Discover the colorful world of David Hockney

David Hockney (9 July 1937 – 11 June 2026) was an influential English painter, printmaker, photographer, and stage designer who became a leading figure of the 1960s pop art movement. Renowned for his vibrant use of color and masterly depiction of light, he is perhaps best known for his iconic, sun-drenched paintings of Los Angeles swimming pools and expressive portraits. Let’s look into our article now!

The text below is the excerpt of the book The Pop Art Tradition (ISBN: 9781783107490), written by Eric Shanes, published by Parkstone International.

David Hockney is, of course, perhaps the most admired painter of the Pop/Mass-Culture Art tradition to have emerged in Britain. Born in the north of England, he studied art in his hometown of Bradford before becoming a post-graduate at the Royal College of Art in London between 1959 and 1962. At the college Hockney almost immediately met R.B. Kitaj who encouraged him to abandon the Abstract Expressionist approach he was dutifully following, in favour of his true artistic interests. As a result, Hockney entered the first of his many mature stylistic phases.

Like his supreme artistic hero, Pablo Picasso, Hockney has passed through differing creative stages. The first of these lasted between 1961 and 1966, and arguably it proved the most visually inventive period of his entire career. Stylistically it owed much to the influence of the French painter Jean Dubuffet, who had developed an intentionally crude manner of painting based upon the visual and expressive directness of graffiti and child art. The slightly childlike side of Hockney’s nature found this approach highly congenial. Other influences were ancient Egyptian sculpture, the paintings of Piero della Francesca and Jan Vermeer, and the pictures and prints of William Hogarth. By drawing upon such stimuli, Hockney was able to explore a number of preoccupations that have remained constants in his work down to the present day: the relationship between art and illusion; perspective and its contradictions; and his homosexual impulses, which he has never denied. Occasionally he even demonstrated an awareness of mass-culture and its artefacts, as can be seen in his Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style of 1961. Here he attained a number of goals simultaneously: he represented a familiar consumer product; he got in a cheap joke at Francis Bacon’s expense; and he explored the nature of pictorial space. To do so he used a shaped canvas in a sideways look at what American painters such as Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella were doing contemporaneously with such supports.

Between 1961 and 1963 Hockney projected a far more complex set of responses to contemporary mass-culture in his series of etchings, “The Rake’s Progress”, of which one example is reproduced opposite and some others are discussed. In this sequence he updated William Hogarth’s famous set of engravings by transporting his rake to present-day New York and Washington, and charted his downfall there. Amid other subjects the images deal with contemporary religious mass-meetings, body-building athleticism, gay sexuality, political elections, the cinema and race relations, psychiatric deterioration and the mental subjugation enforced by pop music.

In 1964, following his first visit to southern California, Hockney began dealing pictorially with American art collectors and the artificial ambiance in which they lived; a memorable painting in this vein is the California Art Collector of 1964 which owes a good deal stylistically to Piero della Francesca. However, by 1966, Hockney began to move away from the freewheeling spatial organisation and intentionally crude drawing of his initial manner and gravitated towards a more conventional organisation of space and a more traditional way of modelling forms. This is unsurprising, for by now he was becoming increasingly reliant upon photographs to supply the visual information needed for his pictures. In this second phase, Hockney surveyed the clean-cut but somehow inert side of Los Angeles life. Such an approach is typified by the portrait of Nick Wilder of 1966. Here the influence of Vermeer is quite apparent, for almost all the major compositional lines run parallel to the edges of the canvas and thus imbue the image with a still, hieratic quality. In A Bigger Splash of 1967 Hockney captured to perfection the artificiality, heat and stillness of affluent, hedonistic Los Angeles, where the sun is always shining and the pool constantly beckons.

During the 1970s Hockney generally lost interest in the mass-culture around him, preferring to paint his friends and relatives, as well as landscapes and still-lifes. However, towards the end of that decade he started exploring the subject of swimming pools once again, especially in a memorable set of prints in which he was able to take advantage of a new method of bonding pigment and paper. Throughout this fourth phase of his development the influence of Picasso’s Cubism constantly increased, motivating Hockney to explore all kinds of perspectival contradictions. And the garish colouring of Fauvism also began to creep into his work, which proved exceedingly handy when he began representing the hot landscapes of Los Angeles and its environs in a fifth phase of his development around 1980. In these works Hockney ably projected the suburban sprawl, garish colours and varieties of form encountered in one of the most inelegant cities on the planet. His exploration of Polaroid photography, with the spatial disjunctions and intense focusing of attention upon details it can bring into play when used in collaged form, also permitted him to create a most memorable image of the American landscape and its despoliation by endless signs.

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