David Hockney Left a Pioneering and Playful Artistic Legacy

It is hard to imagine a more influential artistic giant of the last 60 years than David Hockney. A Yorkshire native who graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1964, Hockney proved to be a cheeky maverick, an idiosyncratic realist with an unmistakeable combination of bright colors and relentless inventiveness. Having been ill in recent years, Hockney passed away on June 11 at his studio residence in London. He was 88 years old.Hockney was born in Bradford, Yorkshire in July 1937, the fourth of five children. His father ran an accounting firm while his mother designed patterns for drapery. Both were outspoken pacificists, raising the young Hockney in a non-conformist household. Hockney would carry this quiet oppositional streak throughout his lifetime. When the art world did one thing, he did another.As a gay man in England when it was a crime, and a figurative realist when painting itself had been declared all but dead, Hockney was a contrarian, forging his idiosyncratic path with whimsy and aplomb. His eccentric personal style, colorful British dandyism with cheerfully mismatched patterns, made him a mascot in the British press. Topped with his mop of bleached hair and owlish black spectacles, he was unmistakeably Britains first true “art star.”Hockney may have shrewdly styled himself as an icon, but his reach and his productivity were anything but superficial. He forged ahead with staggering productivity, estimated to have made 35,000 total works. What sets him apart is not sheer volume, but breadth. Hockney experimented constantly with different aspects of image-making across his career, taking many startlingly unexpected turns. He brought an immense curiosity to whatever he turned his attention to.He began his painting career largely in a new medium — acrylic, producing cool figurative studies and psychologically astute portraits. He then branched into photography, collage, stage design, and finally digital art. Hockney’s iPad drawings invigorated and reinvented the medium, showing analogue artists what was possible. He once produced an entire mural using a photocopier and then sent the work to the Sao Paolo Biennale by fax. In his later years, he would return to plain air landscapes of the Yorkshire countryside, often massive wall-spanning assemblages of stacked canvases.‘Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy,’ by David Hockney, 1968. David Hockney.It all began for Hockney in Los Angeles. Upon graduating at the age of 26, Hockney realized his theatrical persona was perfectly suited for Los Angeles. Moving to Santa Monica, he was immediately taken in by British expat Christopher Isherwood and his lover Don Bachardy — later they would be the subject of one of his most striking double portraits.Hockney’s biggest success from this period were his poolside scenes like the 1967 painting “A Bigger Splash,” a minimalist pool exterior with only a frothy plume of water indicating a human presence. This was at a time when other artists had figures standing poolside in meditative, almost dreamlike lucidity. Hockney had forged an updated painterly sensuality, deploying clean modern lines, limpid colors and plenty of negative space, along with athletic young men. It enshrined the West Coast as an empyrean, imbued with its own sublimity and its own tensions. It spoke to the era as effectively as Joan Didion.Hockney was more than a painter, however. An invitation to share his photography with the Centre Pompidou led him to experiment with elaborate composites of polaroids. These struck a balance between abstraction and the figuration that he favored, rendering his photographic subjects as cubistic collages. These gave way to landscapes, such as his 1986 work “Pearblossom Highway,” where the tiled and overlapping polaroids appear to echo the shimmering desert heat of the scene. ‘Pearblossom Highway, 11th-18th April, 1986, #2,’ by David Hockney, 1986. David HockneyHockney excelled at using technical innovation in a way that both popularized new mediums and fused continuity with past practices. Experimenting with lenses and simple projecting devices, for instance, he endeavored to prove that the great masters had not drawn only from hand but often traced their subjects projected onto paper though the use of mirrored lenses. Claiming this to be the secret behind the eerie realism of the Renaissance and later portraiture, he revealed his findings in a 2001 book entitled “Secret Knowledge.” He also created hundreds of drawn and painted portraits in the process. The revelation caused a minor firestorm in the art world, with many critics and artists dismissed the theory. Ever the contrarian, Hockney stuck to his guns.It all formed part of a larger emergent philosophy — technology was a necessary adjunct to art. He pointed out, for example, that the large plein air canvases of the impressionists would have been unfeasible without metal tubes of paint. He said the same for convenience of iPads which had no drying time, an endless array of color, “an endless piece of paper.” This is what makes Hockney difficult to classify. It is not enough to call him a realist, though he stubbornly championed figuration, especially in later years, and decried “joyless” abstraction. He was instead an advocate of the playful and human in art. This was a consistent quality across Hockney’s work, including his innovative stage designs. There was never a lack of human warmth and whimsy, a quality that links him to Henri Matisse whose work inspired his earlier paintings.‘The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate,’ by David Hockney, 2011, via iPad. Sotheby’s Hockney also cleaved to a style of bohemianism and joie de vivre that he carried on insistently into his declining years. He was never without Turkish cigarettes, and famously advocated for smoker’s rights, once holding up a sign at a rally that said “death awaits you even if you do smoke.” A member of the artistic social set when the partying was at its peak, he eventually renounced alcohol after a heart attack.Yet he never renounced his intense zeal for life. It was a zest that served him well, moving him from success to success. He would eventually pursue projects in homes and studios in Los Angeles, London, and his native Yorkshire, shuttling about and continuously creating. I had the opportunity to meet Hockney at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto when he had his show “Fresh Flowers: Drawings on iPhone and iPad” in 2011. Hockney personally showed me the special pocket in his suit jacket, which his tailors had retrofitted to hold an iPad. Suitably given his artistic eclecticism, he was on his way to the opera that evening.Astonishingly all the success never appeared to tarnish or blunt his childlike capacity for wonder. If he was anything, Hockney was an enthusiast.

David Hockney Left a Pioneering and Playful Artistic Legacy

David Hockney Left a Pioneering and Playful Artistic Legacy

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