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David Hockney: A ChronologyEdith Devaney

1937David Hockney was born on 9 July in Bradford, Yorkshire, the fourth of five 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, camefrom a family of Yorkshire agricultural labourers, whose genealogy Hockney hasrecently researched. Both parents were determined to provide as good an educationas possible for their children, and in 1948 David won a scholarship to BradfordGrammar School, following in the footsteps of his eldest brother Paul.

Kenneth Hockney was well known for his rather eccentric behaviour. Hewas a passionate CND supporter and campaigner against smoking. His interestin theatrical performances, art and drawing, as well as the value he placed onindividualism, all had a strong influence on the young Hockney. Laura Hockneywas loving, yet exerted a strong influence on the family. As her only unmarriedson, David remained very close to her until her death in 1999 at the age of 98.His father (fig. 52) died in 1978.

1948–53Having decided that he wanted to pursue a career as an artist by the time hereached Bradford Grammar School, Hockney was disappointed by the lack offocus 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 naturalintelligence enabled him to pass the majority of his Ordinary Level examinations.

During the summer holidays of 1952 and 1953 Hockney worked on farmsduring the harvest in the East Riding, stooking corn and picking up chaff. Heremembers this as boring work, ‘though even then I noticed that the scenerywas quite beautiful. The rolling hills, the little valleys. Very beautiful.’2

1953–57In September 1953 he joined Bradford School of Art, having persuaded hisparents to support his further education. His contemporaries, and later friends,at the college included Norman Stevens, David Oxtoby, John Loker and MikeVaughan (fig. 53). Hockney embraced the formal art teaching he received there,which included life drawing, figure composition, anatomy and perspective.He had sympathetic teachers in Frank Johnson and Derek Stafford, and hislandscapes and townscapes from this period are clearly influenced by both,who in turn owed much to the Euston Road School.

Johnson and Stafford encouraged the young Hockney to submit a workto the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts – in 1957 he exhibitedan oil entitled Mount Street, Bradford – and to apply to a London art college todo a postgraduate degree. Hockney received a First Class Diploma with Honoursfor the National Diploma in Design examination in 1957 and was offered placesat the Royal College and the Slade. On the advice of Derek Stafford he decidedon the Royal College, where he was to enrol in 1959 after National Service.

1957–59Hockney’s application to register as a conscientious objector was approved,and he and his college friends rented a cottage near Hastings, in whose hospitalhe worked as a nursing auxiliary.

Fig. 52My Parents, 1977. Oil on canvas, 182.9×182.9cm.Tate, London. Purchased 1981

Fig. 51The Hockney children (from left to right):Philip, Margaret, David, John and Paul

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1959–62Hockney joined the Royal College of Art at a time of change and innovation.Under the direction of its formidable Principal, Robin Darwin, the RCA wasstrengthening its position and attempting to create a sense of excitement for thestudents. With Ruskin Spear, Carel Weight, Ceri Richards and Sandra Blow amonghis tutors, such visiting artists as Francis Bacon, Richard Hamilton, Joe Tilsonand Peter Blake, and fellow students including R. B. Kitaj, Patrick Caulfield, AllenJones 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 inBradford, and developed a strong knowledge of, and interest in, contemporaryartists, including Picasso (a major Picasso exhibition took place at the TateGallery 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 confidencein his sexuality is also apparent in such paintings as Doll Boy (fig. 54), The MostBeautiful Boy in the World andWe Two Boys Together Clinging. The influence ofboth Dubuffet and Bacon is evident here, as is Hockney’s interest in poetry, a lineby Walt Whitman providing the title forWe Two Boys.

Inspired by his first visit to New York, Hockney began working in print for thefirst time in 1961 on the series A Rake’s Progress (fig. 55), an updated versionof Hogarth’s engravings of the same name. Hockney depicts the story of a youngman’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 veryaccommodating of Hockney’s constant experimentation, admiring hisdraughtsmanship and claiming that he was ‘changing the course of printmaking’.3

With sufficient funding in place, Hockney began to travel and his discoveryof new places informed his work. In 1961 and 1962 he made trips to Europe.The painting Flight into Italy – Swiss Landscape (1962; cat. 3) was inspiredby a trip to Italy, although Hockney’s seat in the back of a van while traversing

Fig. 54Doll Boy, 1960–61. Oil on canvas, 121.9×99cm.Kunsthalle, Hamburg

Fig. 55‘The Arrival’ from A Rake’s Progress (portfolio of 16 prints),1961–63. Etching, 39.4×57.2cm. Edition of 50

Fig. 53Playing cards in the common room at Bradford School of Art, 1956(from left to right): John Loker, Norman Stevens, David Oxtoby andDavid Hockney

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Fig. 57Dennis Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Geldzahler, David Hockneyand Jeff Goldman in New York (horizontal), 1963. Gelatin silverprint, 40.2×60.5cm. The Dennis Hopper Trust

the Alps meant that he had to imagine the experience of seeing them. The FirstMarriage 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, hehad exhibited three years in succession (1960–62) at the ‘Young Contemporaries’exhibition (in which he was identified as belonging to the group referred to as Popartists, although Hockney never saw himself as belonging to that group); won aprize at the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition in 1961 (Junior Section); and signedhimself up with the art dealer John Kasmin, with the promise of a guaranteedannual income.

1963‘David Hockney, Pictures with People In’, his first solo exhibition at John Kasmin’sgallery, which included one of his most memorable early paintings, Play within aPlay (fig. 56), sold out. Hockney’s growing celebrity status and financial securitymeant that his next visit to New York was very different from his first (fig. 57).Having been commissioned by The Sunday Times to draw in Egypt, he spent mostof October there, although the proposed article was cancelled in the aftermathof President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas on 22 November.

1964–67Hockney visited California for the first time, and as with his previous tripsto Europe and Egypt, his experience of a new environment stimulated a numberof drawings and a new body of work. He produced stylised acrylic paintings ofthe 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 aidemémoire 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 first prize at the John Moores Liverpool Exhibitionfor his painting Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool.

1968–69Hockney worked on a series of large-scale double portraits, mostly of friends,including Christopher Isherwood and his partner Don Bachardy (fig. 58), andon Illustrations for Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, for which he travelledthrough Europe to gather source material, photographing extensively on a tripdown the Rhine.

1970Hockney’s first major retrospective, ‘David Hockney: Paintings, Prints andDrawings 1960–1970’, was staged at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.

1971The National Portrait Gallery, London, showed the completed painting Mr andMrs Clark and Percy (fig. 59), which Hockney had worked on for a year. It waspresented to the Tate Gallery, London, in that year by the Friends of theTate Gallery.

Hockney completed work on a painting begun in the previous year, Portraitof an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (fig. 60). The painting was among the firstand most ambitious of Hockney’s straightforward landscapes.

1972–79Hockney continued to travel regularly during this period, living intermittentlyin Paris between 1973 and 1975. He returned to the use of oil paints after tenyears of using acrylic. Photography remained of great interest to him, and he

Fig. 56Play within a Play, 1963. Oil on canvas and plexiglass,182.9×198.1cm. Private collection

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Fig. 58Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968.Acrylic on canvas, 212.1×303.5cm. Private collection

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also focused during this period on drawing and printmaking; his suite of colouretchings 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’sThe Rake’s Progress for Glyndebourne, staged in the following year. It was whileresearching Hogarth’s work for this that he discovered an eighteenth-centurytreatise on perspective by John Kerby; Hogarth’s satirical frontispiece engraving,illustrating ‘mistakes’ in perspective as outlined by the treatise, was the sourceof Hockney’s painting Kerby (After Hogarth) Useful Knowledge (1975; cat. 6).Over the years Hockney has produced many other set and costume designs foroperatic productions, among them Glyndebourne’s production of Mozart’s TheMagic Flute in 1978 (fig. 44), the Metropolitan Opera’s triple bill of Erik Satie’sParade, Francis Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias and Maurice Ravel’s L’Enfantet les Sortilèges in 1981, the Metropolitan Opera’s Stravinsky triple bill later thatyear, and the Los Angeles Music Center Opera’s production of Richard Wagner’sTristan und Isolde in 1987.

1980Hockney painted once again with acrylics, now using a new variety that produceda 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.

1981At the invitation of Thames & Hudson, Hockney visited China for three weekswith the poet Stephen Spender, taking photographs and producing a numberof watercolours (some from memory following the tour). Spender’s writtenaccount and Hockney’s images were published in 1982 as China Diary (fig. 61).

1982Hockney began to experiment with photographic composites as part of aninvestigation into Cubism and the depiction of pictorial space. In a few monthshe had produced over 100 works that were shown at the L.A. Louver Galleryin Venice, California, in an exhibition entitled ‘Drawing with a Camera’.

1983Hockney produced a series of large-scale painted environments, based on hisprevious set designs, for the Walker Art Center’s touring exhibition ‘HockneyPaints the Stage’. These confirmed his fascination with the use of scale to createan immersive sense of space, explored two years later in panoramic paintingsof the courtyard of a hotel in Mexico and in the closely related Moving Focuslithographs.

1985Hockney was elected an Associate Royal Academician by the Royal Academyof Arts, London.

1988Hockney’s purchase of a beach-side house on the Pacific Coast Highwayin Malibu provided the impetus for a series of small seascapes.

1989Hockney bought a house in Bridlington for his mother Laura and his sisterMargaret and her partner Ken Wathey to live in together. Hockney visited themthere every Christmas. His visits were to become more frequent in the 1990s,when he regularly took his mother for drives through the Wolds, both of themenjoying the countryside.

Fig. 59Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, 1970–71. Acrylic on canvas,213.4×304.8cm. Tate, London

Fig. 60Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972.Acrylic on canvas, 213.4×304.8cm. Private collection

Fig. 61Boat with Red Flag and Caterpillar, Kweilen, China,1981. Wash and crayon on paper, 35.6×43.2cm.Collection unknown

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1990Hockney created his ‘Wagner Drive’, a compilation of music designed to respondto the route between the Pacific Coast Highway and the Santa Monica Mountainsat sunset. This experience transformed his sensation of a visual appreciationof the landscape.

1991Hockney designed a production of Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schattenfor the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In the same year he was electeda full Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

1992The series of V.N. (very new) Paintings, painted in 1992, are semi-abstractinvestigations of space and colour, a direct development from the set designscompleted the previous year (fig. 62).

1992–94Hockney worked on a series of intensely observed drawings of family and friendsand his beloved dogs Stanley and Boodgie.

1995‘David Hockney: A Drawing Retrospective’ opened at Hamburg, and touredto the Sackler Wing of Galleries at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, andthe Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

1996An exhibition of Vermeer’s painting in The Hague encouraged Hockney to workon a number of still-lifes and portraits, with reference to Vermeer’s deploymentof controlled light and colour.

1997Jonathan Silver, Hockney’s friend and supporter and the creator of Salts Mill,Saltaire, was in the final stages of cancer. Hockney spent the summer drivingacross the Wolds from Bridlington each day to see his dying friend, who hadalways encouraged him to paint the county of his birth. The accumulated memoryof the landscape from these daily drives resulted in a group of paintings thatincluded Double East Yorkshire (1998; cat. 18) and Garrowby Hill (1998; cat. 17).These works mark Hockney’s first engagement with the Yorkshire landscape.

1998Hockney visited an exhibition of work by the nineteenth-century English-bornAmerican painter Thomas Moran at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.Moran’s depiction of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone in Wyoming (fig. 25)inspired Hockney to take the vast natural feature in Arizona as the subject for anambitious body of work of his own. Designed to afford the viewer a true sense ofbeing in the space through the use of a multiplicity of viewpoints, the largest ofthese works are painted on a number of identically sized canvases forming a grid.A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998) and A Closer Grand Canyon (1998; cat. 13) werepainted in the studio and based on both memory and drawings.

1999The Grand Canyon works formed part of a retrospective exhibition focusingon 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 ownat the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in the same year.

Fig. 62The Fourteenth V. N. Painting, 1992. Oil on canvas,61×50.8 cm. Private collection

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2000–01Inspired by an exhibition of drawings by Ingres at the National Gallery in 1999,Hockney began researching and writing Secret Knowledge: Rediscoveringthe Lost Techniques of Old Masters. Applying his interest in and empathy with thework of the Old Masters and his skills as a draughtsman, his intense study ledto 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 learningto master the device. A series of these portraits, Twelve Portraits after Ingresin a Uniform Style (fig. 63), was executed for the National Gallery’s ‘Encounters:New Art from Old’ exhibition in 2000.

2002Hockney visited an exhibition of Chinese painting at the Metropolitan Museumin New York and was inspired to take up watercolour. He had experimented withthe medium occasionally during the 1960s, including a summer spent touringItaly and France in 1967 with the artist Patrick Procktor, a great adherent ofwatercolour, 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 sixmonths mastered a looser, more immediate technique. ‘It’s the most directmethod of laying in a mark flowing from the eye, the heart, down the arm to thehand, through the tip of your instrument, everything flowing very quicklyand seamlessly.’4

He executed a number of studio-based watercolours, still-lifes and largerdouble portraits, and then began experimenting with working in watercolourin the landscape on trips to Norway and Iceland.

2004Watercolours painted as the result of time spent in Spain were shown at theRoyal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition, which Hockney curated with AllenJones. 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 changingseasons. Aware that he was being drawn once again to a part of the world he

Fig. 63Twelve Portraits after Ingres in a Uniform Style, 1999–2000.Pencil, crayon and gouache on twelve sheets of grey paperusing a camera lucida (each 56.2×38.1cm), 112.4×228.6cm.Private collection

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knew well, and which had inspired the paintings of 1997, he noted that landscapewas not an unfamiliar subject for him. In the American West, Europe and Norwayhe was ‘painting views’, ‘sight-seeing’, but ‘around Bridlington, I was painting theland, land that I myself had worked. I had dwelt in those fields, 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 apparentto Hockney the more time he spent in East Yorkshire, in contrast to theunchanging nature of the seasons and the weather in California. He alsorecognised that the sense of openness and spaciousness of the landscape, whichhad appealed to him so much in the western United States, could also be foundin the Wolds. As with the portraits of his friends, painted over the years, markingchanges in them, so with these landscapes, which he painted with a similaraffection, born both from familiarity and an emotional connection.

2005The Yorkshire watercolours were shown in an exhibition in Los Angeles, whosetitle was taken from a Chinese proverb indicating the requirements for painting:‘Hand Eye Heart’.

Hockney turned his attention once again to oil painting, and in Marchof this year he set up his easel to capture the landscape in Yorkshire, knowingthat he would find greater freedom in oil than in watercolour. Indeed, as MarcoLivingstone observed in 2009: ‘The paintings he has made of the Wolds between2005 and the end of 2008 are in purely technical terms – but also in theirobservational accuracy and evocation of space – the most commandinghe has ever made.’6

2006The recently painted Yorkshire oils were shown at Annely Juda Fine Art in London.

Hockney visited a major Constable exhibition at Tate Britain, and wasparticularly inspired by Constable’s full-size oil sketches for his major ‘six-footer’ landscapes.

Hockney also made the first of many visits to the newly refurbished Muséede l’Orangerie in Paris, to see Monet’s Nymphéas.

2007Hockney painted Bigger Trees near Warter, or /ou Peinture sur le Motif pour leNouvel Âge Post-Photographique (fig. 4), an oil on 50 canvases, measuring4.5×12 m, designed to cover the entire end wall of the largest gallery of thatyear’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Production of the work depended onthe use of a camera and computer printouts, to map progress from one canvasto another. During the de-installation of the Summer Exhibition, Hockney placedtwo exact-size reproductions of the work on the gallery’s empty side walls by wayof an experiment (fig. 64).

In the same year, to coincide with his having curated ‘Hockney on TurnerWatercolours’, an exhibition at Tate Britain, he exhibited five of theWoldgateWoods series (see cats 66–72) at Tate Britain.

In the autumn, the Royal Academy of Arts invited Hockney to stage anexhibition of his recent Yorkshire landscapes in its Main Galleries in 2012.

2008Hockney leased a studio space in Bridlington, the largest in which he hasever worked (fig. 66).

He produced computer-generated inkjet prints, made using Photoshopsoftware, and also mastered drawing on the Apple iPhone with his thumb,e-mailing the results to friends.

Fig. 64David Hockney and friends at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, lookingat Bigger Trees near Warter, or /ou Peinture sur le Motif pour le Nouvel ÂgePost-Photographique, in a temporary installation immediately following theclosure of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, 2007

Fig. 65David Hockney painting Woldgate Woods III, 20 and 21 May 2006(cat. 66) en plein air, 17 May 2006

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Fig. 66The interior of the artist’s studio, Bridlington, 29 July 2009

2009In the spring, an exhibition of recent Yorkshire paintings was shown at theKunsthalle Würth, in Schwäbisch Hall, Germany, entitled ‘David Hockney:Nur Natur / Just Nature’. This was regarded by Hockney as an early experimentfor the forthcoming Royal Academy exhibition.

An exhibition of the inkjet computer drawings took place at Annely JudaFine Art, London, entitled ‘Drawing in a Printing Machine’.

In the autumn, Hockney held an exhibition of recent paintings at PaceWildenstein, New York, his first 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.

2010–11In the spring of 2010, he painted thirteen interpretations of Claude’s Sermonon the Mount (see cats 109–18).

The recent iPhone and iPad drawings were shown in the exhibition ‘FleursFraîches’ at the Fondation Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent in Paris. Hockneywas delighted by the ability of the Brushes application on the iPad to playback the process of creation of a drawing stroke by stroke. This was the firsttime he had watched himself draw, and he realised how Picasso must have feltwhen he saw film of himself drawing on glass.

Hockney started to use the iPad to draw the landscape directly from the motif.He continued to develop his film work, which he had embarked on the

previous year, capturing the Yorkshire landscape on a gantry of high-definitionvideo cameras mounted on the bonnet of his black Jeep: ‘Hours and hoursof studying the subjects and painting them led to the film work.’7 His films owemuch 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 onwhich they are played offers a number of perspective viewpoints in a similarway to his grids of canvases.

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