California was his muse and helped make him famous. Swimming pool artist David Hockney has since returned to his native UK, where the Tate Britain is presenting a "best of" exhibition spanning six decades of his works.
Image: picture alliance/AP Photo/F. Augstein
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Tate presents David Hockney retrospective
David Hockney became famous with his vivid pool paintings, though the British artist has since returned to landscapes. Now London's Tate Britain is showing highlights from his 60-year career.
Image: David Hockney
Hockney's hats
David Hockney is nearly deaf and has survived a heart attack, a stroke and numerous other ailments - but hasn't lost his distinctly British sense of humor. Rarely seen without a hat of some kind, the artist turns 80 on July 9.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/A. Dedert
The other side of the sun
The sunny weather in California was a draw for the young painter David Hockney. He has lived on and off in Los Angeles for many years. Despite his attraction to the glamorous region, Hockney always included the shadowy side of luxury in his large-scale pool paintings. This one, "Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)," is from 1972.
Image: David Hockney/Photo: J. Carter
Early works
As a young painter, David Hockney spent time experimenting with his style. This early work, "Domestic Scene," is from 1963. In that year, he was granted his first solo exhibition in London's Paul Kasim Gallery. Hockney, who is openly gay, dealt with homosexual themes in his work.
Image: David Hockney
New confidence
This 1968 photo-realistic painting of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, a well known gay couple in Los Angeles, shot Hockney to fame. During the 1960s, progressive California was caught up in the hippie movement. The liberal attitudes, as well as the local landscape and climate, left a lasting impression on the artist.
Image: David Hockney
Getting close to other people
Hockney enjoyed painting portraits. "The most interesting aspect of other people - the point where we go inside them - is the face," he said. His portraits often appear to be quite intimate, but nevertheless display a cool distance. This one, a chalk sketch titled, "Ossie, Wearing a Fairisle Sweater," is from 1970.
Image: David Hockney
Hard at work
As a successful artist, Hockney was up to his ears in requests for exhibitions and assignments by the 1970s. He grew exhausted, as shown in the work "Model with Unfinished Self-Portrait." In 1975, he went back to his roots and painted stage backdrops, drafting the setting for "The Rake's Progress" at the Glyndebourne Opera and later for opera houses in San Francisco, New York and Chicago.
Image: David Hockney
'Hollywood Hills House'
When Hockney moved to California in the 1960s, friends asked him what he could possibly want in the cultural desert. He replied that Hollywood was the home of high culture. He loved cinema and often went to movies as a child - diving into worlds that were far away from the gray suburb he grew up in. As a successful artist, he could later afford a house in the Hollywood hills - like this one.
Image: David Hockney
American highway
At some point, the British artist grew tired of the endless summer on California's coast and the never-ending horizons of the American landscape, as seen here in his photo collage, "Pearblossom Hwy." (1986), which he gifted to the Getty Museum in LA upon his departure. Hockney returned to the four seasons in Europe, first moving to Paris and later to London.
Image: David Hockney
European landscapes
Back in Europe, the painter returned to his British hometown as a painter of landscapes, as seen here in "Woolgate Woods, 6 & 9 November 2006." He spent a lot of time on the road, taking photographs, and discovered the digital world of computer-generated images. Often, his work is hung as a series of images side-by-side, giving an impression of surrealism.
Image: David Hockney/Photo: Richard Schmidt
Studying the Grand Canyon
David Hockney has painted nearly 2,000 images over the course of his life. Retirement is not a word in his vocabulary. This large painting, "9 Canvas Study of The Grand Canyon" from 1998, is among those on display at the exhibition at London's Tate Britain.
Image: David Hockney/Photo: Richard Schmidt
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When he was a child, David Hockney's favorite seat on the double-decker bus was up front in the first row on the upper deck. It provided him the best view of the urban and rural landscapes whizzing by. "I always wanted to see more!" the British painter says in Randall Wright's 2015 documentary film, "Hockney."
Later, already an acclaimed artist, he took endless photos of his surroundings, recorded everyday scenes, sketched friends, houses, passers-by and other people he felt were interesting.
Hockney has long incorporated digital technology, working with fax machines, color copiers, using his iPhone as a sketch pad or drawing on an iPad, creating highly fascinating works of art. Currently, the artist is designing a stained-glass window for London's famous Westminster Abbey - the church where Britain's kings have been crowned and buried for centuries. iPad on his lap, Hockney often sits in the vast space and watches the play of light in the interior of the Gothic church.
A down-to-earth star
Painter, bohemian, chain smoker - David Hockney is at home all over the world. He is one of Britain's most important artists, and highly acclaimed abroad. The Queen appointed him a member of the Order of Merit in 2012.
Hockney was inspired by the southern California lifestyleImage: David Hockney
But his many awards, including a prestigious Praemium Imperiale global arts prize in 1989, languish in drawers - they mean nothing to him. Hockney sees himself as a worker, and often gets up at the crack of dawn to take advantage of the early morning light. "I can get excited watching rain on a puddle. And then I paint it," he explains his passion for landscapes.
The British artist turns 80 this year, but he is as curious and adventurous as ever. Over the course of his unsettled life, he has painted about 2,000 pictures, many of them large-sized. Hockney created thousands of photos, sketches and drawings, often as drafts for large works.
He moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s and had a considerable influence on Pop Art in the US before returning to his native Britain in 2000. Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and many other great names of the era were his friends. His starkly colored acrylic paintings fetch high prices - the famous pool painting "Beverly Hills Housewife" sold at an auction for a record $ 7.9 million.
The eternal anarchist
Hockney eventually returned to LA, but is for the most part aloof of the enterprising art scene, he told German weekly "Die Zeit" last year. He admitted he is quite deaf, so he doesn't go out in the evening anymore."If I go to parties at all, I do as the aristocrats do: I'm the last to arrive, the first to leave," he said, adding that he does enjoy friends' daytime visits to his studio.
A collage of Billy and Audrey Wilder, 1982 Image: David Hockney/Photo: R. Schmidt
The British artist's past few years have in fact been his most successful, including major exhibitions of recent works in London, Paris and Cologne in 2015/16. The public adores his colorful works. If painting had categories like serious and pop as the music world does, Hockney would be listed as one of the pop artists, German newspaper "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" once wrote about the artist.
The Tate Britain in London is currently showing a retrospective of his entire works, the best of 60 years of painting, photography and video art. "David Hockney" is open to the public from February 9 to May 29, 2017, before the exhibition moves on to the Centre Pompidou in Paris and then the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
