When the artist David Hockney died earlier this year, I realized that I needed to learn more about his work. To do so, I bought the Abbeville Modern Masters book on Hockney's work, written by Peter Clothier, and published in 1995. When I was studying art history in the early 2000's, the Abbeville Modern Masters series was a great way of getting an overview of an artist's life and career for a budget price. The books are a little over 100 pages long, and they include more than 100 images of the artists' work. Having so many images in a book was huge in the early days of the Internet, when you couldn't find everything online. I've read the Abbeville Modern Masters books on Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns. And yes, I'm still annoyed that there wasn't an Abbeville Modern Masters book on Robert Rauschenberg, one of my favorite modern artists.
The Abbeville Modern Masters book had many Hockney paintings that I had never seen before. One of the paintings I found especially intriguing was Hockney's 1964 painting Iowa. It's a landscape with a barn, a tree, and dark clouds gathering in the sky. I looked at it and wondered "Why does he have a painting called Iowa?" It turns out, Hockney taught at the University of Iowa in the summer of 1964. And the fashion designer Ossie Clark visited Hockney in Iowa, and they went on a road trip together. What? Two icons of 60's Swinging London were in Iowa City together in 1964? Groovy, baby! Also of interest to me is that Hockney's painting Iowa is in the collection of the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, DC, one of the museums I frequented when I spent a semester in DC. I wonder if I saw Iowa? I doubt it, I feel like the novelty of a famous British expat titling a painting after the state directly to the south of mine would have stuck in my mind.
For me, Hockney's work really got interesting after he traveled to California in the mid-1960's. You can just imagine Hockney and Joan Didion sitting out by the swimming pool in Malibu, right? They're both smoking and drinking with a small circle of friends, and Hockney is chattering away a mile a minute, and Didion is sitting there, nodding, and then every once in a while she lobs in a withering bon mot that gets the whole table laughing. And then David wants to see Joan's beautiful, sexy, bright yellow Corvette. They go to look at it in the driveway. It's a gorgeous car, all long hood, concealed headlights, and barely contained power. And David says, very quietly, but insistently, "I want to go for a ride in that." And Joan grins and says, "Get in." And she revs the engine, and David can feel all 300 horsepower of that V-8 American-made engine right in his solar plexus. And Joan yells at the houseboy to open the gate, and she throws it into gear, and they go off down the drive, spinning gravel behind them as the Corvette grips the road.
The bright California sun and the way the water moved in swimming pools brought out new qualities in Hockney's work, and he created paintings like the iconic 1967's A Bigger Splash, perhaps his single most famous canvas. Shown on the cover of this book, the viewer sees the aftermath of a dive into the swimming pool, but we don't see the person. It's beautiful, and a bit mysterious as well.
Hockney's paintings of the 1970's are some of my favorites of his, including My Parents and Contre-jour in the French Style—Against the Day dans le style francais, stunning paintings that show his masterful handling of paint.
In the 1980's, Hockney began a new series of photographs. He took numerous photos of one setting and then assembled them together to create a larger image, although you can still tell that the artwork is made up of many different photographs. He called these "joiners" and they are amazing to see. Probably the most famous of the series is an image of a highway intersection in the California desert, titled Pearblossom Hwy. 11th-18th April, 1986. It's such a striking image. It's hard to say what makes it so cool, but it might be the deep blue desert sky, split up into all of these little photos, each one a little bit different.
The book also focuses on Hockney's designs for stage plays and operas, which were a focus of his work from the 1970's onward. Hockney was always fascinated by advancements in technology. The book describes how Hockney used fax machines and computers to facilitate his artwork. Later in life, Hockney loved creating little paintings on his iPhone using the Brushes app. There's a section of Hockney's official website that features 46 of his iPhone paintings, and they are a delight, tiny treats from a veteran master.
Hockney's work transcended art movements or simple labels. He started out being categorized as part of British Pop Art, along with artists like Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake. But Hockney's work soon went in a different direction, and it's hard to imagine anyone calling his 1970's paintings "Pop Art." Like many great artists, Hockney simply defied easy categorization.
Hockney's personal style was also a large part of his image: the dyed blonde hair, the round glasses, colorful sartorial style, and mismatched socks were all a part of his charm.
I've never seen a large museum exhibit of Hockney's work, and I'm kicking myself that I didn't have the time to see the Hockney retrospective at the Palm Springs Art Museum when I was there in 2025. My wife and I were at the museum for an event, to see retro enthusiast Charles Phoenix speak, and so I looked around the first room of the Hockney exhibit, and I took a couple of photos of some beautiful works, but I wish I would have seen the whole exhibit.
David Hockney's career spanned many decades and numerous artistic styles, and Hockney will long be remembered as one of the major artists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
