Pages 024 295.CS4.Indd 288 26/01/2012 16:04 1959–62 Hockney Joined the Royal College of Art at a Time of Change and Innovation
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David Hockney: A Chronology Edith Devaney 1937 David Hockney was born on 9 July in Bradford, 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 Royal Academy of Arts – in 1957 he exhibited an oil entitled Mount Street, Bradford – and to apply to a London 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 288 David Hockney: A Chronology Pages 024_295.CS4.indd 288 26/01/2012 16:04 1959–62 Hockney joined the Royal College of Art 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 York, 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 289 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 Liverpool 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.