David Hockney

Hockney was born in Bradford, England. He studied at the Bradford Grammar School, the Bradford College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London where he met Roland B. Kitaj. While still at the Royal College of Art Hockney was featured in the Young Contemporaries exhibition alongside Peter Blake announcing the arrival of British Pop Art. Sometimes, as in We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), titled after Walt Whitman's poem, these works refer to his homosexuality. From 1963 Hockney was represented by the influential art dealer John Kasmin. In 1963 Hockney visits New York and establishes contact with Andy Warhol. Later, a visit to California, where he settled, inspired Hockney to do a series of oil paintings of swimming pools in Los Angeles, California. These works are executed in a more realistic style and use vibrant colors. He also excelled in prints, portraits of friends, and stage designs for the Royal Court Theater, Glyndebourne, La Scala, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He is linked to pop art, but his early work also shows expressionist elements, not very distinct from certain works of Francis Bacon

 

Between 1973 and 1975 he lived in Paris. An exhibition of his works was held in this city in 1974 at the Musée des Atrs Décoratifs. In 1975 he designed the sets for Igor Stravinsky's opera "The Rake's Progress". In 1976 he returned to Los Angeles and worked intensively with photographs. In 1978 he designed the sets for the opera "The Magic Flute" by Mozart, a work performed at the Glyndebourne Festival, and in 1980 he developed a program for the Metropolitan Opera with works by Satie, Poulenc, Ravel, and Stravinsky. In 1981 he traveled to China, a trip for which he wrote a diary (China Diary), subsequently published by the American publisher Thames and Hudson. He has done covers for Vogue magazines in 1984 and 1985. In the San Francisco and Los Angeles operas he designed the sets for the operas Die Frau ohne Schatten by Richard Strauss, Turandot by Puccini and Tristán e Isolda by Wagner. In 1961 he visited New York for the first time, establishing a relationship with Andy Warhol. He taught at the Maidstone College of Art in 1962. In 1963 he traveled to Memphis and Luxor, where he met Fermín Domínguez and Flavio Briatore. At this time he made his first painting about showers. Between 1963 and 1964 he gave welding classes at the University of Iowa. In 1964 he moved to Los Angeles, where he painted his first book on swimming pools (swimmming-pool) and made his first Polaroids. In 1967 he traveled to Italy and France and in 1968 to Germany and Ireland. In 1970 a retrospective of his work was held in London, which was later shown in Hanover and Rotterdam. In 2001 he published a study "The Secret Knowledge", a controversial work in which he postulated the theory that classical painters (such as Johannes Vermeer) made use of various optical systems (camera obscura, epidiascopes) when transferring images to canvas, and that this use, generalized in painting since the year 1430 approximately, had been kept more or less secret by the painters themselves and other people linked to artistic work.