David Hockney, a giant of British painting for six decades, has died.
The artist attended the Royal College of Art to study painting in 1959, featuring in the exhibition New Contemporaries that heralded Pop art.
Nonetheless Hockney found the London artworld of the period stifling and, after graduation, he moved to Los Angeles. There, taking inspiration from the cool modernism of the West coast light and architecture, he produced what would remain some of his most iconic works. Most of all A Bigger Splash (1967), in which we see a modern villa across a swimming pool, is devoid of figures, the human presence given by the splash made below a diving board.
At the time of his first retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1970, Hockney was making portraits: Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy was the first in a series of seven double portraits executed between 1968 and 1975. The playwright and artist are pictured sitting in their Santa Monica home. In the 1971 work Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1971), Hockney shows, in clear lines and a pale palette the fashion designer Ossie Clark and textile designer Celia Birtwell in their flat in Notting Hill Gate, alongside their cat (whose actual name was Blanche).
Pools and the alluring freedom they represent, remained a recurring – and lucrative – motif. Hockney’s 1972 work Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) went on the become the most expensive artwork by a living artist sold at auction, making £70 million in 2018.
In the 1980s, living in the Hollywood Hills, Hockney turned to photo collage as a medium, marking the beginning of his embrace of new technology, experimenting with early computers to make work. He went on use Photoshop in the 1990s and then made a series pf iPad paintings after the turn of the millennium. By then he was spending more time back in his native Yorkshire, and as well as painting en plein air on canvas, he used the the computer screen to capture the landscape in verdant expressionistic strokes that belied the medium.
From his LACMA retrospective exhibition in 1988 – which travelled to The Met, New York, and Tate, London – Hockney never seemed to be wanting for museum shows, or out of fashion, clocking up over 400 solo shows in his lifetime.
