Thursday, June 18, 2026
Paying tribute to David Hockney, who died last Thursday at age 88, King Charles III called the painter “a Yorkshireman through and through.”
Yorkshiremen — Hockney was born and attended art school in Bradford, a textile city in Yorkshire’s West Riding (a term of Scandinavian origin meaning “third”) — are known for their blunt, parsimonious manner, along with a preference for flat cloth caps and whippets.
Though he wore the caps, Hockney, like his hero Picasso, was a dachshund lover. As for the other marks of Yorkshire, one might as well say that Andy Warhol was a Pittsburgher at heart. Both sought success, and relative freedom as gay men, elsewhere.
At London’s Royal College of Art, he and older classmates Peter Blake and R. B. Kitaj pushed back against Abstract Expressionism’s dominance, helping to launch British Pop Art at the Whitechapel Gallery’s 1961 “Young Contemporaries” exhibition. But Hockney was soon to find himself — in both senses — in Southern California.
Moving to Los Angeles in 1964, Hockey taught at UCLA, where he met a partner-to-be, art student Peter Schlesinger, and Berkeley in 1966 and 1967. Those were the years of his breakthrough swimming pool series: “The Little Splash,” “The Splash” and the eight-foot-square “A Bigger Splash,” now at Tate Britain.
In 2018, another pool scene, set against an imagined mountain range, “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” of 1972 — in which a fully dressed man, based on Schlesinger, stares at a submerged swimmer as if waiting to confront him — became the most expensive contemporary painting sold at auction ($90.3 million including fees).
As boldly colored and clean-edged as Pop Art, Hockney’s stylized realism of the period gave off an unironic, West Coast cool (in contrast to his quirky personal style). His portraits of his parents, partners and friends in domestic settings bring to mind the work of Richard Diebenkorn, a Bay Area figurative painter prior to beginning his abstract “Ocean Park” series in 1967, and Easterners Fairfield Porter and Alex Katz.
Like Katz, who created sets and costumes for the Paul Taylor Dance Company, Hockney was drawn to stage design (as was Picasso). Among the productions he worked on: Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu Roi” at the Royal Court Theatre in 1966; Igor Stravinsky, W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman’s “The Rake’s Progress” and Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” at Glyndebourne in the 1970s; the Metropolitan Opera triple bills “Parade” and “Stravinsky” and Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” in Los Angeles in the 1980s; and Puccini’s “Turandot” in Chicago and Richard Strauss’s “Die Frau ohne Schatten” in London in the 1990s.
Attracted to early Renaissance art, traditional Chinese and Japanese painting and quantum physics, Hockney explored ways to flatten, layer and Cubistically fragment his work, with landscape becoming his chief subject. He was a prolific printmaker, also creating photocollages, which he called “joiners,” and embracing computer graphics programs (and the iPad) from the get-go.
Perhaps in part to justify his use of digital tools, Hockney shared his research into how famed painters of past centuries relied on lenses and mirrors in a 2001 book, “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.”
Hockney’s innate gift for color, form and composition seemed medium-blind. In the New York Times obituary, with qualified admiration, Holland Cotter called Hockney’s wide-ranging oeuvre “a virtuosic, graphic-based, fundamentally illustrational art.”
An obstacle to Hockney appreciation for those of us on the Atlantic Seaboard is that few of his paintings are on museum walls. As far as I can tell, the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art contain only works on paper.
Along with numerous drawings, prints and stage designs, MoMA owns a 1963 painting, “Seated Woman Being Served Tea by Standing Companion” (not on view) and a 1975 painting, “Kerby (After Hogarth) Useful Knowledge” (not on view). At the Metropolitan Museum, which mounted a 2017-18 retrospective, is a 1972 painting, “Mount Fuji and Flowers” (not on view).
About a month before “David Hockney 25” closed at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris last August, the Croc-sporting Yorkshireman turned 88. “David Hockney” will open at Tate Britain in October of 2027.