David Hockney, Who Restored the Human Form to Art, Dies at 88
David Hockney, the English artist whose deftly designed and suavely colored paintings turned trans-Atlantic attention to figurative and narrative art beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s after decades in which abstraction had dominated, died on Thursday at his home in London. He was 88.His publicist, Erica Bolton, confirmed the death. No cause was provided.A native of Yorkshire, Mr. Hockney lived for many years in Los Angeles, long enough to refer to himself as an “English Los Angeleno” and to create images that, for many viewers, captured the sun-soaked atmosphere of that city as surely as Joan Didion did in prose. And although his art was conservative in an era that also gave rise to Conceptualism, he was progressive in at least one way: He was one of the first widely popular artists of his time to make work with undisguised gay content and one of the few to take a public stand against the censoring of homosexual imagery.His death came nine months after the close of a sprawling retrospective exhibition of his work at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. But even at that point, he was not finished. Working out of his studio in London, using a wheelchair, his health failing, he continued to paint.“I just go on with my work,” he told The New York Times before the show opened in April 2025. “When I come back from Paris, I’m going to carry on painting.”And so he did, continuing to produce a virtuosic, graphic-based, fundamentally illustrational art that existed largely outside shifts in contemporary market fashion; that reproduced well in print and digital media; and that, in a succession of major institutional shows, attracted popular attention over six decades.David Hockney was born into a working-class family in the small industrial city of Bradford, Yorkshire, on July 9, 1937, one of five children. His father, Kenneth Hockney, was a self-employed restorer of baby carriages and a rabid crusader against nuclear arms. His mother, Laura (Thompson) Hockney, to whom he was especially close, was a frequent subject of his portraits. David Hockney maintained close ties to his parents, returning yearly to spend Christmas with them until the end of their lives. He shared their Labour Party politics and his father’s philosophically principled pacifism. Spotted as a talent early on, Mr. Hockney earned a scholarship to a local art school. When faced with the prospect of being drafted into the British Army in his late teens, he declared himself a conscientious objector and did two years of alternative service as a hospital orderly. In 1959, he enrolled at the Royal College of Art in London. The experience of seeing a major Picasso exhibition at the Tate Gallery the following year confirmed that artist as a personal hero to Mr. Hockney.A short trip to New York City in 1961 established his lasting attraction to America, a place that to him felt less sexually repressive than England. Inspired by his stay, he made prints based on William Hogarth’s series of paintings “A Rake’s Progress,” but he put that 18th-century morality tale — about a young man’s descent into perdition — in 20th-century terms. Mr. Hockney had the hero cruising runners in Central Park, drinking in gay bars and heading to jail. The episodes were depicted in a visually distinctive style: half-abstract but grounded in realistic details.By the time he finished the series, he was himself visually striking, with a high-color wardrobe of plaid suits, striped soccer jerseys and mismatched colored socks, owlish glasses and bleached blond hair. With a graduation gold medal awarded by the Royal Academy — received with the artist wearing a gold lamé jacket to the ceremony — and London gallery representation secured, Mr. Hockney was a British star on the rise.His reputation spread to New York in 1963, when he made a second, heavily networked trip there, during which he met Henry Geldzahler, the Met’s newly appointed curator of 20th-century art, who would become a close and influential friend.The following year, Mr. Hockney visited Los Angeles for the first time. Some of his best-known paintings, many including images of swimming pools, were done there, identifying him as the quintessential artist of Southern California’s nouveau riche leisure life.In 1966, while teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles, he met Peter Schlesinger, a student who became his model, muse and lover. The many paintings and drawings he did of Mr. Schlesinger — in Los Angeles and London and on their frequent travels — constitute a running chronicle of their relationship. A 1974 film by Jack Hazan, “A Bigger Splash,” named for one of Mr. Hockney’s swimming pool paintings but edited largely without his participation, dramatized the couple’s 1971 breakup.Double PortraitsOver the years Mr. Hockney moved among studios in the United States and Europe. What remained consistent was his prodigious output. No matter where he was or what was happening, good or bad, he worked, often experimenting with media new to him.Painting was his chief preoccupation in the mid-to-late 1960s, when he did several renowned double portraits, one of the British writer Christopher Isherwood and his partner Don Bachardy in their Santa Monica home; another of Mr. Geldzahler and his partner Christopher Scott in New York; and a third of the Los Angeles collectors Fred and Marcia Weisman in their Los Angeles sculpture garden.All three pictures are formally razor-sharp and psychologically acute: Mr. Isherwood stares at his younger lover with a kind of predatory intensity; Mr. Geldzahler sits commandingly on a sofa while Mr. Scott, a slight figure in a raincoat, seems to be on his way out the door. Mr. Weisman stands, sculpture-stiff in a business suit with fists clenched, near his pink-robed wife, whose snarling smile is echoed, cartoon-fashion, in the faces carved on a Native American totem pole planted nearby.Periodically, Mr. Hockney made an effort to break with what he considered overly realistic painting. One disruptive tool he called on was photography, which he initially used as an aide-mémoire, snapping pictures wherever he went and referring to them when he was painting. Around 1970, he began pasting photographs onto collages, creating figures that appeared to be seen, Cubist-style, from slightly different angles at once. Initially intended as studies for paintings, the collages became an end in themselves and grew in complexity and sophistication.When, in 1982, Mr. Hockney was invited by the Pompidou Center in Paris to have a show of his photographs, he began experimenting with elaborate Polaroid composites — creating single images, often figures, from many individual photographs arranged on a grid. He then moved on to photo-collages made with a Pentax 110 camera, creating panoramic landscapes of the American Southwest, a part of the United States he particularly loved. He then translated this incremental approach — using many small images to build a large one — to paintings, in the late 1990s composing images of rolling East Yorkshire terrain from something like an aerial perspective.His stated intention in such pictures was to repudiate the Renaissance ideal of one-point perspective, which in its scientific exactness was held to define the most advanced form of painting. In arguing against that dogma, Mr. Hockney called on the visual and conceptual logic of Cubism and the multipoint perspective found in Chinese narrative scroll paintings, many of which he examined in the Asian art department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Such work, he said, welcomed viewers as participants, whereas Western-style photographic realism coldly shut them out, as if with a sheet of a glass.Artistry OnstageMr. Hockney’s notion of painting as an immersive medium — demonstrated in a late-life digital extravaganza based on large-scale projections of his work, “Bigger & Closer (Not Smaller & Further Away)” — was also on display in his several much-praised theater designs. The earliest was for a staging of Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu Roi” at the Royal Court Theater in London in 1966; his others were for operas.In 1975, the Glyndebourne Festival, in the English countryside, invited him to create the sets and costumes for Stravinsky’s version of “A Rake’s Progress,” a subject with which Mr. Hockney was familiar. The visual effects he achieved through the use of magnified linear cross-hatching were stunning; the production became one of the most admired of its day.Mr. Hockney had another stage success in 1981 with “Parade,” a triple bill of a ballet by Erik Satie and two short operas by Francis Poulenc and Maurice Ravel at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. His designs for Puccini’s Turandot,” Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” and Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” were extravagantly painterly, bringing his art as close to abstraction as it ever got.Increasingly opinionated about art as he grew older, and temperamentally contrarian, Mr. Hockney became ever more insistent on the importance of the human figure in art, phrasing his conviction as a moral imperative. In a newspaper statement in 1979, he angrily criticized the Tate as favoring abstract art in its acquisition policies — confirming the view of him, widely held in certain parts of the art world, as an aesthetic reactionary.Later, he advanced and strenuously promoted a highly contested theory that many of the old masters, from the Renaissance forward, used optical aids, such as mirrors and prisms, to achieve the illusion of reality in their art. In 2001, to support his claim, he published a book, “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.”Despite the time he spent on formulating and defending such theories, they were a sideline to his virtually nonstop art production, which moved from painting and drawing to experimental printmaking and photography; it continued unbroken as he traveled, often by car, throughout the United States, Europe and Asia, often for different experiences of light, whether in Morocco or Arctic Norway.Mr. Hockney began using computer graphics programs as early as 1985, and more than 30 years later he was making digital drawings and using paint apps on an iPad. In the mid-1980s, he began making prints on an office copier, creating layers of color by putting each sheet repeatedly through the machine, resulting in labor-intensive art produced through a supposedly labor-saving technology. In 1989, he contributed a wall-size print to the São Paulo Biennial, sending the entire piece to Brazil by fax.A gregarious personality, Mr. Hockney was able to work while surrounded by people. At the same time, he frequently complained about distracting visitors, and would sometimes change studios and cities in search of quiet. (He periodically retreated to Yorkshire and moved to rural northern France in 2019, before returning to London in 2023.)The need for constant company seemed to diminish over time. A contributing factor was the onset of congenital deafness — his father had all but lost his hearing, as had his sister Margaret — for which Mr. Hockney wore hearing aids of various strengths. In addition, the need for companionship was filled by his late-in-life acquisitions of pet dachshunds, on which he doted.He is survived by his partner, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, and his brothers Philip and John.Honors and HomagesBy this time his hearing disability had become isolating, he had long since been a celebrity, and one who wore the facts of his life easily and openly. They were there in his art, as well as in two volumes of best-selling autobiography, the first, “David Hockney by David Hockney” (1976); the second, “That’s the Way I See It” (1993). The two volumes of a biography by Christopher Simon Sykes appeared in 2011 and 2014.Official honors arrived, which Mr. Hockney accepted selectively. In 1990, he turned down a British knighthood and was annoyed some years later when he learned that he had been appointed a Companion of Honor without being consulted. In 2012, however, he accepted the Order of Merit, Britain’s most prestigious royal honor for achievement in the arts, because he regarded it as a personal gift from Queen Elizabeth II and to refuse it, he thought, would be ungrateful.Honor also came in the form of major exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic. His first retrospective, at London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery, came in 1970, when he was barely a decade into his career. Another was organized in 1974 by the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, where he was living at the time.A third opened in 1988 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art before traveling to the Met and then to the Tate. The Tate appearance, however, almost didn’t happen after Mr. Hockney threatened to withdraw the paintings in the exhibition owned by him — about a quarter of those on view — to protest anti-gay legislation proposed by the British government at the time. The legislation was defeated, and the show went on.Three decades later, the Met, Tate and Pompidou Center organized an 80th-birthday retrospective, and the recent show at the Louis Vuitton Foundation was the artist’s largest, encompassing more than 400 works.Smaller retrospectives dedicated to his drawings, photographs, stage designs and portraiture attested to both the breadth and the depth of his output. In 1999 at the Picasso Museum in Paris, a large selection of his art was paired with works by his hero, reconfirming the pedigree of the influence he claimed for himself.In the politically charged atmosphere of the 1990s art world, this pedigree and Mr. Hockney’s disdainful rejection of the avant-garde felt out of date. But with the return to favor of painting — and figuration — in the early 21st century, he regained some footing.Even if much of his late output looks like busywork, some of his early paintings are lastingly moving. “My Parents,” from 1977, is one of them. In it, his mother sits erect but relaxed, looking attentively and cooperatively toward the artist; his father, though dressed in a suit, bends intently and nearsightedly over a book, unable or unwilling to hold a formal pose. It is a tender picture about the failure of communication, and the loving acceptance of that.That Mr. Hockney could bring a comparable air of domestic tenderness to his portraits of other men, long before the day of same-sex marriage, and could present that tenderness not as a political statement but as a fact of everyday life, was his radical accomplishment, and one that may well be what he is best remembered for.Isabella Kwai contributed reporting.
Diterbitkan : 2026-06-12 12:38:00
sumber : www.nytimes.com
