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David Hockney (born 9 July 1937) is an English Painting, Drawing, Printmaking, Scenic design, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Hockney has owned residences and studios in Bridlington and London as well as two residences in California, where he has lived intermittently since 1964: one in the Hollywood Hills, one in Malibu. He has an office and stores his archives on Santa Monica Boulevard David Hockney, Mulholland Drive (1980) LACMA. Retrieved 1 May 2013 in West Hollywood, California.
On 15 November 2018, Hockney's 1972 work Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at Christie's auction house in New York City for $90 million (£70 million), becoming the most expensive artwork by a living artist sold at auction. It broke the previous record which was set by the 2013 sale of Jeff Koons's Balloon Dog for $58.4 million. Hockney held the record until 15 May 2019 when Koons reclaimed the honour by selling his Rabbit for more than $91 million at Christie's in New York.
At the Royal College of Art, Hockney featured – alongside Peter Blake – in the exhibition New Contemporaries, which announced the arrival of British Pop art. He was associated with the movement, but his early works display Expressionism elements which are similar to some of Francis Bacon's works.
When the RCA said it would not let him graduate if he did not complete an assignment of a life drawing of a live model in 1962, Hockney painted Life Painting for a Diploma in protest. He had refused to write an essay required for the final examination and said that he should be assessed solely on his artworks. Recognising his talent and growing reputation, the RCA changed its regulations and awarded him a diploma. After leaving the RCA, he taught at Maidstone College of Art for a short time. He taught at the University of Iowa in 1964. Hockney also taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1965. Next he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1966 to 1967 and then at the University of California, Berkeley in 1967.
In 1978 he rented a home in the Hollywood Hills; he later bought and expanded the house to include his studio. He also owned a 1,643-square-foot beach house at 21039 Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, which he sold in 1999 for about $1.5 million (£1.2 million). In the 1990s, Hockney returned more often to Yorkshire, usually every three months, to visit his mother who died in 1999. Until 1997, he rarely stayed for more than two weeks, when his friend Jonathan Silver who was terminally ill, encouraged him to capture the local surroundings. At first he did this with paintings based on memory, some from his boyhood. In 1998, he completed his painting of the Yorkshire landmark, Garrowby Hill. Hockney returned to Yorkshire for increasingly longer stays and by 2003 was painting the countryside en plein air in both oils and watercolour.
Hockney set up residence and studio in a converted bed and breakfast, in the seaside town of Bridlington, about from where he was born. The oil paintings he produced after 2005 were influenced by his intensive studies in watercolour, a series titled Midsummer: East Yorkshire (2003–2004). David Hockney: Paintings 2006–2009, 29 October – 24 December 2009 Pace Gallery, New York. He created paintings made of multiple smaller canvases — two to fifty — placed together. To help him visualise work at that scale, he used digital photographic reproductions to study the day's work. In spring 2020 he stayed at La Grande Cour, a farmhouse and studio in Normandy, during the global COVID-19 pandemic.
From 1999 to 2001 Hockney used a Camera Lucida for his research into art history as well as his own work in the studio. He created over 200 drawings of friends, family, and himself using this antique lens-based device.
In 2016, the Royal Academy exhibited Hockney's series entitled 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life which traveled to Ca' Pesaro in Venice, Italy, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, in 2017 and to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2018. Hockney calls the paintings started in 2013 "twenty-hour exposures" because each sitting took six to seven hours on three consecutive days.
In 1973 Hockney began a fruitful collaboration with Aldo Crommelynck, Picasso's preferred printer. In his atelier, he adopted Crommelynck's trademark sugar lift, as well as a system of the master's own devising of imposing a wooden frame onto the plate to ensure colour separation. Their early work together included Artist and Model (1973–74) and Contrejour in the French Style (1974). In 1976–77 Hockney created The Blue Guitar, a suite of 20 etchings, each utilising Crommelynck's techniques and filled with references to Picasso. The frontispiece to the suite mentions Hockney's dual inspiration; "The Blue Guitar: Etchings By David Hockney Who Was Inspired By Wallace Stevens Who Was Inspired By Pablo Picasso". The etchings refer to themes in a poem by Wallace Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar. It was published by Petersburg Press in October 1977. That year, Petersburg also published a book in which the images were accompanied by the poem's text. (1977). 9780902825031, Petersburg Ltd. ISBN 9780902825031
In the summer of 1978, David Hockney stayed for six weeks with his friend the printer Ken Tyler at Tyler's studio in New York, Tyler Graphics Ltd. Tyler invited Hockney to try a new technique with liquid paper. The process is painting with the paper itself, so the artist had to do it himself by hand. Each image becomes a unique work between printmaking and painting. In six weeks, Hockney created a total of 29 artworks with a series of 17 sunflowers and swimming pools. Many of the works are very similar, differentiated by changes in colour choice and application of the colour. Some are solely coloured using paper pulp, while some use spray paint to achieve certain details.
Some of Hockney's other print portfolios include Home Made Prints (1986), Recent Etchings (1998) and Moving Focus (1984–1986), which contains lithographs related to A Walk Around the Hotel Courtyard, Acatlan. A retrospective of his prints, including 'computer drawings' printed on fax machines and inkjet printers, was exhibited at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London 5 February – 11 May 2014 and Bowes Museum, County Durham 7 June – 28 September 2014, with an accompanying publication, Hockney, Printmaker, by Richard Lloyd.
He arrived at the idea of "joiners" accidentally. In the late 1960s, he noticed that photographers were using cameras with wide-angle lenses; he did not like the resulting photographs because they looked somewhat distorted. While working on a painting of a living room and terrace in Los Angeles, he took Polaroid shots of the living room and glued them together, not intending for them to be a composition on their own. On looking at the final composition, he realised it created a narrative, as if the viewer moved through the room. He began to work more with photography after this discovery, stopping painting for a while to pursue this new technique exclusively.
Over time, he also discovered what he could capture with a lens, saying: "Photography seems to be rather good at portraiture, or can be. But, it can't tell you about space, which is the essence of landscape. For me anyway. Even Ansel Adams can't quite prepare you for what Yosemite looks like when you go through that tunnel and you come out the other side." Frustrated with the limitations of photography and its 'one-eyed' approach, he returned to painting.Hockney on Art – Paul Joyce
Since 2009, Hockney has painted hundreds of portraits, still lifes and landscapes using the free and open-source Brushes Redux iPhone and iPad application, often sending them to his friends. In 2010 and 2011, Hockney visited Yosemite National Park to draw its landscape on his iPad. He used an iPad in designing a stained glass window at Westminster Abbey which celebrated the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. Unveiled in September 2018, the Queen's Window is located in the north transept of the Abbey and features a hawthorn blossom scene which is set in Yorkshire.
From 2010 to 2014, Hockney created multi-camera movies using three to eighteen cameras to record a single scene. He filmed the landscape of Yorkshire in various seasons, jugglers and dancers, and his own exhibitions within the de Young Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts. His earlier photo collages influenced his shift to another medium, digital photography. He combined hundreds of photographs to create multi-viewpoint "photographic drawings" of groups of his friends in 2014. Hockney picked the process back up in 2017, this time using the more advanced Agisoft PhotoScan photogrammetric software which allowed him to stitch together and rearrange thousands of photos. The resulting images were printed out as massive photomurals and were exhibited at Pace Gallery and LACMA in 2018.
In 2017, Hockney was awarded the San Francisco Opera Medal on the occasion of the revival and restoration of his production for Turandot. The majority of his theatre works and stage design studies are found in the collection of The David Hockney Foundation.
In October 2006, the National Portrait Gallery in London organised one of the largest ever displays of Hockney's portraiture work, including 150 paintings, drawings, prints, sketchbooks, and photocollages from over five decades. The collection ranged from his earliest self-portraits to work he completed in 2005. Hockney assisted in displaying the works and the exhibition, which ran until January 2007, was one of the gallery's most successful. In 2009, "David Hockney: Just Nature" attracted some 100,000 visitors at the Kunsthalle Würth in Schwäbisch Hall, Germany.
From 21 January 2012 to 9 April 2012, the Royal Academy presented , which included more than 150 works, many of which take entire walls in the gallery's brightly lit rooms. The exhibition is dedicated to landscapes, especially trees and of his native Yorkshire. Works included oil paintings, watercolours, and drawings created on an iPad and printed on paper. Hockney said, in a 2012 interview, "It's about big things. You can make paintings bigger. We're also making photographs bigger, videos bigger, all to do with drawing." The exhibition drew more than 600,000 visitors in under 3 months. The exhibition moved to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain from 15 May to 30 September, and from there to the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany, between 27 October 2012 and 3 February 2013.
From 26 October 2013 to 30 January 2014 David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition was presented at the de Young Museum, one of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The largest solo exhibition Hockney has had, with 397 works of art in more than 18,000 square feet, was curated by Gregory Evans and included the only public showing of The Great Wall, developed during research for Secret Knowledge, and works from 1999 to 2013 in a variety of media from camera lucida drawings to watercolours, oil paintings, and digital works.
From 9 February to 29 May 2017 David Hockney was presented at the Tate Britain, becoming the most-visited exhibition in the gallery's history. The exhibition marked Hockney's 80th year and gathered together "an extensive selection of David Hockney's most famous works celebrating his achievements in painting, drawing, print, photography and video across six decades". Tabish Khan in his five-star review for Londonist draws attention to Hockney's adaptation of new technology for the exhibition stating “What we love the most about Hockney is that he doesn't stop experimenting with age. Many of his iPad drawings are on display and while not his finest work, they show he's willing to try out new tools and techniques”. The show then travelled to Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The wildly popular retrospective landed among the top ten ticketed exhibitions in London and Paris for 2017 with over 4,000 visitors per day at the Tate and over 5,000 visitors per day in Paris.
After the blockbuster exhibitions in 2017 of the works of decades past, Hockney went on to display his newest paintings on hexagonal canvases and mural-size 3D photographic drawings at Pace Gallery in 2018. He revisited paintings of Garrowby Hill, the Grand Canyon, and Nichols Canyon Road, this time painting them on hexagonal canvases to enhance aspects of reverse perspective. In 2019, his early work featured in his native Yorkshire at The Hepworth Wakefield. In April–June 2022 an exhibition "Hockney's Eye: The Art and Technology of Depiction" was held at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and at the city's Heong Gallery. In 2023 the Honolulu Museum of Art (HoMA) presented "David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed, Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation." The exhibition is the largest retrospective print exhibition of Hockney's career, with more than 100 colourful prints, collages and photographic and iPad drawings, in a variety of media, spanning six decades of the artist's career.
From 9 April to 31 August 2025, Fondation Louis Vuitton, hosted David Hockney 25, an exhibition with paintings in a variety of media created from 1955-2025, as well as immersive video. The catalog was edited by Norman Rosenthal
In the summer of 1966, while teaching at UCLA, he met Peter Schlesinger, an art student who posed for paintings and drawings, and with whom he became romantically involved. Another of Hockney's romantic partners who was the subject of his work was Gregory Evans; the two met in 1971 and began a relationship in 1974. While no longer romantically involved, they still work together, with Evans managing the David Hockney Studio. Hockney's current partner is longtime companion Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima. Also known as JP, he also works with Hockney in his studio as his chief assistant.
In March 2013, Hockney's 23-year-old assistant, Dominic Elliott, died as a result of drinking drain cleaner at Hockney's Bridlington studio; he had earlier taken both drugs and alcohol. Hockney's partner drove Elliott to Scarborough General Hospital where he later died. The inquest returned a verdict of death by misadventure. In November 2015 Hockney sold his house in Bridlington ending his connections with the town.
Next he moved to Normandy and lived in Rumesnil, near Beuvron-en-Auge, until 2023, before returning to London. He holds a California Medical Marijuana Verification Card, which enables him to buy cannabis for medical purposes. He has used hearing aids since 1979, but realised he was going deaf long before then. As of 2018, he has been keeping fit by spending a half hour in the swimming pool every morning; he has been able to stand for six hours at the easel.
Hockney has synesthesia between sound, colour and shape.
In 2012, he was appointed to the Order of Merit, an honour restricted to 24 members at any one time for their contributions to the arts and sciences. He was a Distinguished Honoree of the National Arts Association, Los Angeles, in 1991 and received the First Annual Award of Achievement from the Archives of American Art, Los Angeles, in 1993. He was appointed to the board of trustees of the American Associates of the Royal Academy Trust, New York in 1992 and was given a Foreign Honorary Membership to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1997. In 2003, Hockney was awarded the Lorenzo de' Medici Lifetime Career Award of the Florence Biennale, Italy. David Hockney: Paintings 2006–2009, 2 October – 24 December 2009 Pace Gallery, New York. Commissioned by The Other Art Fair, a November 2011 poll of 1,000 British painters and sculptors declared him Britain's most influential artist of all time. In 2012, Hockney was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork – the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover – to celebrate the British cultural figures of his life that he most admires.
He is an honorary member of the Printmakers Council.
His A Bigger Grand Canyon, a series of 60 canvases that combined to produce one enormous picture, was bought by the National Gallery of Australia for $4.6 million.
Beverly Hills Housewife (1966–67), a 12-foot-long acrylic that depicts the collector Betty Freeman standing by her pool in a long hot-pink dress, sold for $7.9 million at Christie's in New York in 2008, the top lot of the sale and a record price for a Hockney. This was topped in 2016 when his Woldgate Woods landscape made £9.4 million at auction. The record was broken again in 2018 with the sale of Piscine de Medianoche ( Paper Pool 30) for $11.74 million and then doubled in the same Sotheby's auction when Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica sold for $28.5 million.
On 15 November 2018, David Hockney's 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at Christie's for $90.3 million with fees, surpassing the previous auction record for a living artist of $58.4 million, held by Jeff Koons for one of his Balloon Dog sculptures. He had originally sold this painting for $20,000 in 1972.
In recent years, David Hockney's iPad drawings have become the most successful segment of his print market. Since the initial release of the Arrival of Spring in Woldgate series, prices have increased from roughly £19,000 in 2014 up to the current auction record of £340,200 in 2022.
He is a staunch pro-tobacco campaigner. In 2005 he fought to stop the ban on smoking in pubs and restaurants. At the Labour Party conference he held up a card saying "DEATH awaits you all even if you do not smoke". He was invited to guest-edit BBC Radio's Today programme on 29 December 2009 in which he aired his views on the subject. In 2013 he wrote a foreword and provided illustrations for a book by John Staddon, Unlucky Strike.
In October 2010, he and a hundred other artists signed an open letter to the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Jeremy Hunt, protesting against cutbacks in the arts.
Hockney was inducted into Vanity Fairs International Best-Dressed Hall of Fame in 1986. In 2005, Burberry creative director Christopher Bailey centred his entire spring/summer menswear collection around the artist and in 2012, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, a close friend, named a checked jacket after Hockney. In 2011, British GQ named him one of the 50 Most Stylish Men in Britain and in March 2013, he was listed as one of the Fifty Best-dressed Over-50s by The Guardian.
Hockney was commissioned to design the cover and pages for the December 1985 issue of the French edition of Vogue. Consistent with his interest in cubism and admiration for Pablo Picasso, Hockney chose to paint Celia Birtwell (who appears in several of his works) from different views for the cover, as if the eye had scanned her face diagonally. David Hockney: A Rake's Progress (2012) is a biography of Hockney covering the years 1937–1975, by writer/photographer Christopher Simon Sykes.
In 2012, Hockney featured in BBC Radio 4's list of The New Elizabethans to mark the diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. A panel of seven academics, journalists and historians named Hockney among the group of people in the UK "whose actions during the reign of Elizabeth II have had a significant impact on lives in these islands and given the age its character". The 2015 Luca Guadagnino's film A Bigger Splash was named after Hockney's painting. In 2022, he was portrayed by Laurence Fuller in the 7th episode of the 1st season of Minx.
In BoJack Horseman, a caricature of Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) hangs on the wall of the title character's home office. In this version, horses replace the two human figures of the original.
The foundation's mission is to advance appreciation and understanding of visual art and culture through the exhibition, preservation, and publication of David Hockney's work. Richard Benefield, who organised David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition in 2013–2014 at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, became the first executive director in January 2017.
The foundation owns over 8,000 works – paintings, drawings, watercolours, complete editioned prints, stage design, multi-camera movies, and other media. They also hold 203 sketchbooks and Hockney's personal photo albums from 1961 to 1990. The foundation manages various loans to museums and exhibitions around the world, including Happy Birthday, Mr. Hockney! at the Getty celebrating his 80th birthday, and the retrospective exhibitions of 2017–2018 at the Metropolitan Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, and Tate Britain.
In October 2016 Taschen published David Hockney: A Bigger Book, costing £1,750 (£3,500 with an added loose print). The artist curated the selection of more than 60 years of his work reproduced within 498 pages. The book, weighing 78 lbs, had gone through 19 proof stages. The book came with an (optional) substantial wooden lectern. He unveiled the book at the Frankfurt Book Fair where he was the keynote speaker at the opening press conference.
Collections
Many of Hockney's works are housed in the 1853 Gallery at Salts Mill in Saltaire, near his hometown of Bradford. Another large group of works are held by The David Hockney Foundation. His work is in numerous public and private collections worldwide, including:
Recognition
In 1967, Hockney's painting Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool won the John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. In 1983, the Hamburg-based Alfred Toepfer Foundation awarded Hockney its annual Shakespeare Prize in recognition of his life's work. He was offered a knighthood in 1990 but declined it, before accepting an Order of Merit in January 2012. He was awarded The Royal Photographic Society's Progress medal in 1988 and the Special 150th Anniversary Medal and Honorary Fellowship in recognition of a sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography in 2003. Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Award / Retrieved 13 August 2012 He was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1997 and awarded The Cultural Award from the German Society for Photography (DGPh). He is a Royal Academician.
Art market
On 21 June 2006, Hockney's painting The Splash sold for £2.6 million. It was offered for auction again on 11 February 2020, with an estimate of £20–30 million and sold, to an unknown buyer, for £23.1 million.
The Hockney–Falco thesis
In the 2001 television programme and book Secret Knowledge, Hockney posited that the used camera obscura as well as camera lucida and lens techniques that projected the image of the subject onto the surface of the painting. Hockney argues that this technique migrated gradually from Northern Europe to Italy, and is the reason for the photographic style of painting seen in the Renaissance and later periods of art. He published his conclusions in the 2001 book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, which was revised in 2006.
Public life
Like his father, Hockney was a conscientious objector and worked as a medical orderly in hospitals during his National Service, 1957–1959. David Hockney was a founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1979. He was on the advisory board of the political magazine Standpoint; he contributed original sketches for its launch edition in June 2008, as well as agreeing to allow Standpoint to publish his previous views and pictures over the years.
In popular culture
In 1966, while working on a series of etchings based on love poems by the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy, Hockney starred in a documentary by filmmaker James Scott, entitled Love's Presentation. He was the subject of Jack Hazan's 1974 biopic, A Bigger Splash, named after Hockney's 1967 pool painting of the same name. Hockney was also the inspiration of artist Billy Pappas in the documentary film Waiting for Hockney (2008), which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2008.
David Hockney Foundation
The David Hockney Foundation — both the UK registered charity 1127262 and the US 501(c)(3) private operating foundation — was created by the artist in 2008. In 2012, Hockney, worth an estimated $55.2 million (approx. £36.1 m), transferred paintings valued at $124.2 million (approx. £81.5 m) to the David Hockney Foundation, and gave an additional $1.2 million (approx. £0.79 m) in cash to help fund the foundation's operations.
Books
By Hockney
David Hockney (1971). 022400655X, Jonathan Cape. 022400655X
David Hockney (1999). 286882028X, Galerie Lelong. 286882028X
David Hockney (2025). 050028671X, Thames & Hudson. 050028671X
David Hockney (2025). 9783791353340, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and Del Monico with Prestel. ISBN 9783791353340
Contributions by Hockney
Further reading
External links
Categories: Hockney.com Official Website, 1937 Births, Living People, 20th-century British Painters, 20th-century British Photographers, 20th-century English Painters, 21st-century British Photographers, 21st-century English Painters, 20th-century English Male Artists, 21st-century English Male Artists, Academics Of The University For The Creative Arts, Alumni Of Chelsea College Of Arts, Alumni Of The Royal College Of Art, Artist Authors, Artists From Bradford, Painters From California, British Conscientious Objectors, British Artists With Disabilities, British Collage Artists, British Pop Artists, Deaf Artists, English Contemporary Artists, English Deaf People, English Expatriates In France, English Expatriates In The United States, English Male Painters, English Printmakers, Gay Painters, Gay Photographers, English Lgbtq Photographers, English Lgbtq Painters, English Gay Artists, Lgbtq People From Yorkshire, Members Of The Order Of Merit, Members Of The Order Of The Companions Of Honour, Neo-expressionist Artists, The New Yorker People, Opera Designers, People Educated At Bradford Grammar School, Photographers From Yorkshire, British Postmodern Artists, Recipients Of The Praemium Imperiale, Royal Academicians, John Moores Painting Prize Winners, Photographers From California, California People In Design
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