: A Chronology

Edith Devaney

1937 David Hockney was born on 9 July in , Yorkshire, the fourth of fi ve children (fig. 51), into what he describes as a ‘radical working-class family’.1 His father, Kenneth, was an accountant’s clerk and his mother, Laura, a strict Methodist, came from a family of Yorkshire agricultural labourers, whose genealogy Hockney has recently researched. Both parents were determined to provide as good an education as possible for their children, and in 1948 David won a scholarship to Bradford Grammar School, following in the footsteps of his eldest brother Paul. Kenneth Hockney was well known for his rather eccentric behaviour. He was a passionate CND supporter and campaigner against smoking. His interest in theatrical performances, art and drawing, as well as the value he placed on individualism, all had a strong infl uence on the young Hockney. Laura Hockney was loving, yet exerted a strong infl uence on the family. As her only unmarried son, David remained very close to her until her death in 1999 at the age of 98. His father (fig. 52) died in 1978. 1948–53 Fig. 51 Having decided that he wanted to pursue a career as an artist by the time he The Hockney children (from left to right): reached Bradford Grammar School, Hockney was disappointed by the lack of Philip, Margaret, David, John and Paul focus on art in the curriculum and the concentration on more academic subjects. Despite a determination to apply himself to his only area of interest, his natural intelligence enabled him to pass the majority of his Ordinary Level examinations. During the summer holidays of 1952 and 1953 Hockney worked on farms during the harvest in the East Riding, stooking corn and picking up chaff. He remembers this as boring work, ‘though even then I noticed that the scenery was quite beautiful. The rolling hills, the little valleys. Very beautiful.’2 1953–57 In September 1953 he joined Bradford School of Art, having persuaded his parents to support his further education. His contemporaries, and later friends, at the college included Norman Stevens, David Oxtoby, John Loker and Mike Vaughan (fig. 53). Hockney embraced the formal art teaching he received there, which included life drawing, fi gure composition, anatomy and perspective. He had sympathetic teachers in Frank Johnson and Derek Stafford, and his landscapes and townscapes from this period are clearly infl uenced by both, who in turn owed much to the Euston Road School. Johnson and Stafford encouraged the young Hockney to submit a work to the Summer Exhibition at the – in 1957 he exhibited an oil entitled Mount Street, Bradford – and to apply to a art college to do a postgraduate degree. Hockney received a First Class Diploma with Honours for the National Diploma in Design examination in 1957 and was offered places at the Royal College and the Slade. On the advice of Derek Stafford he decided on the Royal College, where he was to enrol in 1959 after National Service. 1957–59 Hockney’s application to register as a conscientious objector was approved, Fig. 52 and he and his college friends rented a cottage near Hastings, in whose hospital My Parents, 1977. Oil on canvas, 182.9×182.9cm. he worked as a nursing auxiliary. Tate, London. Purchased 1981

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Pages 024_295.CS4.indd 288 26/01/2012 16:04 1959–62 Hockney joined the at a time of change and innovation. Under the direction of its formidable Principal, Robin Darwin, the RCA was strengthening its position and attempting to create a sense of excitement for the students. With Ruskin Spear, Carel Weight, Ceri Richards and Sandra Blow among his tutors, such visiting artists as Francis Bacon, Richard Hamilton, Joe Tilson and Peter Blake, and fellow students including R. B. Kitaj, Patrick Caulfi eld, Allen Jones and Derek Boshier, Hockney soon became immersed in London’s art world. He continued to visit galleries regularly, as he had done when a student in Bradford, and developed a strong knowledge of, and interest in, contemporary artists, including Picasso (a major Picasso exhibition took place at the Tate Gallery in 1960), Bacon, Magritte, Dubuffet and Pollock. Hockney was much admired by his tutors at the RCA for his draughtsmanship. It was during his time there that he found his own style in painting. His confidence in his sexuality is also apparent in such paintings as Doll Boy (fig. 54), The Most Beautiful Boy in the World and We Two Boys Together Clinging. The infl uence of both Dubuffet and Bacon is evident here, as is Hockney’s interest in poetry, a line by Walt Whitman providing the title for We Two Boys. Inspired by his fi rst visit to New , Hockney began working in print for the fi rst time in 1961 on the series A Rake’s Progress (fig. 55), an updated version of Hogarth’s engravings of the same name. Hockney depicts the story of a young man’s experiences on a visit to New York. His interest in printmaking continued to develop throughout his career, and he later worked with Ken Tyler of Gemini in Los Angeles. Tyler was very accommodating of Hockney’s constant experimentation, admiring his draughtsmanship and claiming that he was ‘changing the course of printmaking’. 3 With sufficient funding in place, Hockney began to travel and his discovery of new places informed his work. In 1961 and 1962 he made trips to Europe. Fig. 54 The painting Flight into Italy – Swiss Landscape (1962; cat. 3) was inspired Doll Boy, 1960–61. Oil on canvas, 121.9×99cm. by a trip to Italy, although Hockney’s seat in the back of a van while traversing Kunsthalle, Hamburg

Fig. 53 Fig. 55 Playing cards in the common room at Bradford School of Art, 1956 ‘The Arrival’ from A Rake’s Progress (portfolio of 16 prints), (from left to right): John Loker, Norman Stevens, David Oxtoby and 1961–63. Etching, 39.4×57.2cm. Edition of 50 David Hockney

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Pages 024_295.CS4.indd 289 08/12/2011 12:14 the Alps meant that he had to imagine the experience of seeing them. The First Marriage and Man in a Museum were the result of a visit to Berlin. By the time Hockney graduated from the RCA as a gold-medal winner, he had exhibited three years in succession (1960–62) at the ‘Young Contemporaries’ exhibition (in which he was identifi ed as belonging to the group referred to as Pop artists, although Hockney never saw himself as belonging to that group); won a prize at the John Moores Exhibition in 1961 (Junior Section); and signed himself up with the art dealer John Kasmin, with the promise of a guaranteed annual income. 1963 ‘David Hockney, Pictures with People In’, his fi rst solo exhibition at John Kasmin’s gallery, which included one of his most memorable early paintings, Play within a Play (fig. 56), sold out. Hockney’s growing celebrity status and fi nancial security meant that his next visit to New York was very different from his fi rst (fig. 57). Fig. 56 Having been commissioned by The Sunday Times to draw in Egypt, he spent most Play within a Play, 1963. Oil on canvas and plexiglass, of October there, although the proposed article was cancelled in the aftermath 182.9×198.1cm. Private collection of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas on 22 November. 1964–67 Hockney visited California for the fi rst time, and as with his previous trips to Europe and Egypt, his experience of a new environment stimulated a number of drawings and a new body of work. He produced stylised acrylic paintings of the Californian landscape, and worked on the shower paintings and swimming- pool paintings for which he is perhaps best known (fig. 21). It was at this point that Hockney began to use Polaroid photographs as an aide mémoire for his paintings. He held several short-term teaching posts in America during this period, at Colorado University in Boulder (1965), at UCLA in Los Angeles (1966) and at the University of California at Berkeley (1967). In 1967 he was awarded fi rst prize at the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition for his painting Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool. 1968–69 Hockney worked on a series of large-scale double portraits, mostly of friends, Fig. 57 including Christopher Isherwood and his partner Don Bachardy (fig. 58), and Dennis Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Geldzahler, David Hockney and Jeff Goldman in New York (horizontal), 1963. Gelatin silver on Illustrations for Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, for which he travelled print, 40.2×60.5cm. The Dennis Hopper Trust through Europe to gather source material, photographing extensively on a trip down the Rhine. 1970 Hockney’s fi rst major retrospective, ‘David Hockney: Paintings, Prints and Drawings 1960–1970’, was staged at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. 1971 The National Portrait Gallery, London, showed the completed painting Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (fig. 59), which Hockney had worked on for a year. It was presented to the Tate Gallery, London, in that year by the Friends of the Tate Gallery. Hockney completed work on a painting begun in the previous year, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (fig. 60). The painting was among the fi rst and most ambitious of Hockney’s straightforward landscapes. 1972–79 Hockney continued to travel regularly during this period, living intermittently Fig. 58 in Paris between 1973 and 1975. He returned to the use of oil paints after ten Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968. years of using acrylic. Photography remained of great interest to him, and he Acrylic on canvas, 212.1×303.5cm. Private collection

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Pages 024_295.CS4.indd 290 16/01/2012 17:58 also focused during this period on drawing and printmaking; his suite of colour etchings The Blue Guitar was published in 1977. In 1978 he created Paper Pools, a bold series of unique paper-pulp works. In 1974 he was commissioned to design sets and costumes for Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress for Glyndebourne, staged in the following year. It was while researching Hogarth’s work for this that he discovered an eighteenth-century treatise on perspective by John Kerby; Hogarth’s satirical frontispiece engraving, illustrating ‘mistakes’ in perspective as outlined by the treatise, was the source of Hockney’s painting Kerby (After Hogarth) Useful Knowledge (1975; cat. 6). Over the years Hockney has produced many other set and costume designs for operatic productions, among them Glyndebourne’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute in 1978 (fig. 44), the Metropolitan Opera’s triple bill of Erik Satie’s Parade, Francis Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias and Maurice Ravel’s L’Enfant

et les Sortilèges in 1981, the Metropolitan Opera’s Stravinsky triple bill later that Fig. 59 year, and the Los Angeles Music Center Opera’s production of Richard Wagner’s Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, 1970–71. Acrylic on canvas, Tristan und Isolde in 1987. 213.4×304.8cm. Tate, London 1980 Hockney painted once again with acrylics, now using a new variety that produced a more luminous colour effect on the canvas. He completed the ambitious Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio (cat. 7), at 218.4×617.2cm his last very large work to be painted on a single canvas. 1981 At the invitation of Thames & Hudson, Hockney visited China for three weeks with the poet Stephen Spender, taking photographs and producing a number of watercolours (some from memory following the tour). Spender’s written account and Hockney’s images were published in 1982 as China Diary (fig. 61). 1982 Hockney began to experiment with photographic composites as part of an investigation into Cubism and the depiction of pictorial space. In a few months he had produced over 100 works that were shown at the L.A. Louver Gallery

in Venice, California, in an exhibition entitled ‘Drawing with a Camera’. Fig. 60 Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972. 1983 Acrylic on canvas, 213.4×304.8cm. Private collection Hockney produced a series of large-scale painted environments, based on his previous set designs, for the Walker Art Center’s touring exhibition ‘Hockney Paints the Stage’. These confirmed his fascination with the use of scale to create an immersive sense of space, explored two years later in panoramic paintings of the courtyard of a hotel in Mexico and in the closely related Moving Focus lithographs. 1985 Hockney was elected an Associate Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts, London. 1988 Hockney’s purchase of a beach-side house on the Pacifi c Coast Highway in Malibu provided the impetus for a series of small seascapes. 1989 Hockney bought a house in for his mother Laura and his sister Margaret and her partner Ken Wathey to live in together. Hockney visited them there every Christmas. His visits were to become more frequent in the 1990s, Fig. 61 Boat with Red Flag and Caterpillar, Kweilen, China, when he regularly took his mother for drives through the Wolds, both of them 1981. Wash and crayon on paper, 35.6×43.2cm. enjoying the countryside. Collection unknown

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Pages 024_295.CS4.indd 291 16/01/2012 17:58 1990 Hockney created his ‘Wagner Drive’, a compilation of music designed to respond to the route between the Pacifi c Coast Highway and the Santa Monica Mountains at sunset. This experience transformed his sensation of a visual appreciation of the landscape. 1991 Hockney designed a production of Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In the same year he was elected a full Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts, London. 1992 The series of V.N. (very new) Paintings, painted in 1992, are semi-abstract investigations of space and colour, a direct development from the set designs completed the previous year (fig. 62). 1992–94 Hockney worked on a series of intensely observed drawings of family and friends and his beloved dogs Stanley and Boodgie. 1995 ‘David Hockney: A Drawing Retrospective’ opened at Hamburg, and toured to the Sackler Wing of Galleries at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 1996 An exhibition of Vermeer’s painting in The Hague encouraged Hockney to work on a number of still-lifes and portraits, with reference to Vermeer’s deployment of controlled light and colour.

Fig. 62 1997 The Fourteenth V. N. Painting, 1992. Oil on canvas, Jonathan Silver, Hockney’s friend and supporter and the creator of Salts Mill, 61×50.8 cm. Private collection Saltaire, was in the fi nal stages of cancer. Hockney spent the summer driving across the Wolds from Bridlington each day to see his dying friend, who had always encouraged him to paint the county of his birth. The accumulated memory of the landscape from these daily drives resulted in a group of paintings that included Double East Yorkshire (1998; cat. 18) and (1998; cat. 17). These works mark Hockney’s fi rst engagement with the Yorkshire landscape. 1998 Hockney visited an exhibition of work by the nineteenth-century English-born American painter Thomas Moran at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Moran’s depiction of the of the Yellowstone in Wyoming (fig. 25) inspired Hockney to take the vast natural feature in as the subject for an ambitious body of work of his own. Designed to afford the viewer a true sense of being in the space through the use of a multiplicity of viewpoints, the largest of these works are painted on a number of identically sized canvases forming a grid. (1998) and A Closer Grand Canyon (1998; cat. 13) were painted in the studio and based on both memory and drawings. 1999 The Grand Canyon works formed part of a retrospective exhibition focusing on Hockney’s exploration of the landscape and space, ‘Espace/Paysage’, at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. The Grand Canyon paintings were also shown in a room of their own at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in the same year.

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Pages 024_295.CS4.indd 292 17/01/2012 10:19 Fig. 63 Twelve Portraits after Ingres in a Uniform Style, 1999–2000. Pencil, crayon and gouache on twelve sheets of grey paper 2000–01 using a camera lucida (each 56.2×38.1 cm), 112.4×228.6cm. Inspired by an exhibition of drawings by Ingres at the National Gallery in 1999, Private collection Hockney began researching and writing Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of Old Masters. Applying his interest in and empathy with the work of the Old Masters and his skills as a draughtsman, his intense study led to the creation of a series of drawings inspired by the portrait drawings of Ingres. Hockney made these using a camera lucida, having spent several months learning to master the device.A series of these portraits, Twelve Portraits after Ingres in a Uniform Style (fig. 63), was executed for the National Gallery’s ‘Encounters: New Art from Old’ exhibition in 2000. 2002 Hockney visited an exhibition of Chinese painting at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and was inspired to take up watercolour. He had experimented with the medium occasionally during the 1960s, including a summer spent touring Italy and France in 1967 with the artist Patrick Procktor, a great adherent of watercolour, but had always been unhappy with the resultant lack of definition. This time he took more time to explore the medium, and over a period of six months mastered a looser, more immediate technique. ‘It’s the most direct method of laying in a mark fl owing from the eye, the heart, down the arm to the hand, through the tip of your instrument, everything fl owing very quickly and seamlessly.’4 He executed a number of studio-based watercolours, still-lifes and larger double portraits, and then began experimenting with working in watercolour in the landscape on trips to Norway and Iceland. 2004 Watercolours painted as the result of time spent in Spain were shown at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition, which Hockney curated with Allen Jones. Hockney also spent an extended period of time at the house in Bridlington, with his sister, and began a series of watercolour studies recording the changing seasons. Aware that he was being drawn once again to a part of the world he

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Pages 024_295.CS4.indd 293 07/12/2011 18:42 knew well, and which had inspired the paintings of 1997, he noted that landscape was not an unfamiliar subject for him. In the American West, Europe and Norway he was ‘painting views’, ‘sight-seeing’, but ‘around Bridlington, I was painting the land, land that I myself had worked.I had dwelt in those fi elds, so that out there, seeing, for me, necessarily came steeped in memory.’5 The changing seasons and the sense of life in the landscape were apparent to Hockney the more time he spent in East Yorkshire, in contrast to the unchanging nature of the seasons and the weather in California. He also recognised that the sense of openness and spaciousness of the landscape, which had appealed to him so much in the western United States, could also be found in the Wolds. As with the portraits of his friends, painted over the years, marking changes in them, so with these landscapes, which he painted with a similar affection, born both from familiarity and an emotional connection. 2005 The Yorkshire watercolours were shown in an exhibition in Los Angeles, whose title was taken from a Chinese proverb indicating the requirements for painting: Fig. 64 ‘Hand Eye Heart’. David Hockney and friends at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, looking Hockney turned his attention once again to oil painting, and in March at Bigger Trees near , or/ou Peinture sur le Motif pour le Nouvel Âge of this year he set up his easel to capture the landscape in Yorkshire, knowing Post-Photographique, in a temporary installation immediately following the closure of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, 2007 that he would fi nd greater freedom in oil than in watercolour. Indeed, as Marco Livingstone observed in 2009: ‘The paintings he has made of the Wolds between 2005 and the end of 2008 are in purely technical terms – but also in their observational accuracy and evocation of space – the most commanding he has ever made.’6 2006 The recently painted Yorkshire oils were shown at Annely Juda Fine Art in London. Hockney visited a major Constable exhibition at , and was particularly inspired by Constable’s full-size oil sketches for his major ‘six- footer’ landscapes. Hockney also made the fi rst of many visits to the newly refurbished Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, to see Monet’s Nymphéas. 2007 Hockney painted , or/ou Peinture sur le Motif pour le Nouvel Âge Post-Photographique (fig. 4), an oil on 50 canvases, measuring 4.5×12 m, designed to cover the entire end wall of the largest gallery of that year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Production of the work depended on the use of a camera and computer printouts, to map progress from one canvas to another. During the de-installation of the Summer Exhibition, Hockney placed Fig. 65 two exact-size reproductions of the work on the gallery’s empty side walls by way David Hockney painting Woldgate Woods III, 20 and 21 May 2006 (cat. 66) en plein air, 17 May 2006 of an experiment (fig. 64). In the same year, to coincide with his having curated ‘Hockney on Turner Watercolours’, an exhibition at Tate Britain, he exhibited fi ve of the Woldgate Woods series (see cats 66–72) at Tate Britain. In the autumn, the Royal Academy of Arts invited Hockney to stage an exhibition of his recent Yorkshire landscapes in its Main Galleries in 2012. 2008 Hockney leased a studio space in Bridlington, the largest in which he has ever worked (fig. 66). He produced computer-generated inkjet prints, made using Photoshop software, and also mastered drawing on the Apple iPhone with his thumb, e-mailing the results to friends.

294David Hockney: A Chronology

Pages 024_295.CS4.indd 294 07/12/2011 18:42 Fig. 66 The interior of the artist’s studio, Bridlington, 29 July 2009

2009 In the spring, an exhibition of recent Yorkshire paintings was shown at the Kunsthalle Würth, in Schwäbisch Hall, Germany, entitled ‘David Hockney: Nur Natur/Just Nature’. This was regarded by Hockney as an early experiment for the forthcoming Royal Academy exhibition. An exhibition of the inkjet computer drawings took place at Annely Juda Fine Art, London, entitled ‘Drawing in a Printing Machine’. In the autumn, Hockney held an exhibition of recent paintings at Pace Wildenstein, New York, his fi rst in the city for twelve years. He studied Claude’s Sermon on the Mount at the Frick Collection, a painting he had long admired for its depiction of space. 2010–11 In the spring of 2010, he painted thirteen interpretations of Claude’s Sermon on the Mount (see cats 109–18). The recent iPhone and iPad drawings were shown in the exhibition ‘Fleurs Fraîches’ at the Fondation Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent in Paris. Hockney was delighted by the ability of the Brushes application on the iPad to play back the process of creation of a drawing stroke by stroke. This was the fi rst time he had watched himself draw, and he realised how Picasso must have felt when he saw fi lm of himself drawing on glass. Hockney started to use the iPad to draw the landscape directly from the motif. He continued to develop his fi lm work, which he had embarked on the previous year, capturing the Yorkshire landscape on a gantry of high-definition video cameras mounted on the bonnet of his black Jeep: ‘Hours and hours of studying the subjects and painting them led to the fi lm work.’7 His fi lms owe much to his earlier paintings in which he explored the notion of the route, or journey, and the grid format produced by the wall of video monitors on which they are played offers a number of perspective viewpoints in a similar way to his grids of canvases.

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