David Hockney was born in Bradford
in 1937, the fourth of five children. By the time he won a
scholarship to Bradford Grammar School at the age of eleven he
had already decided that he wanted to be an artist. He drew for
the school magazine and produced posters for the school debating
society as a substitute for homework. At sixteen he managed to
persuade his parents to let him go to the local art school, and
this was followed by two years of working in hospitals as an
alternative to National Service, as he had registered as a
conscientious objector. After this he went to the Royal College
of Art in London to continue his studies, arriving there in
1959:
Immediately after
I started at the Royal College I realized that
there were two groups of students there: a
traditional group, who carried on as they had
done in art school, doing still life, life
painting and figure compositions; and then what
I thought of as the more adventurous, lively
students, the brightest ones, who were involved
in the art of their time. They were doing big
Abstract Expressionist paintings on hardboard.
In the same year Hockney made a
series of discoveries. He visited New York, and was struck by
the freedom of American society - it was at this stage that he
bleached his hair and began to present a new image, fuelled not
only by the United States but also by his discovery of the
poetry of Whitman and Cavafy. He had begun to make etchings, and
on his return to England set to work on a series of prints which
were a modern version of Hogarth's Rake's Progress, and which
reflected his American experiences. He also visited Italy for
the first time in December 1961 and Berlin in 1962.
Hockney's success was so rapid
that he became independent very soon after leaving the Royal
College and did not, like the vast majority of his
contemporaries, have to rely on teaching in order to make a
living. In 1963 he travelled to Egypt at the invitation of the
London Sunday Times, then at the end of the year went to Los
Angeles, a city he had always fantasized about:
Within a week of arriving
there in this strange big city, not knowing a soul, I'd
passed the driving test, bought a car, driven to Las Vegas
and won some money, got myself a studio, started painting,
all within a week. And I thought, it's just how I imagined
it would be.
The Los Angeles lifestyle and
landscape became important features of Hockney's work. There
were other important changes in his work as well: he started
using acrylics rather than oil paint and he made increasing use
of photography for purposes of documentation. His life was
professionally successful - he had no fewer than five one-man
exhibitions in Europe in 1966 - and personally happy. In 1966 he
met Peter Schlesinger, a young Californian art student who
became his lover and favourite model.
In 1968 Hockney
returned to England with Peter, who enrolled at the
Slade. But gradually the relationship came under
increasing strain, and in 1970 it broke up. This
break-up was recorded in Jack Hazan's film, A Bigger
Splash, a candid documentary about Hockney's life
and work, which was being made at this time. This
was also the year in which Hockney had his first
major retrospective exhibition, at the Whitechapel
Art Gallery in London.
In 1973 Hockney went to live in
Paris for a while. He took the opportunity while he was there to
work with Aldo and Piero Crommelynck, who had been Picasso's
master printers, and produced a series of etchings in memory of
Picasso who had died earlier that year, and who had been one of
Hockney's heroes since he saw the Picasso exhibition at the Tate
Gallery in the summer of 1960. In 1974 there was a large
exhibition of Hockney's work at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in
Paris.
During this period Hockney was
also experimenting both with large composite photographs and
with works made of paper pulp impregnated with colour - the
Paper Pools. From 1982 Hockney explored the use of the camera,
making composite images of Polaroid photographs arranged in a
rectangular grid. Later he used regular 35-millimetre prints to
create photocollages, compiling a 'complete' picture from a
series of individually photographed details.
After working with master printer
Ken Tyler in the 1980s on making etchings and lithographs, in
1986 Hockney explored ways of creating work with with colour
photocopiers. 'The works I did with the copying machine ... were
not reproductions,' he said later, 'they were very complex
prints.' Subject to the same curiosity about new technical
methods, he began to experiment with the fax machine, and in
1989 even sent work for the Sao Paulo Biennale to Brazil via the
telephone line. Experiments using computers followed, composing
images and colours on the screen and having them printed
directly from the computer disk without preliminary proofing.
Text from Edward Lucie-Smith,
Lives of the Great 20th Century Artists |
