcends a particular category or movement.
• Hockney was openly gay, and has remained a staunch advocate for gay rights. In the context of a macho art scene that dismissed "pretty color" as effeminate, Hockney's bright greens, purples, pinks, and yellows are declarative statements in support of sexual freedom.
• In actively seeking to imitate photographic effects in his work, Hockney is a forerunner of the Photorealists . He is also a heretic among purists who feel that painting should rely only on the artist's direct observations from nature. Though not universally accepted, Hockney's research into the history of art has shown that Old Masters, from Vermeer to Canaletto, frequently used the camera obscura (an early form of camera) to enhance their optical effects. If the revered Old Masters could use cameras, he implies, why can't we?

The Life of David Hockney

Britain's beloved David Hockney has a career of breaking taboos and leading the avant-garde - to the point of being recognized as the most important artist to revitalized painting. And in his eighties, Hockney continues to be active and to make headlines.

Important Art by David Hockney

We Two Boys Together Clinging

This early work by Hockney shows no sign of the slick landscapes or carefully observed characters that he would later develop. It is one of the first, however, to address homoeroticism, an important theme in his work. In a composition that resembles a child's drawing, two figures kiss and embrace. Stylized, blocky forms and scrawled words offer symbols as opposed to descriptions of the encounter. Small horizontal lines of pigment run from one figure to the other, representing the erotic charge between them. A sketchy swathe of blue hints at a sense of place. Hockney's semi-abstracted figures and muted color palette recall those of Jean Dubuffet, a stylistic preference indicative of the challenge of finding a way to represent forbidden feelings. At a time when homosexual activity was still illegal in both the U.S. and in Britain, the representation of an erotic act between two men was unusual and potentially risky. The title is a direct quote from Walt Whitman, master of homoerotic poetry, and the image was inspired by a report of a climbing accident in a newspaper that read "Two Boys Cling to Cliff All Night." This unintended double meaning delighted Hockney, who had a crush on the British pop singer, Cliff Richard. These sources in popular culture and classic poetry offered the artist a way to address same-sex relationships in a way that didn't resort to caricature.

Oil on board - Southbank Centre, London

A Bigger Splash

Hockney painted this seminal work while at the University of California in Berkeley. A Bigger Splash was created as the final result of two smaller paintings in which he developed his ideas, A Little Splash (1966) and The Splash (1966). A Bigger Splash is a considerably larger work, measuring approximately 94 x 94 inches. Hockney was one of the first artists to make extensive use of acrylic paint, which was then a relatively new artistic medium. He felt that as a fast-drying substance it was more suited to depicting the hot, dry landscapes of California than traditional oil paints. He painted this work by stapling the canvas to his studio wall. In A Bigger Splash , Hockney explores how to represent the constantly moving surface of the water. The splash was based on a photograph of a swimming pool Hockney had seen in a pool manual. He was intrigued by the idea that a photograph could capture the event of a split second, and sought to recreate this in painting. The buildings are taken from a previous drawing Hockney had done of a Californian home. The dynamism of the splash contrasts strongly with the static and rigid geometry of the house, the pool edge, the palm trees, and the striking yellow diving board, which are all carefully arranged in a grid containing the splash. This gives the painting a disjointed effect that is absolutely intentional, and in fact one of the hallmarks of Hockney's style. The effect is one of stylization and artificiality, drawing on the aesthetic vocabulary of Pop art and fusing it with Cubism. He said in his autobiography, "I love the idea first of all of painting like Leonardo, all his studies of water, swirling things. And I loved the idea of painting this thing that lasts for two seconds: it takes me two weeks to paint this event that lasts for two seconds."

Acrylic on canvas - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom

American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman)

While Hockney paints a broad range of subjects, some of his most masterful compositions are his portraits of the late 1960s. These offer unrivaled, almost cinematic, insights into the mood and culture of this transitional decade in American history. Here are Fred and Marcia Weisman, art collectors and friends of Hockney, who appear outside their residence as if stepping outside to greet a neighbor. Hockney's blinding, saturated palette mimics the light of Southern California. The Weismans are surrounded by their prized art possessions, among them an imposing modernist sculpture in a niche, and a totem pole that looks like it could be a third member of the family. Dry humor pervades all elements of the composition. The viewer half expects to see the vertical elements - the stiff couple and their belongings - blast off like space ships into the blue sky. The threat of the surreal lurking in this picture underscores the consistent relationship between Pop art and older movements. Also noteworthy is the manner in which the poses transgress traditional gender norms. Marcia, a full-figured matron in a robe held closed with one arm, bares her teeth, and strikes a sensual pose that is both gracious and confrontational. Fred, the man of the house, stands stiffly with his fists clenched, and is literally marginalized as he is pushed to the left-hand side.

Acrylic on Canvas - The Art Institute of Chicago

A Visit with Christopher and Don, Santa Monica Canyon

For this view of the "Santa Monica Canyon", Hockney draws on the language of Cubism, a strong influence on his artistic style throughout his life due to his deep admiration for the work of Picasso. For this work, he extends the Cubist visual vocabulary through his use of a rich color palette borrowed from the Pop art movement. The composition measures 6 x 20 feet, a scale normally reserved for grand subjects from history or the bible. It consists of two canvases side-by-side. And yet it is a subject normally reserved for smaller canvases, a household interior, in which Hockney combines representations of the California home with seaside views and portraits of himself at work to the left and right. There are no conventional architectural or painterly boundaries between the different elements of the composition. Hockney uses flat areas of color and texture to create distinct spaces. This work makes use of a multi-point "reverse" perspective, meaning that it contains several vanishing points that extend out towards the viewer rather than converging on a distant horizon. In the spirit of Cubism, Hockney offers more than one viewpoint, and extends the perspective outwards, drawing the viewer into the scene that is so big, one feels one might step right into it.

Oil on two canvases

A Bigger Grand Canyon

Hockney began photographing the Grand Canyon in 1982, aiming "to photograph the unphotographable. Which is to say, space. [T]here is no question that the thrill of standing on that rim of the Grand Canyon is spatial. It is the biggest space you can look out over that has an edge." Not many artists attempt to paint The Grand Canyon . One reason is that it is so large, no indicator of depth, distance, or scale can convey it. The other is that the 19 th -century painter Thomas Moran produced what is considered by many to be the definitive version: a spectacular, monumental canvas so detailed, so complete, and so naturalistic that it set an unsurpassable standard. Unfazed by this precedent and directly inspired by Moran's famous view, ("intrigued to see how another artist grappled with representing the same vast, heroic space" according to the National Museum of American Art) Hockney produced A Bigger Grand Canyon - which is even larger than Moran's canvas. Sixty small canvases join together to create one large view representing just a portion of the canyon. Hockney is poking gentle fun at tourists with cameras, artists with easels, and the absurdity of attempting to map a three-dimensional experience onto a two-dimensional plane.

Oil on canvas

Winter Timber

While many of Hockney's best-known works were inspired by photographs, this work was painted in front of the motif, at the corner of an old Roman road in Yorkshire, near his birthplace. The purple palette renders the landscape contemporary and eternal, like a computer-generated fairytale. It is one of the largest in a series of timber and "totems", as Hockney calls the lone tree stumps depicted in these representations. Throughout his career, Hockney has been interested in returning to tradition in order to examine it, but with an almost scientific detachment that places the viewer off-center. This view, presented across fifteen canvases, has two paths of perspective leading down the two roads through the woods. This means that the visual plane contains two vanishing points, rebuking the one-point perspective that has characterized Western art since the Renaissance. It also transgresses the single perspective of the camera lens, the point of view that has come to define how we see the world in photographs. The painting's two vanishing points lead outward toward us, creating a kind of double vision that heightens the kaleidoscopic, hallucinatory effect of the piece.

Oil on 15 canvases - Guggenheim, Bilbao

A Bigger Message

Created relatively late in Hockney's career, A Bigger Message is a culmination of a series of works by Hockney inspired by The Sermon on the Mount , Claude Lorrain's 1656 painting. Lorrain was one of Hockney's heroes - a French Baroque landscape painter (in English, simply "Claude"), known for revolutionizing the genre and basing his work on observation, Claude has had a strong effect on Hockney's landscapes. In order to create the painting, Hockney spent three weeks digitally cleaning the painting by Claude on his computer. Through this process, Hockney got to know the composition better, and created a thoroughly contemporary way of painting; rather than working from life, or even from the original work, his inspiration came from a mediated, doctored version of the Old Master's work. Hockney is fully aware that many art enthusiasts would frown on this process, and fully intends to tweak the nose of tradition. He is also, however, following in the footsteps of another renegade, Picasso, who painted Cubist versions of Velazquez's Las Meninas based in part on reproductions from newspapers and magazines. Distance from the original allows the artist to create his own spin on the scene. Hockney takes his palette not from Claude but from Pop art, and from his own earlier depictions of the Californian and Yorkshire landscapes. He draws more attention to the human figures in the foreground of the image, and represents the mountain as an oversized red rock, imbuing the scene with a distinct sense of drama absent from the original.

Oil on 30 canvases

Biography of David Hockney

One of five children, David Hockney was born into a working-class family in Yorkshire, northern England, in the industrial city of Bradford. His father, a conscientious objector during the Second World War, "had a kind heart" remembers Hockney. "He thought there should be justice in the world". He also romanticized the ideals of the Communist party in Russia. While adopting his father's anti-war stance, Hockney remained resistant to ideologies and hierarchies. As a schoolboy, Hockney says of himself, "I was always quite serious, but cheeky." Art was something he knew he wanted to do very early in life. At his school academically promising boys were forced to drop art as a subject and so he deliberately failed his exams. Interestingly, Hockney was born with synesthesia, meaning that he sees colors as a response to musical stimuli

Early Training

At 16, Hockney was admitted to the acclaimed Bradford School of Art, where he studied traditional painting and life drawing alongside Norman Stevens, David Oxtoby, and John Loker. Unlike most of his peers Hockney was from a more humble family, and he worked tirelessly, especially in his life drawing classes, recalling: "I was there from nine in the morning till nine at night."

In 1957 he was called up for National Service, but as a conscientious objector he served out his time as a hospital orderly. It was around this time that Hockney encountered the work of Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev , whose openness about his sexual identity gave Hockney the courage to reveal his own.

In 1959, Hockney went on to study at the Royal College of Art in London and was taught by several well-known artists, including Roger de Grey and Ceri Richards. His friends included R.B. Kitaj, Allen Jones, and Peter Blake. At the time, the college asked students to submit an essay along with their final work. Hockney refused, wanting to be judged solely on the basis of his art. Remarkably, the RCA, a bastion of tradition, changed its rules to allow him to graduate.

Mature Period

Hockney's first solo show, held in 1963 at John Kasmin's gallery, proved very successful. The following year he traveled to Los Angeles for the first time, where he met leading intellectual and artistic figures including Christopher Isherwood, and designer Ossie Clarke, with whom he struck up a close friendship and later traveled to the Grand Canyon. He would later be best man at Clarke's wedding to Celia Birtwell, of whom he would paint and draw many portraits. Over the following few years, he resided almost permanently in California, teaching at various universities including Berkeley and UCLA, but also traveling extensively around the US and Europe. During this period he painted some of his best-known works, including A Bigger Splash (1967). He also began to design productions for the ballet, opera, and theater. While his synesthesia didn't play much of a role in most of his art-making, it did influence his set design work. He first listened to the musical score for each production, and then based his designs off of the colors he saw.

In California during the 'swinging 60s', Hockney embraced the mood of experimentation, exploration, and iconoclasm. At a time when homosexuality was still illegal in the U.S. and Britain, Hockney's open love affairs and unapologetic attitude attracted the attention of newspapers and magazines. He met and started a long-term relationship with Peter Schlesinger, who also frequently acted as his model, a relationship that lasted from 1966 to 1971. Of his unconventional lifestyle and experimentation with drugs during this period, Hockney has commented: "you can't have a smoke-free bohemia. You can't have a drug-free bohemia. You can't have a drink-free bohemia." In 1973, Hockney moved to Paris, where he lived until 1975. By the mid-1970s, he was famous. 1974 saw a large traveling retrospective of his work, and a film about him directed by Jack Hazan. In 1976 Hockney published his autobiography and in 1978, he purchased property in Los Angeles' Hollywood Hills, where he maintains a residence and studio to this day.

The AIDS crisis of the 1980s changed the art world forever, and had a particularly profound impact on Hockney who recalls "the first person to die of AIDS that I knew was in 1983, and then for ten years it was lots of people. If all those people were still here, I think it would be a different place." A retrospective of Hockney's work was due to take place at London's Tate gallery in 1988. He threatened to cancel it in protest of anti-homosexual legislation being proposed in Britain at the time.

Late Period

The 1990s constituted a very productive period for Hockney, with a huge number of retrospectives and exhibitions around the world. In 1991, he began a relationship with John Fitzherbert, a former chef, which lasted for the next 25 years. One of his most important large-scale works, A Closer Grand Canyon , was completed in 1998. From 2000-01 he researched and wrote a book about the Old Masters , developing a theory that these artists made use of the camera far earlier than previously thought. For his research, Hockney assembled photocopies of Old Master paintings, from Byzantine Art to Van Gogh , on a huge wall in his LA studio. While Hockney's theory met with significant resistance, it has gained widespread support from the art history community. In 2002, Hockney moved to the Yorkshire seaside town of Bridlington. In the same year, he sat for 120 hours for a portrait painted by Lucian Freud . In return, Freud sat for four hours for him.

Hockney had a stroke in 2012, which for a while impaired his speech. Much to his relief, "the stroke didn't affect my drawing, and that's the most important thing." Only a few months later, one of his assistants, Dominic Elliot, died in Hockney's home. He had taken cocaine and ecstasy and drank a bottle of drain cleaner. Elliot had been in a relationship with Hockney's former partner John Fitzherbert, who was still living with him. At the high-profile inquest, Hockney was required to give evidence that the death was not a murder. In 2015, he decided to sell his mother’s Bridlington house and moved back permanently to Los Angeles.

The Legacy of David Hockney

In 2011 a poll of British art students rated Hockney as the most influential artist of all time. His work has played a crucial role in reviving the practice of figurative painting. Chuck Close , Cecily Brown , and film director Martin Scorsese (especially the aesthetics of Taxi Driver (1976)) are among the artists inspired by Hockney. Hockney, still prolific, continues to reinvent himself, embracing contemporary technology. His most recent series of works was produced on an iPad. Despite his widespread fame, he remains an iconoclast, steadfastly refusing to accept institutional authority, even some of the highest honors, turning down an invitation to paint a portrait of the Queen (Hockney was "very busy" and couldn't make it), and a knighthood in 1990 (although he was awarded, and accepted, the Order of Merit in 2012). "I don't have strong feelings about the honours system" Hockney has remarked, "I don't value prizes of any sort. I value my friends."

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on David Hockney

• David Hockney: The Biography, 1937-1975 By Christopher Simon Sykes
• David Hockney: The Biography, 1975-2012 By Christopher Simon Sykes
• A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney By Martin Gayford
• Life of David Hockney: A Novel Our Pick By Catherine Cusset
• True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney Our Pick By Lawrence Weschler
• Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters By David Hockney
• Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy Our Pick By David Hockney and Martin Gayford
• David Hockney: A Yorkshire Sketchbook By David Hockney
• A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen Our Pick By David Hockney and Martin Gayford
• Hockney Pictures By David Hockney
• David Hockney’s Dog Days By David Hockney
• David Hockney: A Bigger Picture Our Pick By Margaret Drabble and Marco Livingstone
• David Hockney. A Chronology. 40th Anniversary Edition Our Pick By Hans Werner Holzwarth
• Hockney’s Portraits and People Our Pick By Marco Livingstone and Kay Haymer
• David Hockney: Moving Focus By Helen Little
• David Hockney Our Pick By Chris Stephens and Andrew Wilson
• David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition By Richard Benefield et al.
• Cameraworks By Lawrence Weschler
• Hockney/Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature By Hand den Hartog Jager
• Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters Our Pick By Martin Gayford
• Hockney on Photography: Conversations with Paul Joyce By Paul Joyce
• Official David Hockney website Our Pick
• David Hockney on the Tate's website
• Sotheby's: David Hockney's Iconic Masterpiece, "The Splash" By Sotheby's / January 13, 2020
• David Hockney: "Just because I'm cheeky doesn't mean I'm not serious" Our Pick By Simon Hattenstone / The Guardian / May 9, 2015
• Imagining the Grand Canyon By Jane Kinsman / National Gallery of Australia
• Painting Pioneer: Early Reflections of David Hockney By Steph Moffat / The Double Negative / December 11, 2013
• David Hockney: "When I'm working I feel like Picasso, I feel I'm 30." By Tim Lewis / The Guardian / November 16, 2014
• David Hockney returns to LA By Caroline Daniel / The Financial Times / October 11, 2013
• David Hockney takes a drive through art history Our Pick By Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times / November 9, 2013
• David Hockney on the purpose of artists By Mary M. Lane / The Wall Street Journal / November 25, 2014
• How the iPhone and iPad transformed the art of David Hockney By Chris O'Brien / Los Angeles Times / October 27, 2013
• David Hockney's Diaries Our Pick Trailer. Directed by Michael Blackwood
• Interview (2012) Our Pick The Royal Academy's Exhibition: A Bigger Picture
• Inside New York's Art World: David Hockney (1982)
• David Hockney on What's Unphotographable (2004) Segment by Robert Hughes from The New Shock of the New
• Interview with David Hockney In 1960s London
• Lecture on Hockney by Lawrence Weschler (2013) Our Pick For David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition: 10/26/2013 - 1/20/14 at The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
• David Hockney: Painting and Photography (2015) Lecture at the Getty
• David Hockney Interview: "The avant-garde have lost their authority" By Martin Gayford / The Spectator / November 22, 2014
• David Hockney interview: "I'll go on until I'm bored" Our Pick By Martin Gayford / The Telegraph / May 7, 2014

Similar Art

Still Life with Chair Caning (1912)

Hartley (1965)

Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956)

Related artists.

Related Movements & Topics

Content compiled and written by Anne Souter

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Ruth Epstein

David Hockney, Los Angeles, 1st March 2016

© David Hockney. Photo: Jean-Pierre Goncalves de Lima

David Hockney RA (b. 1937)

David Hockney studied at Bradford School of Art from 1953 to 1957 and the Royal College of Art from 1959 until 1962. He was awarded the Royal College of Art gold medal in 1962 in recognition of his mastery as a draughtsman and his innovative paintings. His early work was stylistically diverse, combining graffiti-like images with quotations from the poetry of Walt Whitman.

Hockney moved to Los Angeles in 1963. He produced highly evocative, sometimes homoerotic, iconic images of urban life. By the late 1960s his work had become more naturalistic but it was always characterised by Hockney’s alertness to the psychological and emotional resonance of his subject matter.

Hockney’s work also includes landscapes, photography, printmaking and stage designs for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera and the Los Angeles Music Centre Opera.

Recent solo exhibitions have included the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2012), and Galerie Lelong, Paris (2013). The Royal Academy’s blockbuster David Hockney: A Bigger Picture opened in 2012, featuring large-scale works inspired by the East Yorkshire landscape.

After 2012, Hockney turned away from painting and from his Yorkshire home, returning to Los Angeles. Slowly he began to return to the quiet contemplation of portraiture. Over the months that followed, he became absorbed by the genre, creating a series of artworks that became the 2016 exhibition David Hockney: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life

Royal Academician

Born: 1937 in Bradford, Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom

Nationality: British

Elected ARA: 20 May 1985

Elected RA: 26 June 1991

Elected Senior RA: 1 October 2012

Gender: Male

Preferred media: Painting, Printmaking, Photography, and Theatre design

Works associated with David Hockney in the RA Collection

Anne-Katrin Purkiss

David Hockney R.A. , 1 August 1985

Silver bromide print. camera: probably east german praktica vlc2. film: ilford hp5.

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In the studio with David Hockney RA

David Hockney RA talks to curator Edith Devaney in his Los Angeles studio, just before his Royal Academy exhibition ‘82 Portraits and 1 Still-life’ in 2016.

David Hockney RA - Selected CV

Recent solo exhibitions.

2017 Tate Britain, London 2016 Royal Academy of Arts 2015 Pace Gallery, New York 2014 Dulwich Picture Gallery 2013 Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool Galerie Lelong, Paris 2012-13 Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford 2012 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao Whitworth Gallery, Manchester Museum Ludwig, Cologne Royal Academy of Arts 2011 Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark 2010 Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent, Paris Southbank Centre, London 2009 Nottingham Contemporary Pace Wildenstein, New York Annely Juda Fine Art, London Kunsthalle Würth, Künzelsau, Germany

Selected Collections

Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Norway J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, USA Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, USA Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles USA National Museums and Galleries of Wales, Cardiff Tate, England Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, England York City Art Gallery, England

Selected Publications

That’s the Way I See It , David Hockney, Thames and Hudson, 1999 Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters , David Hockney, Thames and Hudson, 2001 Hockney on Art , David Hockney, Little Brown, 2002 Hockney by Hockney , David Hockney, Thames and Hudson, 1988 David Hockney: A Drawing Retrospective , Ulrich Luckhardt and Paul Melia, Thames and Hudson, 2001 David Hockney, Marco Livingstone (World of Art Series), Thames and Hudson, 1996 Outlines: David Hockney , Peter Adam, Absolute Press, 1997

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Associated books

Constantine Cavafy

Fourteen poems / by C.P. Cavafy; chosen and illustrated with twelve etchings by David Hockney; translated by Nikos Stangos and Stephen Spender - London: 1967

David Posner

A rake's progress : a poem in five sections - London: 1967

Associated archives

David Hockney RA 82 Portraits and 1 Still-Life

Item RAA/PRE/5/2/555

Dennis Hopper - the Lost Album

Item RAA/PRE/5/2/535

David Hockney RA A Bigger Picture

Item RAA/PRE/5/2/500

Item RAA/PRE/5/2/499

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David Hockney

Who Is David Hockney?

David Hockney attended art school in London before moving to Los Angeles in the 1960s. There, he painted his famous swimming pool paintings. In the 1970s, Hockney began working in photography, creating photo collages he called joiners. He continues to create and exhibit art, and in 2011, he was voted the most influential British artist of the 20th century.

Early Life and Education

Hockney was born in Bradford, England, on July 9, 1937. He loved books and was interested in art from an early age, admiring Picasso , Matisse and Fragonard. His parents encouraged their son’s artistic exploration, and gave him the freedom to doodle and daydream.

Hockney attended the Bradford College of Art from 1953 to 1957. Then, because he was a conscientious objector to military service, he spent two years working in hospitals to fulfill his national service requirement. In 1959, he entered graduate school at the Royal College of Art in London alongside other young artists such as Peter Blake and Allen Jones. He experimented with different forms, including abstract expressionism. He did well as a student, and his paintings won prizes and were purchased for private collections.

Early Work & Photography

Hockney’s early paintings incorporated his literary leanings, and he used fragments of poems and quotations from Walt Whitman in his work. This practice, and paintings such as We Two Boys Clinging Together , which he created in 1961, were the first nods to his homosexuality in his art.

Because he frequently went to the movies with his father as a child, Hockney once quipped that he was raised in both Bradford and Hollywood. He was drawn to the light and the heat of California, and first visited Los Angeles in 1963. He officially moved there in 1966. The swimming pools of L.A. were one of his favorite subjects, and he became known for large, iconic works such as A Bigger Splash . His expressionistic style evolved, and by the 1970s, he was considered more of a realist.

In addition to pools, Hockney painted the interiors and exteriors of California homes. In 1970, this led to the creation of his first “joiner,” an assemblage of Polaroid photos laid out in a grid. Although this medium would become one of his claims to fame, he stumbled upon it by accident. While working on a painting of a Los Angeles living room, he took a series of photos for his own reference, and fixed them together so he could paint from the image. When he finished, however, he recognized the collage as an art form unto itself, and began to create more.

Hockney was an adept photographer, and he began working with photography more extensively. By the mid 1970s, he had all but abandoned painting in favor of projects involving photography, lithographs, and set and costume design for the ballet, opera and theater.

In the late 1980s, Hockney returned to painting, primarily painting seascapes, flowers and portraits of loved ones. He also began incorporating technology in his art, creating his first homemade prints on a photocopier in 1986. The marriage of art and technology became an ongoing fascination—he used laser fax machines and laser printers in 1990, and in 2009, he started using the Brushes app on iPhones and iPads to create paintings. A 2011 exhibit at the Royal Museum of Ontario showcased 100 of these paintings.

In a 2011 poll of more than 1,000 British artists, Hockney was voted the most influential British artist of all time. He continues to paint and exhibit, and advocates for funding for the arts.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: David Hockney
• Birth Year: 1937
• Birth date: July 9, 1937
• Birth City: Bradford
• Birth Country: England
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Known for his photo collages and paintings of Los Angeles swimming pools, David Hockney is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.
• Education and Academia
• Theater and Dance
• Astrological Sign: Cancer
• Royal College of Art, London
• Bradford College of Art

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: David Hockney Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/artists/david-hockney
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: October 26, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014

Famous British People

Alan Cumming

Olivia Colman

Richard III

20 Shakespeare Quotes

William Shakespeare

Andy Murray

Stephen Hawking

Gordon Ramsay

Kiefer Sutherland

David Hockney

• American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman), 1968 David Hockney
• Sunday Morning, Mayflower Hotel, N.Y., November 28, 1983 David Hockney
• Inland Sea, Japan, 1971 David Hockney
• The Old Guitarist, from The Blue Guitar, 1976–77 David Hockney
• Telephone Pole, Los Angeles, California, September 1982 David Hockney
• What Is This Picasso?, from The Blue Guitar, 1976–77 David Hockney
• A Picture of Ourselves, from The Blue Guitar, 1976–77 David Hockney
• Figures with Still Life, from The Blue Guitar, 1976–77 David Hockney
• Gonzalez and Shadow, 1972 David Hockney
• In a Chiaroscuro, from The Blue Guitar, 1976–77 David Hockney
• Serenade, from The Blue Guitar, 1976–77 David Hockney
• Pembroke Studio with Blue Chairs and Lamp, 1985 David Hockney

Related Content

• Exhibition Closed David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 Aug 20, 2022 – Jan 9, 2023
• Article Hockney’s Perpetual Spring: The Embrace of Digital Tools

Explore Further

Related artworks.

• Finn MacCool, from Imaging Ulysses, 1983 Richard Hamilton
• Portrait of the Artist by Francis Bacon, 1970–71 Richard Hamilton
• Five Tyres Remoulded, 1972 Richard Hamilton
• Swinging London 67, 1968 Richard Hamilton
• In Horne’s House, from Imaging Ulysses, 1981–82 Richard Hamilton
• Bronze by Gold, from Imaging Ulysses, 1985–87 Richard Hamilton
• Leopold Bloom, from Imaging Ulysses, 1983 Richard Hamilton
• Landscape 8, from Ten Landscapes, 1967 Roy Lichtenstein
• Flowers (Hand-colored), 1974 Andy Warhol
• Joseph Beuys, 1980 Andy Warhol

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Press release

David hockney.

The exhibition is made possible in part by The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Jay Pritzker Foundation, the Jane and Robert Carroll Fund, and the Aaron I. Fleischman and Lin Lougheed Fund. It is supported by an Indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. It is organized collaboratively by Tate Britain, London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Born in West Yorkshire, where he attended the local Bradford School of Art, Hockney moved to London in 1959 to study at the Royal College of Art. His career is distinguished as much by early successes as by his willingness to flaunt conventions both societal and artistic. Hockney’s works from the 1960s brazenly reference homoerotic subject matter, from Walt Whitman to Physique Pictorial muscle magazines, while his dedication to figuration throughout his career runs against the grain of predominant art world trends on both sides of the Atlantic. Many fine examples of Hockney’s work from California in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as his double portraits from New York, London, and Los Angeles, show the artist’s interest in the tension that exists in social relationships and the difficulty of depicting transparent material such as glass and water. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hockney turned to a brightly hued palette and fractured, cubistic perspective that mirrors both his interest in Pablo Picasso and his own experiments with Polaroid photography. In recent decades, Hockney has ventured outdoors to paint the changeable landscapes of his native Yorkshire across the seasons, while simultaneously returning to the study of figures in social groupings. Keenly interested in scientific innovations in the aid of art, Hockney recently experimented with an old technology: he created a series of portrait drawings using a camera lucida, first employed by artists in the Renaissance to render one-point perspective.  He has also always embraced new technologies, including the possibilities for colorful composition offered by applications on the iPhone and iPad. Examples of the artist’s experiments in that medium will be included in the galleries. The exhibition ends with his most recent, near neon-toned landscapes, painted in the last three years in Southern California, where he returned to live in 2013. The Met presentation marks the first time the series will be exhibited publicly in the United States. Even to the most committed follower of Hockney’s art, the unprecedented unification of his renowned early works with the newest, will be revelatory. At The Met, David Hockney is curated by Ian Alteveer, Curator, with assistance from Meredith Brown, Research Associate, both in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated, scholarly catalogue published by Tate.

Related Programs

On Monday, February 5 acclaimed stage and screen actors Alan Cumming and Simon Callow will perform a dramatic reading in The Animals: Love Letters between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy . Inspired by Hockney’s 1968 portrait of the pair, the actors will recreate the painting and bring an extraordinary relationship to life. The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium; tickets will be available on our website.

Other programs include Artists on Artworks—Mickalene Thomas on David Hockney on Friday, January 19, 6:30 pm, in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium; and a Teen Studio: Painting program on Saturday, January 27, 1–4 pm. The exhibition is featured on the Museum's website , as well as on Facebook , Instagram , and Twitter using the hashtag #Hockney.

Image: David Hockney (British, born 1937).  A Bigger Splash (detail), 1967. Acrylic on canvas. Tate, purchased 1981. © David Hockney. Photo © Tate, London, 2017

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David Hockney

British, English

A Bigger Splash 1967

David Hockney (b.1937)

David Hockney (b. Bradford, 9 July 1937). British painter, draughtsman, printmaker, photographer, designer, and writer, active mainly in the USA. After a brilliant prize-winning career as a student at the Royal College of Art, Hockney had achieved considerable success by the time he was in his mid-twenties, and he has since consolidated his position as by far the best-known and most critically acclaimed British artist of his generation. His phenomenal success has been based not only on his flair and versatility as an artist, but also on his colourful and engaging personality, which has made him a recognizable figure even to people not particularly interested in art. In 1961 he emerged as one of the leaders of British Pop art at the Young Contemporaries exhibition.

Text source: The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford University Press)

Artworks by David Hockney

Andrew Greg

Robert Priseman

Farah Nayeri

Tim Cornwell

Miriam O'Connor Perks

Melissa Munro

Ruth Millington

Molly Tresadern

Ferren Gipson

Hammad Nasar

Learning resources

• KS2 (ENG) KS2 (NI) CfE L2 (SCO) PS2 (WAL) PS3 (WAL) KS3 (ENG) KS3 (NI) CfE L3 (SCO) CfE L4 (SCO) KS3 (WAL) KS4 (ENG) KS4 (NI) CfE Sen. (SCO) KS4 (WAL)

• KS2 (ENG) KS2 (NI) CfE L2 (SCO) PS3 (WAL)

• EYFS (ENG) FD (NI) CfE EY (SCO) PS1 (WAL) KS1 (ENG) KS1 (NI) CfE L1 (SCO) PS2 (WAL) KS2 (ENG) KS2 (NI) CfE L2 (SCO) PS3 (WAL) KS3 (ENG) KS3 (NI) CfE L3 (SCO) CfE L4 (SCO) KS3 (WAL)

• KS3 (ENG) KS3 (NI) CfE L3 (SCO) CfE L4 (SCO) KS3 (WAL)

• KS2 (ENG) KS2 (NI) CfE L2 (SCO) PS3 (WAL) KS3 (ENG) KS4 (ENG) KS3 (NI) KS4 (NI) CfE L3 (SCO) CfE L4 (SCO) KS3 (WAL) KS4 (WAL)

• KS4 (ENG) KS4 (NI) CfE L4 (SCO) KS4 (WAL) KS5 (ENG) KS5 (NI) CfE Sen. (SCO) KS5 (WAL)

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A look at 1980

We are forced to make depictions. We have made them for ten thousand years now, and we are certainly not going to stop. There’s a deep, deep desire within us that makes us want to do it.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.

If any artist tells you he’s not having fun in his studio, there is something wrong with him.

A look at 1977

David Hockney

David Hockney (British, b. 1937) has produced some of the most vividly recognizable and influential works of the twentieth century. Hockney gained notoriety in his mid-twenties, after receiving the Gold Medal from London’s Royal College of Art, and he quickly became one of the defining figures of the British Pop Art movement.

In the late 1960s Hockney relocated to California and established himself as a prolific figurative and landscape artist. He is perhaps best recognized for the works he produced there: brightly colored, large-scale evocative images of the Southern California lifestyle, and domestic, intimate portraits of his friends, family, and lovers. Hockney’s works are notable for their quietness of subject, flatness of space, and subtle reduction of form. Throughout his career he has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, drawing, collage, photography, and printmaking, often utilizing contemporary technologies, including fax machines, laser photocopiers, and other 20th- and 21st-century digital instruments.

Hockney has received a vast number of awards and honors, including the First Annual Award of Achievement from the Archives of American Art, Los Angeles; membership to the Board of Trustees of the American Associates of the Royal Academy Trust, New York; Distinguished Honoree of the National Arts Association, Los Angeles; the Lorenzo de Medici Lifetime Career Award of the Florence Biennale; and nine honorary degrees from institutions worldwide. In 1997, he was made a Companion of Honour from the British and Commonwealth Order for his outstanding achievement in the arts.

David Hockney’s work can be found in numerous distinguished public collections around the world, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Portrait Gallery, London; The Tate Gallery, London; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. He currently lives and works in Normandy, France.

For more information and available works, inquire here .

Featured Works

Exhibitions

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By Carol Kino

David Hockney: Paper Trails showcases a captivating survey of 110 works on paper by the artist. This exhibition marks the largest of Hockney’s works on paper to date, presenting a wide-reaching selection of works spanning his career, from his famous Pool Series and intimate portraits to his recent digital works created on an iPad.

Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the exhibition  David Hockney is on view from July 15th to November 5th, 2023. This is the first large-scale solo exhibition in Japan in 27 years devoted to British artist David Hockney, regarded as one of the most innovative artists of the postwar era.  

In a cycle of six animated chapters, the viewer is immersed in the artist’s oeuvre and creative process guided by a recorded commentary from the artist himself and accompanied by an exhibition-specific score composed by Nico Muhly. A continuation of the artist’s material expansiveness, Hockney’s voice surrounds viewers, providing insight into his practice as he experiments with perspective, uses photography as a way of 'drawing with a camera' and captures the passing of time.  

Five of the world’s leading galleries are coming together to present 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures , an unprecedented international exhibition by David Hockney. The global exhibition will be jointly presented this fall and winter at Annely Juda Fine Art in London; Galerie Lelong & Co. in Paris; GRAY in Chicago; L.A. Louver in Los Angeles; and Pace in New York. The exhibition at GRAY Chicago (2044 West Carroll Avenue) will open with a public reception on Friday, November 4, 2022, from 5-7 PM CDT, and be on view November 4 – December 23, 2022.

David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 includes 116 iPad paintings creating by the artist to capture the unfolding of spring in the midst of a pandemic.

Gray is pleased to present Hockney in Normandy,  an online exhibition open January 13th to March 19th, 2021.

Maximilíano Durón and Angelica Villa recap the start of this year's Art Basel OVR: Miami Beach, including a quote by gallery Director Raven Falquez Munsell.

The Morgan Library and Museum presents David Hockney: Drawing from Life , a solo exhibition of David Hockney's portraits on paper. Featuring about 100 drawings, the exhibition is one of few to investigate the evolution of his drawing practice over the years.

David Hockney’s Yosemite and Masters of California Basketry  at the Heard Museum highlights the impact that Yosemite has had over time and space on artistic production.

David Hockney opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The exhibition offers a grand overview of the artist's achievements across all media, including painting, drawing, photography, and video.  Organized collaboratively by Tate Britain, London;  the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Featuring works from 1861 - 1967 relating to lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) identities, the show marks the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England.  Queer British Art  explores how artists expressed themselves in a time when established assumptions about gender and sexuality were being questioned and transformed. Features work from John Singer Sargent, Dora Carrington, Duncan Grant, David Hockney, and more.

This exhibition gathers together an extensive selection of David Hockney's most famous works celebrating his achievements in painting, drawing, print, photography and video across six decades. The exhibition will travel to the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 

The National Gallery of Victoria presents a major solo exhibition of the work of David Hockney, including more than 700 works from the past decade and drawing from the artist's extensive output of paintings, digital drawings, photography, and video.

This exhibition uses one hundred objects from the British Museum to explore the history of humanity. David Hockney's etching  In the Dull Village  appears as a representation of twentieth century social change. 

I draw, I do is the first significant presentation of Hockney's work in Ireland. The exhibition focuses on the artist's formative years in the 1950s.

David Hockney RA: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life , on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, London from July 2 through October 2, 2016, presents a suite of portraits from the past two years conducted in the artist's Los Angeles studio.

River & Rowing Museum presents David Hockney: From the Beginning , a survey of 30 works from across Hockney's career and drawn from public collections throughout the UK.

David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring opens at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles. Featuring work from a series of large-format inkjet prints of iPad drawings and a series of charcoal drawings on paper. October 11, 2015 through January 10, 2016.

The work of David Hockney is featured in the group exhibition Regards sur Beyrouth: 160 ans d'images 1800-1960 at the Sursock Museum, Beirut, Lebanon. October 9, 2015 through January 11, 2016.

David Hockney is featured alongside Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Martin Kippenberger in Picasso.Mania , an exhibition at the Grand Palais Galeries Nationales in Paris. The exhibition focuses on the influences of Pablo Picasso on generations of contemporary artists.

David Hockney and John Stezaker are featured in the Wexner Center exhibition After Picasso: 80 Contemporary Artists , which tracks the modern master's influence through the contemporary field. Also including works by Jasper Johns, Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Sigmar Polke, Amy Sillman, and Fred Wilson. Through December 27, 2015.

Richard Gray Gallery at EXPO Chicago 2015 : Booth 319. Presenting work by Marc Chagall, Bethany Collins, Jim Dine, Jean Dubuffet, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Eric Fischl, Sam Francis, Alberto Giacometti, Philip Guston, Eva Hesse, David Hockney, Hans Hofmann, Malia Jensen, Alex Katz, David Klamen, Roy Lichtenstein, Glenn Ligon, John McLaughlin, Pablo Picasso, Jaume Plensa, Leon Polk Smith, Ed Ruscha, Mitchell Squire, Evelyn Statsinger, John Stezaker, Marc Swanson, Andy Warhol and Christopher Wool.

The year 2015 will see a number of museums around the world present exhibitions of David Hockney’s drawings. Two unrelated exhibitions, one in Bristol, UK and one in Portland, Oregon, center on Hockney’s A Rake’s Progress , a suite of sixteen prints from 1965 adapting William Hogarth’s 1735 prints of the same title. Hockney’s version translates the story as an autobiographical telling of his arrival in New York City in the 1960s and his subsequent psychological adaptation to the American metropolis. The suite is on view at the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery until June 14, 2015 and will be on exhibition at the Portland Art Museum from April 18 - August 29, 2015. A more recent set of charcoal landscape drawings will also be on display at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark from March 19 - June 21, 2015.

Richard Gray Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of David Hockney opening in Chicago on Thursday, November 21. There will be a reception from 6-8pm, and the public is welcome to attend. This will be Hockney's first exhibition in Chicago in over ten years. A corresponding illustrated catalogue is available. The Thrill is Spatial  is centered around eight exceptional paintings and drawings, commencing with portraits of Hockney's lifelong muse Celia Birtwell from the 1970s and culminating with  Colorado River  (1998), a majestic 15-panel landscape of the Grand Canyon. The exhibition also features  The Conversation  (1980), an iconic portrait of curator Henry Geldzahler and Raymond Foye; a vibrant still life  Gauguin's Chair  (1988); and a rare, small-scale pool painting  Montcalm Pool, Los Angeles  (1980). The exhibition opens on the eve of Richard Gray Gallery's 50th anniversary.  The gallery was established in Chicago in November 1963.

The Royal Academy of Arts will showcase the first major exhibition of new landscape works by David Hockney RA. Featuring vivid paintings inspired by the East Yorkshire landscape.

Tate Papers ISSN 1753-9854

David Hockney’s Early Etchings: Going Transatlantic and Being British

Martin Hammer

David Hockney’s early autobiographical prints, My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean 1961 and the series A Rake’s Progress 1961–3, are examined in relation to contemporary developments in American art and literature, the artist’s affinities with his British modernist contemporaries and predecessors, and other aspects of his emerging sense of artistic and sexual identity.

David Hockney’s A Rake’s Progress was published and exhibited in late 1963, little over a year after his graduation from the Royal College of Art. 1 The sixteen etchings projected a singular artistic persona: witty, charming, youthful, frankly homosexual, and possessed of technical virtuosity and inventiveness allied to a knowing immersion in tradition made explicit in the allusion to William Hogarth’s graphic cycle of the same title. However, the appeal of A Rake’s Progress resided not merely in Hockney’s precocious assurance but also in his chosen subject-matter of the artist’s adventures in New York City. In that sense, the work spoke to an infatuation with all things American then pervasive in British culture and society. 2 The writer Malcolm Bradbury remarked of the years on either side of 1960 that ‘it was a time when Americanization was passing through Europe like … a dose of salts’:

America was where, it seemed, everything that was best came from – the best jazz, the best novels, the best ice-cream, the best cars, the best films. I became a typical example of a constant figure of the time, Midatlantic Man … In Britain he talked all the time of the States; in America he would become notably more British, a flagship in his Harris tweeds … And America proved pretty much what was expected. After austerity Britain, it was wildly exciting. 3

Hockney’s own first visit to America ‘was something very special to me’, and the prelude to a lifetime of moving between the two countries. 4 Prizes and sales of works meant that he could contemplate an extended stay in the summer of 1961. Hockney had personal motivations, over and above the general climate. As a homosexual, he would have been well aware that such figures as Cecil Beaton, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had submitted to the lure of America. 5 Equally, as abstract expressionism was all the rage, trips to New York had become a rite of passage for progressive-minded students at the Royal College of Art, the equivalent to the cultural pilgrimages that former generations had made to France or Italy. Indeed, the availability of modestly priced air tickets in 1961 encouraged a number of Hockney’s contemporaries to make the trip, including the graphic design student Billy Apple, with whom Hockney travelled and occasionally met up in New York, as well as his friend Brian Haynes, current art editor of the Royal College of Art magazine ARK . 6 The following year Haynes published photographs he had taken in New York, accompanying an essay which asserted that the city and country had both lived up to and undermined his expectations of ‘the promised land’: ‘They were so much more developed than us … The billboards were amazing.’ But there were also drunks lying in the street in the Bowery district, and heading south and seeing whites and blacks entering the bus through different doors ‘was the beginning of a naive sort of social awareness on my part’. 7 Beaton had been struck by such contrasts before the war, while in interviews Hockney also recorded comparable reactions to the spectacle of poverty and discrimination. Indeed, he recalled that it was the squalor in areas like the Bowery, with people sleeping on the streets, that prompted the idea of reinventing the Rake’s Progress narrative in a contemporary context: ‘I saw this and I thought this is like eighteenth-century London – it’s Hogarthian.’ 8

Hockney’s A Rake’s Progress tends to be understood in somewhat literal terms as a record and celebration of that mind-opening visit. In David Hockney by David Hockney (1975), the artist remarked: ‘when I came back I decided to do A Rake’s Progress because this was a way of telling a story about New York and my experience and everything’. 9 Subservience to the horse’s mouth in subsequent literature has inhibited analysis of the complex thought processes and allusions that, in reality, underpinned Hockney’s sophisticated art. There has been little informed speculation to date about how and why he chose the particular subjects that made up the eventual series, and arrived at the decisions he did regarding medium, format and idiom. One important factor, I shall argue, was an alert responsiveness to the cultural environment in which he found himself, which also looked to America for inspiration. Commentators have emphasised that, on one level, the project was bound up with Hockney’s self-projection as a homosexual, already a theme of paintings produced at the Royal College of Art in the privacy of his studio space. Specifically, I want to present Hockney as recapitulating, knowingly or otherwise, what has come to be seen as a ‘queering’ inherent in the embrace of ‘trivial’ discourses of gossip and camp talk within avant-garde literary and aesthetic practice, a process exemplified by figures active in New York during the late 1950s such as the poet Frank O’Hara and artists like Larry Rivers and Jasper Johns, who were at the forefront of the revolt against abstract expressionism and its macho aura. 10

Fig.1 David Hockney My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean 1961–2 Etching and aquatint on paper Tate P07353 © David Hockney 

Fig.2 Frank O’Hara and Larry Rivers ‘Melancholy Breakfast’, from the portfolio Stones 1958 (published 1960) Lithograph on paper Tate P77305 © 2017 Estate of Larry Rivers 

We shall return in due course to A Rake’s Progress , but to help establish an appropriate framework for making sense of the series, I want first to juxtapose two other prints that likewise bear on matters of transatlantic dialogue and artistic identity. One is Hockney’s My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean , inscribed ‘July 1961’ (fig.1), the other ‘Melancholy Breakfast’ (fig.2) from the portfolio entitled Stones , which had been created a year or two earlier as a collaboration between the aforementioned New York School poet Frank O’Hara and his close artist friend (and sometime lover) Larry Rivers. The former is an etching, combining fine line with tonal blocks and marks using aquatint, including the insertion of colour in the Stars and Stripes. ‘Melancholy Breakfast’ is a monochrome lithograph, employing a softer, more crayon-like method. The allusion to a traditional British folk song in the Hockney contrasts with the purely personal and poetic content of the American work. Nevertheless, there are several striking affinities, including the integrated lines of hand-written text, sometimes floated at eccentric angles; the passages of dense scribbling located towards the bottom centre of each image; a general effect of improvisation and of pockets of artistic incident, from legibly figurative to abstract, dispersed as if randomly within the compositions. Such parallels might be regarded as coincidental, the outcome of two artists seeking to extend the informal look that had been developed within abstract expressionism, and extended into more figurative idioms by subsequent generations of American artists (a figure like Robert Rauschenberg springs to mind). But can we see the similarities between the two prints as symptomatic of a wider cultural engagement on Hockney’s part?

My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean happens to be the first known work that Hockney created on American soil. We know very little, in truth, about his activities that summer, beyond the episodes recounted with hindsight in A Rake’s Progress in 1963. He met up with Apple and possibly other Royal College of Art students, but his main contact across the pond was Mark Berger, an American friend from the painting school who, along with R.B. Kitaj, had doubtless encouraged Hockney to make the trip, offering to keep him company and show him around. In his autobiography Hockney mentioned Berger only once, noting that, when he first visited New York, Berger was the only person he knew, but ‘was in hospital with hepatitis all the time I was there’. 11 In fact, Hockney stayed with Berger at the latter’s parents’ house in Long Island, soon after arriving and before the onset of his friend’s illness. Hockney reported to his family early on that he had plans to visit New Orleans and elsewhere in the south. 12 It is likely that he and Berger were contemplating making the trip together, given that the latter had been teaching at Tulane University in New Orleans before taking the year off to study in Europe. 13 Presumably the hepatitis prevented this expedition, with the consequence that Hockney decided to remain in the north-east. From biographies we also gather that it was through Berger, during that visit to Long Island, that Hockney met another young artist, Ferrill Amacker. 14 The two men hit it off, and Hockney ended up spending the rest of his trip sharing Amacker’s well-appointed apartment in Brooklyn Heights, in an occasional sexual relationship. They engaged more widely with New York’s gay subculture, which clearly seemed a good deal more exciting and developed than its London counterpart. 15 It is curious that Hockney’s account should simply have stated: ‘I met a boy in a drugstore in Times Square and stayed with him for three [sic] months’. 16 This brings home the selectiveness of David Hockney by David Hockney , comprising as it did what he remembered and chose to recall some ten years after the event.

Hockney’s immediate reactions are conveyed in the odd surviving letter back home, composed during the early part of his trip. His camp humour and sense of Britishness come through in an epistle to American Kitaj (‘Ron – old chap’), who had evidently commissioned him to purchase a book, magazine and pair of trousers. After reporting on such practicalities, Hockney declared:

I like this town – vegetarian restaurants on every corner. I haven’t been in the Empire State Building yet – but I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole of that wasn’t one big Veg. restaurant. The funny thing is that New Yorkers don’t look like animal lovers. ‘Il Marko’ [Mark Berger] is convalescing at home now (he only came out of hospital on Friday) and at the moment I am staying in Brooklyn – with an awfully nice fellow, and doing a bit of etching at a place near here. 17

The last point is picked up in a more formal communication dispatched to his prospective dealer, still ‘Mr Kasmin’:

I’m having quite a time here, although the weather is uncomfortable (it seems to be permanently over 70 degrees). The Museum of Modern Art here have bought two of my prints – and I have been doing a bit of work at the Pratt Institute. I hope to start some painting next week – unless I go west to California. 18

It did not take Hockney long to descend upon the Pratt Institute, conveniently located near Amacker’s apartment, and to produce My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean . The trip to California did not, of course, happen at this stage, although it is interesting that he already had the idea in mind, inspired by the movies and by issues of Physique Pictorial magazine that Berger had brought with him to London. There is no evidence of any paintings having been realised in the US, but it might be said that one catalyst for My Bonnie was Hockney finding himself with more time on his hands in New York than he had anticipated. He clearly experienced a powerful compulsion to work, and not just to spend his time being an idle tourist. Printmaking must have seemed a more practical option than having to deal with the transportation of canvasses. He had recently revived this interest back at the Royal College of Art, on running out of money to buy painting materials. 19 Beyond the artistic satisfactions that the medium provided, Hockney found that he could readily sell prints, both in London at the St George’s Gallery and then again in New York, where he made contact with the curator William Liebermann, who purchased works for the Museum of Modern Art and advised Hockney about other possible purchasers. 20 Conceivably, one motivation for producing My Bonnie was generating sales to subsidise his trip. The imagery, and the charm and humour of the treatment, seem calculated to appeal to collectors on both sides of the Atlantic.

Hockney’s choice of theme is interesting given the currency of the folk song. An instrumental version by Duane Eddy was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic in 1960. Moreover, just a few weeks before Hockney set to work, My Bonnie was recorded in Hamburg by Tony Sheridan, on vocal and lead guitar, with backing from ‘Die Beat’ Brothers, whose first ever recording this was. 21 By the time the song was released in England in July, the band had reverted to calling themselves The Beatles. Perhaps the general revival of the song was connected not just to the folk revival but also to the burgeoning of transatlantic travel and cultural transmission at this time. But Hockney certainly made the theme his own. Alongside its light-hearted whimsy, his composition presents a distinctive fusion of nostalgia and desire, in both content and artistic language. The title of the traditional song hovers above the scribbled indication of the Atlantic Ocean, with stormy clouds floating above, whose vast expanse separates Hockney’s own new and old worlds. On the left-hand side, the artist (‘DH’) stands atop a vertical structure, recalling at once the kind of extractor flues that one might encounter on a New York rooftop and, on a different scale, a schematic, ziggurat-like skyscraper along the lines of the Empire State Building, as viewed perhaps from the distance of Brooklyn Heights. The figure holds aloft the gigantic, coloured Stars and Stripes, as if to signify the fantasy of a King Kong-like conquest of America, while down below we encounter the date, July 1961, and a figure of George Washington incorporating a collaged head extracted from a US postage stamp. The figure seems to gesture in a friendly manner towards the old colonial power and sometime enemy, and the reference to the stamp signifies the means by which Hockney and antryone else could keep in touch with family and friends back home. To the right of the composition we see a more complex montage of overlapping elements, a small black and white Union Jack, whose pole is another, vertical version of the title slogan; a simplified figure sporting a hat; another figure (‘P’) waving another Union Jack; and an idealised, classicising profile that may signify the young man identified by a further, larger ‘P’ (presumably Peter Crutch, with whom Hockney was currently infatuated). We might take this whole passage to evoke memories of the beloved ‘bonnie’, back in London, who was still on Hockney’s mind that summer, even as he took in the heady excitements of New York.

Fig.3 R.B. Kitaj The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg 1960 Tate T03082  

In metaphorical terms, the particular romantic attachment may stand for a more general allegiance to his homeland, from which he felt unable or perhaps unwilling entirely to escape, while coming to terms with such a different environment. One might see some such attitude as implicit in his decision to tackle this traditionally British folk theme in a print made in the USA. But another reading would be to interpret Hockney’s ‘bonnie’ as in fact America itself, understood not nostalgically but rather as the object of his imaginative yearning (in full technicolour), now indeed attained, an earthly paradise from the perspective of dull, self-satisfied, black and white England. The phrase can be taken, in other words, to signify in those two distinct ways, looking backwards and forwards, just as it occurs twice in the image itself. Hockney, we might say, was channelling into this modest-looking work quite complex and ambivalent feelings about his own personal and artistic identity, and the mingling in his own mind of nostalgia and the urge to embrace new possibilities. In relation to art, the inclusion of a ‘found’ image brings to mind current work on paper by Rauschenberg, in which elements of mass media imagery, inserted by means of solvent transfer, are combined with rough mark-making and informal, all-over compositional effects. However, Rauschenberg’s aesthetic had already been mediated for Hockney by the example of Kitaj. In My Bonnie the montage structure, combination of image and text, and interweaving of careful delineation with seemingly random, graffiti-like marks seem closely modelled on recent pictures by Kitaj that he would have known well, such as The Murder of Rosa Luxembourg 1960 (Tate T03082 ; fig.3).

But American points of affinity emerge if we take account of the immediate circumstances of the work’s creation in Brooklyn. It was Liebermann who evidently advised Hockney to make contact with the Pratt Institute. 22 But the college had a good deal more to offer than equipment and convenient location. The Pratt Graphic Art Center had been established in the mid-1950s and played an important role in the revival of American printmaking that came fully to fruition in the 1960s. It provided artists drawn to the format with both studio and exhibiting facilities. 23 Hence, figures like the young Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine, as well as abstract expressionists Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman, made productive use of the workshops. It was at Pratt in 1961, for example, that Dine produced These Are Ten Useful Objects Which No One Should Be Without When Traveling , a portfolio of ten drypoints, while Oldenburg created a poster for his Store exhibition as well as other prints, and Newman a significant series of abstract lithographs. Hockney found himself operating in not just any old art college environment but rather in one of the most sophisticated centres for printmaking currently available in an American or indeed international context, a facility which probably made the Royal College of Art in London seem old-fashioned. From looking at what was going on around him, and talking to individuals he encountered at Pratt, he would surely have learnt a great deal about the position of the print within the American art world.

He is likely to have become familiar there with the graphic activities of Larry Rivers, an artist generally much admired in British art college circles in the early 1960s, in whose work Hockney may well have been interested even before travelling to New York. It is interesting to note that when Hockney drew a portrait of Berger during his visit to Long Island, it was against a backdrop of Camel cigarettes imagery. 24 This was a favourite Rivers theme in the early 1960s, and perhaps the implication was that Berger was a fan, who had transmitted his enthusiasm to Hockney. Aside from his paintings, Rivers could have benefited, in Hockney’s eyes, from his close links with writers. In 1960, for instance, Jack Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveller book of essays appeared with a cover and illustrations by Rivers. 25 That same year the artist worked with Kenneth Koch on a series of poem-paintings, involving a visual interplay between gestural marks, imagery and hand-written verse. Above all, Rivers was known for his long-standing collaborative relationship with Frank O’Hara, starting with the frontispiece for A City Winter and Other Poems (1952). It was O’Hara who contributed the text about Rivers for Martin Friedman’s School of New York: Some Younger Artists volume, published in London in 1959. 26 But their best-known and most fully realised example of interaction across visual and verbal media was, of course, Stones , the sequence of thirteen lithographic prints interweaving passages of poetry hand-written (using a mirror!) by O’Hara and pockets of imagery and abstract design contributed by Rivers. Stones was executed in an intensive, improvised manner over 1957–8 and finally published in 1959 by Tanya Grossman’s Universal Art Editions. 27 It is plausible to suppose that the affinity with which I began, between My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean and ‘Melancholy Breakfast’, reflected Hockney’s awareness of this recent, notably ambitious print project. We might note that the second plate in Stones is headed ‘Love’ and includes a lyrical poem and suitable graphic accompaniment. ‘Love’ was likewise one of the first words Hockney included in otherwise abstract paintings of 1960, and a theme of several works from that year. 28

The parallels with Stones open up the possibility that Hockney took an informed interest in the New York poetry scene. He was, after all, a well-read and self-consciously literary artist, using written components in many paintings to embed references to the likes of William Blake, Walt Whitman, Auden and Constantine Cavafy. 29 An engagement with literature was one of the things he found he had in common with Kitaj. 30 Did this extend, in both of their cases, to contemporary American literature? But we should note the significant impact exerted in the UK by Donald Allen’s 1960 anthology The New American Poetry , featuring the Beat poets such as Allan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, along with Charles Olson, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and many other emerging figures, whose work had been little known hitherto in Britain. 31 Produced in San Francisco, Evergreen Review was another cult publication, combining artistic and poetic content, which seems to have been avidly consumed in Britain. This phenomenon in literary transmission exactly parallels the availability and inspiration of recent American painting and sculpture, a narrative familiar to historians of British art of the period.

It is feasible, then, that Hockney already had a nascent interest in American literature when he arrived in New York, but he recalled being excited by the bookstores there, which stayed open all night and where one could browse at leisure. 32 We might imagine him absorbing the latest issue of Evergreen Review , featuring an account of the seamy homosexual subculture in New York from John Rechy’s forthcoming novel ( City of Night , published in 1963, which subsequently inspired Hockney’s first trip to Los Angeles). 33 There was also the wonderfully camp and irreverent text ‘How to Proceed in the Arts: A Detailed Study of the Creative Act’, another collaboration between O’Hara and Rivers. 34 At any rate, My Bonnie offers an intriguing visual equivalent to the casual, affectionate, nostalgic tone, combining tender lyric sentiment with mundane circumstances, that O’Hara deployed, for instance, in his recent poem ‘Song’, first published in the same year of 1961. 35  Likewise, it seems a short step to Hockney’s The Cha Cha Cha that was Danced in the Early Hours of 24th March 1961, based on memories of watching Peter Crutch dancing at a Royal College of Art ball, from one of O’Hara’s poems about having a good time in ‘The Old Place’, the gay bar in Greenwich Village after which the poem is named, in the company of fellow poet John Ashbery: ‘Down the dark stairs drifts the steaming cha-cha-cha./ thThrough the urine and smoke we charge to the floor./ Wrapped in Ashes’ arms I glide.’ 36

There were two obvious reasons why Hockney would have been familiar with O’Hara. One was his status in the art community not just for his poetry but rather for his activities and publications as a rising curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and as the author of the first book about Jackson Pollock (1959), plus many other articles and artist interviews. 37 The second was the poet’s sexuality. Given Hockney’s personal contacts in New York and therefore access to gossip, which, according to Gavin Butt, was an activity of special importance within the gay community in a period when homosexuality was illegal, it is very likely that he would have become aware of O’Hara’s credentials and status as a gay man, whose sexuality perhaps conditioned the ‘camp’ idiom and rejection of macho posturing characteristic of his poetry from the second half of the 1950s onwards. 38 This perspective has become a strong theme in recent literature on the poet’s work, though its earlier absence did not mean sexuality was not talked about and celebrated in a sub-cultural context (as it surely was, back in London, with regard particularly to the painter Francis Bacon).

Fig.4 Derek Boshier England’s Glory 1961–2 Museum Sztuki, Lodz

If there is a single contemporary British work that shares the thematic and artistic concerns of My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean , it is the painting England’s Glory (1961; fig.4) by Derek Boshier. Across the media divide, affinities between the two images include the incorporation of both British and American flags, and a suggestion of interchange across a watery expanse; the fusion of such bold, colourful, geometric elements with montage-like passages of more complex and fluid imagery, and with gestural marks; the incorporation of words on a variety of scales; and an overall informality and visual congestion of pictorial structure. The Boshier painting has been discussed in relation to the currency in his early work of the theme of ‘American influence and, most especially, American corporate and military power’. 39 Here, the demise of British imperial power is intimated through the American flag eating into ‘England’s Glory’ (evoking the title and design of a well-known British box of matches) and the storm clouds beginning to eclipse the large Union Jack, while a strip of smaller ones are more fully buried beneath the jumble of elements including abstract marks but also imprinted advertising imagery, a map showing the potential impact of a nuclear bomb targeting central London, flags evoking the current process of decolonisation, and additional reminders of a historical legacy increasingly losing its relevance, such as a tie (suggesting the world of public schools, gentlemen’s clubs and military regiments), as well as Nelson’s famous slogan: ‘England expects every man to do his duty.’ Boshier, one might say, was revisiting the tradition of landscape painting (England’s glory in another sense), but the atmosphere he was registering was the metaphorical one of swift-moving historical change, with the imperial legacy ending up as little more than the nostalgic branding on a matchbox.

The approach in this painting is sociological and political, in contrast to Hockney’s private, autobiographical reflections. Boshier’s outlook reflected his immersion in recent books critical of the impact of American mass media culture, such as Marshall McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride (1951), Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957) and Daniel Boorstin’s The Image (1961). 40 An ambivalence about the waxing and waning of America and Britain respectively, and about positives and negatives inherent in transatlantic exchange, doubtless featured in conversations between the two men, who were exact contemporaries at the Royal College of Art. Their close friendship and sharing of a studio is registered in the well-known photograph of the two artists standing to mock-attention next to their easels, paint brushes as surrogate rifles. 41 A common artistic enthusiasm is suggested by the echoes of Larry Rivers in England’s Glory . Recent pictures by Rivers such as The Last Civil War Veteran prefigure Boshier’s fusion of heraldic flag imagery and painterly mark-making, while many other works provide a model for the inclusion of words, both stencilled and scrawled. 42 While the date of My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean can be pinned down precisely, there is no documentary evidence for exactly when Boshier created England’s Glory , although the autumn term of 1961 seems most likely. Whatever the direction of interchange, however, this juxtaposition highlights a shared immersion in issues of identity, and in exploring through their work what it felt like to be British at a moment of increasing American domination, on cultural, economic, military and many other fronts.

My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean established a model for the light-hearted, quasi-autobiographical mode that Hockney proceeded to elaborate in A Rake’s Progress , to which we now return. Equally, the above discussion of My Bonnie provides a template for my analysis of that more ambitious, considered and complex project. Thus, Hockney’s experiences in the US came to be presented through the filter of a cycle format and storyline modelled, as noted, on Hogarth’s eight paintings and related engravings, a quintessentially British creation. 43 A Rake’s Progress was one of a cluster of projects in which the eighteenth-century artist had pioneered a genre of art depicting and commenting satirically upon the spectacle of contemporary urban life, taking advantage of the reproducibility of the print to reach mass audiences, and of the medium’s potential to project narrative across a series of intricate multi-figure compositions. It was the general and very un-modernist idea of a story developed over a series of images that evidently intrigued Hockney about the Hogarths: ‘What I liked was telling a story just visually. Hogarth’s story has no words, it’s a graphic tale. You have to interpret it all.’ 44

How, then, should we interpret Hockney’s synthesis of contemporary, autobiographical subject-matter and art-historical appropriation? For Philip Webb, in the first published biography of the artist, the idea was opportunistic: ‘Hockney wanted to make something effective out of the sketch-books he brought back from New York, and he hit on the brilliant idea of producing an updated version of Hogarth’s “Rake’s Progress” engravings, transferring the story of a young man’s experiences on first visiting London in the eighteenth century to New York two centuries later’. 45 There was no doubt an urge on Hockney’s part to exploit the material he had brought back with him, and to tap into the wider imaginative appeal of America. But it is also worth considering whether referring back to Hogarth might also have been a means for Hockney to acknowledge and assert his own sense of British identity, not just as a tourist taking in the spectacle of America with an outsider’s detachment but also in relation to his artistic sensibility, given that Hogarth was renowned as the first British artist to assert native credentials and values, as an antidote to the general reverence for European models in the art world in which he moved. Was the Hogarthian garb an equivalent in some sense of Bradbury’s metaphorical Harris tweeds? Indeed, can we usefully consider A Rake’s Progress as one manifestation of a broader pattern of artists confronting the dilemma of ‘going modern and being British’, in the phrase coined by artist Paul Nash in the early 1930s? Does the work reflect a recurrent mechanism whereby external influences generate a perceived need among British artists to reclaim roots in the national tradition, as a strategy to secure artistic independence? This was clearly a factor, to name but two examples, in the crystallisation of vorticism in 1914, and in the emergence of a romantically-inclined, nostalgic surrealism in the work of Nash and many others in the 1930s. 46

Fig.5 David Hockney ‘1. The Arrival’, from A Rake’s Progress 1961–3 Etching and aquatint on paper Tate P07029 © David Hockney 

Fig.6 David Hockney ‘1a. Receiving the Inheritance’, from A Rake’s Progress 1961–3 Etching and aquatint on paper Tate P07030 © David Hockney 

Fig.7 David Hockney ‘2a. The Gospel Singing (Good People) (Madison Square Garden)’, from A Rake’s Progress 1961–3 Etching and aquatint on paper Tate P07032

Fig.8 David Hockney ‘3. The Start of the Spending Spree and the Door Opening for a Blonde’, from A Rake’s Progress 1961–3 Etching and aquatint on paper Tate P07033

Fig.9 David Hockney ‘3a. The Seven Stone Weakling’, from A Rake’s Progress 1961–3 Etching and aquatint on paper Tate P07034

Fig.10 David Hockney ‘4. The Drinking Scene’, from A Rake’s Progress 1961–3 Etching and aquatint on paper Tate P07035

Fig.11 David Hockney ‘5. The Election Campaign (with Dark Message)’, from A Rake’s Progress 1961–3 Etching and aquatint on paper Tate P07037

Fig.12 David Hockney ‘5a. Viewing a Prison Scene’, from A Rake’s Progress 1961–3 Etching and aquatint on paper Tate P07038

Fig.13 David Hockney ‘6. Death in Harlem’, from A Rake’s Progress 1961–3 Etching and aquatint on paper Tate P07039 © David Hockney 

Fig.14 David Hockney ‘6a. The Wallet Begins to Empty’, from A Rake’s Progress 1961–3 Etching and aquatint on paper Tate P07040

Fig.15 David Hockney ‘7. Disintegration’, from A Rake’s Progress 1961–3 Etching and aquatint on paper Tate P07041

Fig.16 David Hockney ‘7a. Cast Aside’ from A Rake’s Progress 1961–3 Etching and aquatint on paper Tate P07042

Fig.17 David Hockney ‘8a. Bedlam’, from A Rake’s Progress 1961–3 Etching and aquatint on paper Tate P07044 © David Hockney 

In Hockney’s variant on Hogarth, it is of course the artist himself, already a minor media celebrity on account of his blonde hair and stylish demeanour, who becomes the protagonist of the story, supplanting the tragic figure of Tom Rakewell, and appearing in virtually all the prints either in full figure or as a symbolic head and shoulders bust. He seems at once a specific and increasingly recognisable individual, and a more generic archetype of the Englishman abroad, wide-eyed and seeking out novel sensations and forbidden pleasures in the pleasure dome that was contemporary New York. It may be helpful, in fact, to recount the surrogate Hockney figure’s progress, or lack of it, in his imaginary rakish persona. 47 In the opening image he arrives on the other side of the Atlantic, with the aeroplane on which he has travelled behind him and an archetypal (not to say phallic) pair of skyscrapers ahead, beckoning him to experience all the big city has to offer (fig.5). The artist then manages to sell some prints, after haggling over prices, which opens up the prospect of enjoying his trip even more than his initial budget had promised (fig.6). He sees some impressive presidential monuments in Washington, D.C., and attends a performance of gospel singing at Madison Square Garden (fig.7). The fifth image invokes ‘the start of the spending spree’ and a (literal) door opening for a blonde, registering Hockney’s decision to dye his hair with Clairol, having succumbed to the TV slogan ‘Blondes have more fun, doors open for a blonde’, something of an emblem of gay sexuality in post-war America (fig.8). The ‘seven stone weakling’ goes for a walk, in Central Park we might suppose, and gazes admiringly at the athletic physiques, but he seems more in his element in the next scene, where he is fraternising in a gay bar (figs.9, 10). He ‘marries an old maid’, whatever that signifies, and attends a political meeting at which the mainly black audience is being exhorted to register to vote (fig.11). In the next two images he witnesses a ‘prison scene’ in a movie, and a funeral parlour in Harlem (figs.12, 13). The final sequence records an apparent downward spiral: he is ordered to descend a metaphorical staircase as ‘the wallet begins to empty’ (fig.14); takes to drink (‘disintegration’; fig.15); finds or feels himself ‘cast aside’ (tossed into the mouth of a giant serpent; fig.16); descends yet further stairs, at the bottom of which he encounters a faceless youth with a t-shirt advertising WABC (a new, highly successful commercial radio station based in New York) and wearing headphones emanating from one of the new transistor radios; and our rake finally ends up in Bedlam, which turns out to comprise five identikit figures (with the protagonist singled out only by the small arrow above his head; fig.17). These vignettes make up a cycle corresponding, we assume, to some autobiographical narrative.

His accompanying statement, incorporated within the original portfolio, recounted the quite complicated evolution of the project:

These etchings were begun in London in September 1961 after a visit to the United States. My intention was to make eight plates, keeping the original [i.e. Hogarth’s] titles but moving the setting to New York. The Royal College on seeing me start work were anxious to extend the series with the idea of incorporating the plates in a book of reproductions to be printed by the Lion and Unicorn Press. Accordingly I set out to make twenty-four plates but later reduced the total to sixteen retaining the numbering from one to eight and most of the titles in the original tale. 48

Hockney evidently embarked upon A Rake’s Progress soon after starting his final year at the Royal College of Art. It is not known if the idea came to mind even before he left America, though Hockney implies that it did in commenting, as noted, how areas such as the Bowery had struck him as ‘Hogarthian’. He later remarked that he began working on the series after completing A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style , which would place the initial phase of work in the latter weeks of 1961. Over time, however, the conception of the series underwent significant modifications, as Hockney remarked in the statement quoted earlier, which continued: ‘Altogether I made about thirty-five plates of which nineteen were abandoned so leaving these sixteen the published set. Nos.7 and 7a were etched at the Pratt Graphic Workshop in New York city in May of this year [1963], the others at the Royal College of Art from 1961 to 1963’. 49 Although the prints might look at first sight like a spontaneous, diaristic exercise, Hockney devoted considerable time and effort to bringing A Rake’s Progress to resolution. The treatment of individual scenes was distilled as work proceeded over that period of eighteen months to two years. The gulf between the initial and final states of The Arrival and Start of the Spending Spree , which happen to be known, are indicative of the general shift in his artistic idiom. 50 The clarity, economy and relative realism of the final works bring to mind paintings he executed in 1962 and 1963, such as Picture Emphasising Stillness and Domestic Scene: Los Angeles . 51

Such stylistic modifications reinforce the point that the eventual images in A Rake’s Progress crystallised long after the events and experiences they depicted. Moreover , the series as a whole was carefully crafted, the prints possessing a notable aesthetic cohesion alongside their satisfying variety of theme and mood. Technically speaking, as in My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean , all sixteen prints combine passages of etching, played off against solid, unmodulated blocks of tone produced by the aquatint technique. A single element in each composition is printed in red, a visually arresting device. There is also a rough consistency across the plates in terms of the scale of the figures, and the visual balance between the diverse pockets of imagery that make up each scene and the expanse of blank paper. In addition to their narrative imagery, all of the final images include a prominent stamp giving the overall title, the place of execution (New York and London) and the date of the series (1961–2), with the specific title for each of the numbered plates then filled in by hand. The deliberate crudity of the stamps confers a folk art quality on the works, as opposed to the slickness and conventional signatures characteristic of fine-art printmaking.

Fig.18 William Hogarth ‘The Young Heir taking Possession’, from  A Rake’s Progress (plate 1) 1735 Tate T01789  

Fig.19 William Hogarth ‘A Prison Scene’, from A Rake’s Progress (plate 7) 1735–63 Tate T01793  

Fig.20 William Hogarth ‘Scene in a Madhouse’, from  A Rake’s Progress (plate 8) 1735–63 Tate T01794  

The eventual series bears a more oblique relationship than is usually acknowledged to both of its ostensible points of reference. Hockney explained how the Royal College of Art’s intervention had diluted his original intention, which was ‘to take Hogarth’s titles and somehow play with them and set it in New York in modern times’. But what actual titles did he have in mind, as there is in fact no definitive titling for the Hogarths? Was he thinking, for instance, of the prints, or the suite of paintings in the Soane Museum in London? In truth, Hockney’s eventual sixteen titles on the prints correspond quite minimally to Hogarth’s eight, despite his remark about his ‘sixteen retaining the numbering from one to eight and most of the titles in the original tale’. The implication is that the Hockneys come in pairs, 1a and 1b etc, which together match each one of the Hogarths. Thus, we might say that Hogarth’s ‘The Young Heir taking Possession’ (fig.18) resonates with the print showing Hockney arriving in New York, to take up his spiritual inheritance, but more directly with his selling prints in ‘Receiving the Inheritance’ (figs.5 and 6). Hogarth’s ‘Surrounded by Artists and Professors’ is presumably the equivalent to Hockney’s more solitary experience of visiting Washington, D.C. and viewing important cultural sites, such as the Jefferson and Lincoln monuments (titled ‘Meeting the Good People’), while the ‘good people’ theme is elaborated in attending the gospel concert, with its religious connotations (fig.7). Thereafter any such rigorous pairing and numbering systems seem to dissolve. Perhaps Hogarth’s brothel scene is the model for a much less dissolute visit to a bar, and for ‘Disintegration’, where he confronts an enormous glass of whisky, evoking a poster advertisement (fig.15). ‘The Arrest’ for debt in the Hogarth is reimagined by Hockney as an expulsion from affluent society, under the heading ‘The Wallet Begins to Empty’ (fig.14). ‘Marries an Old Maid’ is the scene recapitulated most directly. Hogarth’s ‘Scene in a Gaming House’ seems not to be echoed at all, while his ‘Prison Scene’ (fig.19) may be echoed in ‘Cast Aside’ (fig.16) but turns more literally into ‘Viewing a Prison Scene’ in a movie (fig.12). ‘Scene in a Madhouse’ (fig.20) becomes, in Hockney’s hands, the image of the young men listening to pop radio on their headphones, with ‘Bedlam’ as the writing on the wall, both literally and proverbially (fig.17). Ironically, Bedlam, the dreaded prison in Hogarth’s final print but subsequently a term evoking somewhere very noisy, takes the form of a strange, silent world, with everyone uniformly immersed in their private bedlam of the endless pop songs pumped out on commercial radio.

Critics have been lured into reading into the Hockney series an equivalent to Hogarth’s idea of a modern moral narrative, combining comic elements with an undeniably serious purpose. According to one typical commentary, Hogarth’s ‘themes are still found in Hockney’s work, but he titles them differently and they do not serve to illustrate a moral tale, that of a Rake’s downfall, but a social dilemma, the loss of individuality within a commercial society’. 52 Critic Andrew Brighton ventured a more politicised interpretation. Whereas the Hogarths had projected ‘a tale of squandered inheritance’, Hockney recounts ‘the adventures of a young meritocrat discovering the American good life’. Rather than madness, ‘Bedlam for Hockney is to be among the mindless mass, the “other people”. Bedlam is the masses and mass culture – ears plugged into swinging WABC. The ticket needed to join “the good people” is a full wallet.’ 53 For art historian Jonathan Weinberg, in a similar vein, ‘the seduction of American consumer culture and its possible corrupting effects are at the centre of David Hockney’s A Rake’s Progress ’. 54

Such moralistic readings seem out of kilter with the playful feel and disconnected narrative structure of the series. Any trigger deriving from New York’s ‘Hogarthian’ underbelly is certainly not visible in the completed work. Indeed, an alternative reading of the underlying, programmatic ‘message’ of the series might be that the joys and sorrows of the contemporary world are a good deal less intensely felt, more standardised, banal and passive, than those confronted by Hogarth, a very contemporary artist in some ways but one whose mindset was rooted in traditions of Christian morality and tragic aesthetics that had come to seem dated. The Hockney figure inhabits the very different notion of being a rake, or rakish, that had come to prevail in more recent times, lacking the monstrous, immoral connotations of earlier conceptions, and understood more as a youthful ‘rebel without a cause’. Hockney was asserting, we might say, not only that modern life had moved on but also that the prevailing conditions of artistic practice in 1962 were very different from how such things stood in 1735. Rather than the viewer being instructed what to think and feel, now ‘you have to interpret it all’. Art, we infer, has shed its didactic purpose, and become a vehicle rather for the exercise of playfulness on the part of both artist and viewer. The inclusion of the sets of stairs and the serpent’s head in different scenes might even be taken to introduce reference to the well-known board game ‘Snakes and Ladders’, reinforcing the implication that the individual’s progression through life may have as much to do with the throw of the dice, or luck, as with character and moral choice. An interest in the diagrammatic imagery of board games is again paralleled in Boshier’s contemporary work. 55

Hockney’s own departures from the original may have been encouraged by a familiarity with the several other modern adaptations of A Rake’s Progress . These had included a 1935 ballet, with sets by Rex Whistler; a 1945 film starring Rex Harrison, with the story loosely transposed to modern London; and most famously the 1951 Stravinsky opera, with libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, which retained the eighteenth-century setting but significantly modified Hogarth’s narrative. Such works might at least have reinforced Hockney’s impulse to take the Hogarths as a springboard for spinning a personal variation. In his case, the relationship with the eighteenth-century model could be compared to that between My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean and its folk song source, which served as a pretext for depicting, with suitably parodic and wry detachment, what we take to be his revelation of his personal experiences and feelings. Indeed, the artistic references could be taken to insert a British cultural filter between artist and subsequently viewer and a set of experiences that must, in the early 1960s, have seemed exotic and quintessentially American, such as skyscraper architecture, concerts of gospel music, political rallies given over to registration rather than social policy, funeral display among the black community, transistor radios, big and bold adverts, jogging and gay bars. It is more compelling to view the Hogarths as giving Hockney licence to depict modern life, in a sequence of images, rather than stimulating him to project his own version of a didactic narrative.

The Hockneys are also remote from the elaborate artistic language of the eighteenth-century prototypes. Viewing Hockney’s A Rake’s Progress in purely aesthetic terms would surely not bring the example of Hogarth to mind. In the very first book-length treatment of pop art (1965), Mario Amaya already noted:

These etchings have little to do with Hogarth, despite their title, except that they come from the same English fondness for social satire. They are related more to the inventive freedom of style in the traditional English lampoon-caricature, which goes back to Gillray, Spy and others. Thus Hockney seems to have returned to a type of satire which Lawrence Alloway considered the first truly popular art. 56

Other points of reference also seem relevant. One might see a general stylistic and technical debt to printmaking by Picasso, such as in the ‘Vollard Suite’ where line drawing is sometimes combined with aquatint. But Hockney’s faux naïve figure style, with variations of scale indicating relative narrative importance, and the use of simplified architectural features as settings for the figurative action, seem more closely to reflect his documented enthusiasm for early Renaissance art, especially the work of Duccio. Thus, we might discern an echo in Hockney’s first scene of the composition of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem , as devised by Duccio for the Maestà altarpiece (1308–11). The schematic perspective of the table and inconsistent scale of the figures evoke scenes such as The Last Supper from the same source. Equally the discarded Hockney image There Will Never be Another Like It is strikingly reminiscent of Duccio’s depiction of the Angel sat on the tomb announcing the Resurrection to the Three Maries. 57 Likewise, we might note a distant echo of the Expulsion from Paradise theme, as depicted by an artist like Fra Angelico, in Hockney’s depiction of the wallet beginning to empty, while the tree in ‘The Seven-Stone Weakling’ seems to have migrated from an early Renaissance picture. 58 The story-telling dimension of such Old Master religious art was compatible, of course, with Hogarth’s secular morality tale, while the stylistic reference to the Italian ‘primitives’ reinforces the characterisation of the Hockney/rake figure as a wide-eyed innocent.

A Rake’s Progress has been seen to incorporate reference to the work of one of the first British artists to look back to Pre-Raphaelite artistic models, and also the single pre-twentieth-century British figure who spoke most compellingly to his successors of the modern period, namely William Blake. 59 In the opening image, for instance, the reference to the Flying Tigers airline, the American carrier with which Hockney had flown across the Atlantic, takes on the Blakean resonance of ‘Flying Tyger’. The engagement here and elsewhere with Italian art of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries also emphasises continuities between Hockney and Stanley Spencer (1891–1959), an obsessive fan of Renaissance art whose work Hockney had admired since his Bradford days and would continue to revere. 60 In relation to A Rake’s Progress , we might wonder whether Hockney was thinking at some level of Spencer’s account of his own quotidian experiences as a hospital orderly, and then at the front in Macedonia, in the rectangular scenes incorporated at the lower register of the great Burghclere Chapel decoration. The subsequent visit that Hockney and fellow artist Patrick Proctor paid to Spencer’s major masterpiece in Wiltshire, which had passed into the ownership of the National Trust, is documented by their signatures in the visitors’ book. 61

The idea that Hockney’s art was shaped to some degree by a sense of British roots is reinforced by the general aesthetic affinities visible in the etchings with the work of Christopher Wood (1901–1930), which provided another model for a seemingly naïve mode of figuration, devoted to scenes of unspoilt existence in Cornwall and especially in Brittany. Renewed awareness of Wood’s work in the London art world was prompted by an important exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in early 1959, which also generated a substantial illustrated publication. Beyond his artistic appeal, Wood surely exemplified for Hockney how an artist might project ease with his homosexuality, as apparent in Wood’s portraits, male nudes and, above all perhaps, in his painting Nude Boy in a Bedroom 1930, a rear view depiction with implicit sexual resonances, that strikingly foreshadows Hockney’s own distillation of homosexual desire in a work such as Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool 1966 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). 62

Hockney’s personal experiences during those two to three months in America is the second terrain to which the etchings might be said to make only oblique and selective reference. A Rake’s Progress may give off the general impression of being a travelogue, but the artist himself disclaimed that the tale was autobiographical. ‘It is not really me. It’s just that I use myself as a model because I’m always around.’ 63 One occasional determinant was finding equivalents to the scenes chosen by Hogarth to describe the rise and fall of Tom Rakewell. But we might note, too, the absence of all manner of experiences that doubtless came his way, such as visiting tourist and architectural sights like the Empire State Building, which he mentioned as on his list to Kitaj, or travelling on the subway. 64 Snapshots capture Hockney’s visit to Coney Island with his artist friend Billy Apple. 65 His most recent biographer records that Hockney took part in an anti-nuclear march in Greenwich Village. 66 Less surprisingly perhaps, the activity of looking at art does not feature in A Rake’s Progress . There is the reference to meeting William Liebermann and selling the prints. But we can assume that Hockney spent a good deal of his time going round the galleries of New York that summer, possibly accompanied by Berger and Amacker. In July Hockney reported to his family that ‘the museums here (and there are plenty of them) are quite marvellous and will take some time to absorb’. 67 Hockney has stated that Claes Oldenburg was the only American contemporary artist he actually met on his trip, when the future pop artist happened to be installing his ground-breaking ‘papier mâché shirts and ties’ at the Green Gallery. 68 The group show in question opened in September so the encounter occurred towards the end of Hockney’s stay. 69 Otherwise, we know next to nothing, from the etchings or any other source, about Hockney’s engagement with the New York art world.

Such a prolonged stay doubtless yielded a plethora of experiences and artistic ideas. Future research may establish the additional motifs Hockney had contemplated for A Rake’s Progress before he decided to edit the series down to the sixteen images. But, in its final manifestation, the series focuses upon a miscellaneous selection of the entertainments and amusements on offer in the city, strung together into a loose storyline. Overall A Rake’s Progress comes across as an amusing fiction, one might almost say fairy story, about the adventures of a young Englishman in New York who ends up going native. The Hockney figure who is Tom Rakewell’s successor has fun, gets around, spends a bit too much on shopping, drinks a bit too much, and succumbs to the lure of mass culture when he gets low on funds. But nothing too terrible or traumatic happens. As a droll tale of a young man having to shed his fantasies and come to terms with more mundane realities, A Rake’s Progress brings to mind not so much the historical Hogarth as the contemporary Billy Liar , the highly successful novel from 1959 by Hockney’s fellow Yorkshireman Keith Waterhouse. 70

In sum, neither the Hogarthian rake nor the autobiographical narratives take one very far in pinning down the genesis and aesthetic character of A Rake’s Progress . It may be, rather, that both served as armatures for artistic invention, enabling Hockney to channel his engagement with the contemporary cultural scene. The assimilation of American popular imagery was, of course, an emerging and provocative artistic strategy in New York at the time of his visit. In that context, it is likely that Hockney took back with him to London not just personal memories and drawings, but also a cache of magazines, catalogues and images that could then function as visual aids when devising episodes for inclusion in A Rake’s Progress . ‘Disintegration’ is a fairly literal adaptation to a 1960 advert for Bellows Whisky. ‘The Start of the Spending Spree’ likewise refers to adverts for Clairol, a brand heavily and successfully promoted at this time to women, which Hockney (like his American friends and also Billy Apple) had started using. Again, subsequent investigations may establish specific sources in popular visual culture for elements in other scenes.

One undoubted derivation indicates the breadth of Hockney’s visual resources. The image Death in Harlem (fig.13) seems the least explicable as an autobiographical episode during his trip, beyond implying he had paid a visit to Harlem. The artist subsequently connected his idea to a photograph by Cecil Beaton, an early collector of his work. 71 But, on visual grounds, one could more readily envisage a point of departure in one of the many such photographs produced by James van der Zee for Harlem funeral parlours. Van der Zee had been a significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance during the interwar period, and admiration in the New York art world culminated in the publication of The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978). Indeed, it transpires that Hockney’s particular source for his print was actually encountered in Beaton’s 1938 illustrated book about New York, accompanied by the same caption ‘Death in Harlem’, although Van der Zee is not identified by name as the creator of the image (fig.21). 72 Since many of the illustrations are indeed Beaton’s own photographs, Hockney’s conflation is hardly surprising. More generally, he was fascinated no doubt by Beaton’s account of Harlem as ‘a negro reservation in a white man’s city’, with its own vibrant homosexual and ‘drag’ culture. 73

Fig.21 Cecil Beaton, Cecil Beaton’s New York , London 1938, p.178. 

On another level, we might suppose that the culture of experimental printmaking that Hockney encountered at Pratt encouraged the general notion of a series or portfolio, as both an aesthetic and marketable proposition. The models offered by figures like Dine and Newman were noted earlier. The comparison between My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean and ‘Melancholy Breakfast’ established the possibility that Hockney was also aware of the Stones portfolio. Hockney’s etchings for A Rake’s Progress are more purely visual, and employ quite different techniques, but it is worth considering the possibility that, at some level, the informal designs and fragmented imagery in the Rivers/O’Hara collaboration may have been a catalyst for Hockney’s own conception of a multi-print cycle. If Hockney’s work is viewed as less homage to than parody of Hogarth’s rake narrative, then we might see loose parallels with the literary work of his British contemporaries such as Bradbury, for whom parody was a persistent strategy, and indeed with the wider burgeoning of satire associated with the comedy stage revue Beyond the Fringe, Peter Cook’s Establishment club, and the launch in 1961 of the satirical and current affairs news magazine Private Eye . Wit and irreverence were in the air in the early 1960s. But, in a different way, this was also a feature of avant-garde culture in New York. We might align Hockney with Rivers’s tongue-in-cheek appropriation of a revered historical model in his painting Washington Crossing the Delaware 1953 (followed by a more abstracted 1960 variant), or with the work of a poet, Frank O’Hara, whose major creations, according to poetry scholar Marjorie Perloff, ‘follow Romantic models, but he almost always injects a note of parody, turning the conventions he uses inside out’. 74

The autobiographical mode of A Rake’s Progress was likewise in tune with a current sensibility in America. In advising Hockney to make art that related to his own life and personal commitments, Kitaj was in effect relaying the aesthetic programme that O’Hara had developed for his poetry in the late 1950s. The short text by the poet in The New American Poetry offered an account of his poetic that would surely have resonated with Hockney, if he indeed encountered it: ‘I am mainly preoccupied with the world as I experience it … What is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems … It may be that poetry makes life’s nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial.’ 75 The sentiments match the informal, highly concrete tenor of O’Hara’s poetry, exploring the transient play of sensations, emotions and fantasies provoked by life in the city. This culminated in the conversational tone of the so-called ‘lunch hour poems’, composed during his breaks while working at the Museum of Modern Art. If we were seeking more specific links to O’Hara in A Rake’s Progress , we might note how the fifth plate, with the Clairol allusion, recalls the 1959 poem ‘Rhapsody’, in which the poet makes a characteristic transition from the mundane, and the New York street indelibly associated with the advertising industry, to wondrous revelation:

515 Madison Avenue door to Heaven? Portal stopped realities and eternal licentiousness. 76

Could it even be that, in developing the Death in Harlem image from the photograph in Beaton’s book about New York and so injecting a note of pathos into the series, Hockney was taking bearings from of one of the most wonderful of O’Hara’s ‘I do this, I do that’ poems, as his approach has been caricatured? ‘The Day Lady Died’ was another of the poems included in the 1960 New American Poetry anthology. Like A Rake’s Progress it is replete with numbers and capitalisations, as well as humdrum everyday experiences, until it reaches its poignant conclusion prompted by seeing a newspaper reporting the death of the jazz singer Billie Holliday:

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a cartoon of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing 77

Even if positing that link goes too far, we can sense a pronounced affinity between Hockney and a poet whose work was self-evidently autobiographical, but whose ambitions, according to Perloff, were remote from Romantic confessionalism: ‘the poet does not use the poem as a vehicle to lay bare his soul, to reveal his secret anxieties or provide autobiographical information’. 78 For James Breslin, likewise, ‘rather than struggling to recover a lost core of identity, O’Hara creates a theatricalized self that is never completely disclosed in any of its “scenes”’. 79 Those accounts sound congruent with the outlook elaborated in Hockney’s A Rake’s Progress . The idea of making a work about fragments of everyday experience, conveyed in a light and, so to speak, conversational tone, brings to mind O’Hara’s aesthetic. Hockney, too, cultivated a superficially autobiographical mode, but with everyday activities and imagery serving to keep at a distance any deeper psychic preoccupations or any notion of a core underlying self. Like O’Hara’s work, his series of images projects the sensibility of a latter-day flâneur, a notion that has become pervasive to the point of cliché in accounts of homosexual cultural life during the post-war decades.

The attempt here to complicate our understanding of Hockney’s A Rake’s Progress has yielded several paradoxes. On the face of it, the work projects an Englishman’s vision of New York, filtered through an English artistic paradigm. Yet it also seems illuminating to view A Rake’s Progress as presenting, in Hockney’s own artistic terms, a parallel to, perhaps emulation of, the inconsequential, playful, parodic manner elaborated in the work of stalwarts of the New York gay scene such as Rivers and O’Hara. An aspiration to produce work in this contemporary idiom may have been a primary catalyst, which subsequently became overlain with multiple decisions about what episodes to depict, within narrative frameworks implying both an autobiographical sequence and the fictive rise and fall of Hogarth’s unfortunate rake, and about the artistic language that would impose aesthetic coherence on the project. By that reckoning, it was contemporary American culture that in some sense prompted Hockney to conceive a work which also came to encapsulate a self-consciously British sensibility, in its Hogarthian resonance, affinities within earlier British modernism, generally ‘literary’ character, and air of ironic detachment. Equally, American models in art and literature may have encouraged him to develop a graphic project that was muted in its iconographic allusions to the artist’s sexuality, compared with the frank and polemical paintings he had been producing in the relative seclusion of his personal space at the Royal College of Art, but that nevertheless articulated a homosexual aesthetic through its artistic and literary citations and through its generally ‘camp’ tone, a term previously current in gay subculture but famously launched into high-brow critical discourse by New York critic Susan Sontag in 1964. 80

I may have overstated the concrete connections and possibilities of ‘influence’, but the American aesthetic affinities of A Rake’s Progress are unmistakable. By way of one final incongruity, we might note that the print series narrates the declining fortunes of the fictive Hockneyesque figure, but as an artefact in its own right it celebrates the creation of a singular artistic identity, based on his assimilation of an array of available stimuli, high and low, British and American, contemporary and traditional, visual and literary, cultural and social. While the depicted rake, Hockney’s surrogate self, lapsed in the end into cultural conformism and anonymity, the actual Hockney succeeded with such works in realising his individuality and giving expression to a distinctive voice on the newly transatlantic art scene of the 1960s.

Ellie Claire Fine Art Blog

A timeline of my work at Cardiff School of Art and Design

Subject – Artist Research – David Hockney

David Hockney (b.1937) is a multidisciplinary artist from Yorkshire, working professionally as a painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. Early in his career, Hockney was an integral contributor to the British contribution to Pop Art, made so famous by Warhol.

When I was thinking about travel and travelling to inspire works, I automatically thought of a series that Hockney created based on Yorkshire.

In 2000, Hockney began to create a series of Plein-Air paintings based on his home county; Yorkshire. He travelled back there after living in the States for a while and created what I would describe as a loving homage to what was once his home.

These two paintings, from his Yorkshire series, are rather unique, as in my mind, they depict the same location, though unless you were informed of that, you would not know. I really like Hockney’s use of bold and bright colours which you probably would not actually see in nature naturally such as blue trees. Both depictions of Garrowby Hill display a winding road, sprawling it’s way across the notoriously hilly Yorkshire landscape. Hockney uses bright colours to re-create and capture imaginatively, though accurately, the various natural elements that he saw before him into the painting. To capture the snake-like movement of the road through the countryside, Hockney lined the side of the road with trees, in an unforgettable manner with them altering angles, shapes and sizes to that of real life, adding to a dreamlike aura around the work. The detail Hockney achieved when painting the leaves on the trees is an aspect of the piece that many return to and discuss.

The first image, tagged with a little 1 for reference, depicts a truly windy road, but I cannot help but get lost entirely in the crop field maze beyond the winding road, as opposed to the road and the leaves. I really like the small details Hockney added to the fields which do not take away from the foreground of the piece, which is the start of the road heading down. In the strips of red running by the road, you can imagine it to be likened to some sort of crop. On the second piece, I happen to prefer the depiction of the trees, as they seem completely unrealistic yet possible. The red lines to depict crops have returned but with this particular piece, it happens to be that the image is more compressed and the road is facing upwards, which removes the chance for long, lost vistas but more a steep incline. Out of the two, I prefer the first image, because of the never-ending fields. I feel that that is more accurate in regards to the British Countryside and how it can be one long road in between fields

The composition of both pieces flatter the location, and accurately let you, as the viewer, get lost in the landscape. Something magical about pieces that can transport you to the location, even if it is not photorealistic accurate, have done their job in my mind. Hockney has been able to recreate the hilly landscapes of Yorkshire in a very appealing manner, and the colour scheme only compliments the depiction. The layered composition, by creating a depth of field with the road adds a stronger aspect of realism in the sense of accurate re-creation to the final outcomes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

• http://www.david-hockney.org
• https://www.mfa.org/collections/object/garrowby-hill-51520
• https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/david-hockney-1293

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Author: ellieclaireartblog

University Art student, still trying to find that perfect pen. View all posts by ellieclaireartblog

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