David Hockney, one of the most important and celebrated artists of his generation
David Hockney is widely-regarded as one of the foremost British artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, and he is acknowledged as an influential contributor to the Pop Art movement. Born in Yorkshire in 1937, Hockney has also spent much of his life in California, which provided the inspiration for many of his most celebrated pieces of work.
For a time, Hockney’s Portrait of An Artist (Pool with Two Figures) held the auction record for a living artist, after it was sold by Christie’s in 2018 for over £62.5 million. But Hockney prints can also fetch high prices; they account for 85% of the artist’s work sold at auction, and the majority fetch somewhere between £1,000 and £5,000, with many reaching even higher prices.
Hockney’s work is mostly autobiographical, so it helps to know a bit about his life in order to fully appreciate his artwork; below are seven things you may not have known about David Hockney.
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He Has Synesthesia
More specifically, David Hockney experiences chromesthesia, which is the association between sounds and colours. Hockney claims this rarely influences his painting or photography, but it has undoubtedly affected the numerous stage designs he’s worked on. When Hockney is designing ballet and opera sets, he often listens to the music that will be used in the production in order to choose the appropriate colours and lighting for the stage sets.
His Most Expensive Print Sold For £7.5 million
David Hockney’s Piscine de Medianoche (Paper Pool 30) was sold by Sotheby’s in May 2018 for £7,560,852, which was more than £2 million above its estimate. It is part of the Paper Pools series, which Hockney created in an extraordinarily intense 45 days with the help of his friend, the printmaker Kenneth Tyler. Tyler introduced Hockney to a new technique involving coloured paper pulp, and the artist threw himself into the medium with gusto, resulting in some beautiful and highly sought-after pieces of work; prints from the Paper Pools series account for six out of seven of Hockney’s most expensive prints sold at auction.
Piscine de Medianoche (Paper Pool 30) sold by Sotheby’s in 2018
He Is A Committed Smoker
Hockney is, at times, joyfully irreverent and curmudgeonly, and his frequent tirades against the wellness industry (“ridiculous and too bossy for me”) are one of the best and most hilarious examples of this. Hockney began smoking at the age of 16, and more than 70 years later, he’s still going strong, stating he is “still smoking and enjoying it enormously.”
He took particular delight in campaigning against the proposed smoking ban in 2005, even appearing at a Labour Party Conference holding a sign that read: “DEATH awaits you all even if you do smoke.” In response to Rishi Sunak’s recent attempts to progressively outlaw smoking, David Hockney wrote: “This is just madness to me. I have smoked for 70 years… and I’m reasonably fine, thank you. I just love tobacco and I will go on smoking until I fall over.”
David Hockney
He Is An Advocate Of Figurative Art
Hockney came to prominence at a time when abstract art was favoured over figurative art, which was too often denigrated as being old-fashioned and out of touch. Although Hockney has experimented with different styles over the past 70 years, he has always been a staunch defender of figurative art, stating: “I am not that interested in painting that doesn’t depict the visible world.”
This stance made the artist unpopular in certain circles, with one prominent opponent being Norman Reid, the one-time director of the Tate Gallery. The two men’s acerbic relationship wasn’t improved when Reid turned down the opportunity to acquire some Hockney paintings. The artist’s response was to tell Reid he was “just a pathetic little shit.” The irascible Yorkshireman didn’t stop there, however, and he continued to berate Reid’s perceived bias towards abstract art by arguing in The Observer that “people have been painting faces for 5,000 years – and for a good reason.”
He Tried To Paint Lucian Freud
As two of the most prominent artists of their day, Lucian Freud and David Hockney had agreed they would each sit for each other. Freud was famous for making his sitters endure punishingly-long sittings, and Hockney estimated he must have sat for about 120 hours in total for the reclusive artist. When it came to Freud’s turn as a model, however, things didn’t go quite as well; supposedly, he only showed up for two sittings, and he fell asleep on both occasions.
Lucian Freud and David Hockney
He Declined A Knighthood
Apparently, David Hockney was offered a knighthood in the 1990s, but he quietly turned it down, partly because he was living in America at the time, but also because, as he said, “I don’t value prizes of any sort. I value my friends.” Although he believes “prizes of any sort are a bit suspect,” he was made a Companion of Honour in 1997, and he accepted an Order of Merit in 2012. In response to this seeming change of heart, he said he accepted the honours “because you have to be gracious.”
He Loves Learning New Techniques
Hockney has avidly embraced new techniques and media throughout his long career, including experimenting widely with photography, drawing, painting, printmaking, and stage design, even using technology such as iPads to create art. He delights in learning things, and two of his most celebrated and sought-after series (Paper Pools and Home-Made Prints) were both created after experimenting with new media and techniques. They now account for many of the artist’s most expensive prints ever sold at auction.
