David Hockney is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Paintings by David Hockney
Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1971)
Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy is an acrylic on canvas painting by the British artist David Hockney. Painted between 1970 and 1971, it depicts a couple, the fashion designer Ossie Clark and the textile designer Celia Birtwell in their flat in Notting Hill Gate, shortly after their wedding, with one of the couple's cats on Clark's knee. The white cat depicted in the painting was named Blanche; Percy was another of their cats, but Hockney thought "Percy" made a better title.
The work is part of a series of double portraits made by Hockney from 1968, often portraying his friends. Hockney and Clark had been friends since meeting in Manchester in 1961, and Hockney was Clark's best man at his wedding to Birtwell in 1969. Hockney did preparatory work for the painting from 1969, making drawings and taking photographs. He worked on the painting from early 1970 to early 1971.
A Bigger Splash (1967)
A Bigger Splash is a large pop art painting by British artist David Hockney. Measuring 242.5 centimetres (95.5 in) by 243.9 centimetres (96.0 in), it depicts a swimming pool beside a modern house, disturbed by a large splash of water created by an unseen figure who has apparently just jumped in from a diving board. It was painted in California between April and June 1967, when Hockney was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. Jack Hazan's fictionalised 1973 biopic, A Bigger Splash, concentrating on the breakup of Hockney's relationship with Peter Schlesinger, was named after the painting.
Luca Guadagnino's 2015 film A Bigger Splash (a loose remake of La Piscine) was also named after the painting.
Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972)
Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) is a large acrylic-on-canvas pop art painting by British artist David Hockney, completed in May 1972. It measures 7 ft × 10 ft (2.1 m × 3.0 m), and depicts two figures: one swimming underwater and one clothed male figure looking down at the swimmer. In November 2018, it sold for $90.3 million, at that time the highest price ever paid at auction for a painting by a living artist.
Hockney visited California for the first time in January 1964 after a successful first solo exhibition at the John Kasmin gallery. The United States fascinated him, and Los Angeles in particular, partly because of the influence of Hollywood cinema but also because of the modernist building Case Study House #21. As a gay man, he was also a fan of the beefcake magazine Physique Pictorial, which was published in Los Angeles. "I instinctively knew I was going to like it," Hockney said, "and as I flew over San Bernardino and saw the swimming pools and the houses and everything and the sun, I was more thrilled than I have ever been in arriving in any city."
Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007)
Bigger Trees Near Warter or ou Peinture en Plein Air pour l'age Post-Photographique is a large landscape painting by British artist David Hockney. Measuring 460 by 1,220 centimetres or 180 by 480 inches, it depicts a coppice near Warter, Pocklington in the East Riding of Yorkshire and is the largest painting Hockney has completed.
It was painted in the East Riding of Yorkshire between February and March 2007. The painting's alternative title alludes to the technique Hockney used to create the work, a combination of painting out of doors and in front of the subject (called in French 'sur le motif') whilst also using the techniques of digital photography.
Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool (1966)
Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool is a 1966 acrylic-on-canvas painting by the British pop art artist David Hockney. It depicts the rear view of a naked man climbing out of a swimming pool outside a contemporary house. It is held at the Walker Art Gallery, in Liverpool.
Hockney moved from England to California in 1964, drawn by its sleek modernist aesthetic and warm Mediterranean climate. In 1966, while teaching at UCLA, Hockney met the American art student Peter Schlesinger. The two became lovers, and Hockney started painting a series of pool pictures, often featuring Schlesinger. A few of these, such as Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool (1966), A Bigger Splash (1967) and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972), later achieved iconic status. On 15 November 2018, the latter set a world record for the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction by a living artist.
We Two Boys Together Clinging (painting) (1961)
It was one of several homoerotic paintings created by Hockney in 1961 during his second year at the Royal College of Art, alongside Doll Boy and The Most Beautiful Boy in the World. Both Doll Boy and We Two Boys Together Clinging contain the code "3.18" which is a reference to the British pop singer Cliff Richard, who Hockney had several 'pin up' photographs of on his studio wall. Hockney's biographer Christopher Sykes described the painting as "one of Hockney's most iconic images" and that it was "both touching and funny". The work was inspired by a newspaper headline of a mountaineering accident, "Two Boys Cling Together All Night" and a poem by Walt Whitman of the same name from his Calamus sequence of poems. An experimental watercolour study preceeded the painting. Hockney subsequently said of his early homoerotic paintings that as depictions of homosexuality they were "partly propaganda of something that hadn't been propagandised" and that the line "We Two Boys Together Clinging" was a "marvellous, beautiful, poetic line". The painting was created several years prior to the decriminalization of homosexual acts between males as a result of the Sexual Offences Act 1967.
The painting is oil on board and measures 121.9 x 152.4cm. It depicts two figures bound together with "tentacles of desire". The figures are shown standing infront of the wall of a lavatory with graffiti. Four coded numbered references are in the four corners of the painting. "4.2" refers to Hockney's earlier painting Doll Boy, "4.8" refers to Hockney himself as it is a self-portrait, "3.18" stands for Cliff Richard and "16.3" refers to Peter Crutch, an art student whom Hockney fancied. Accros the figure depicting Hockney is painted the words "Never" which suggests that the figures desire will be unrequited. Two lines from the poem by Whitman are on the left side of the painting that act as "a commentary on the men's activities". The description of the painting on the Arts Council Collection website describes Hockney's style as influenced by Jean Dubuffet which "gives the painting a crudity and vigour but also shrouds the identity of the artist in mock-anonymity".
The Splash (1966)
The Splash is a 1966 pop art painting by the British artist David Hockney. It depicts a swimming pool beside a pavilion, disturbed by a splash of water created by an unseen figure who has apparently just jumped in from a diving board. It is made in acrylic on a 72 in (180 cm) square canvas, and is titled, signed and dated 1966 on the reverse. It is one of three connected works painted in 1966 and 1967: the others are The Little Splash (1966, private collection), and A Bigger Splash (1967, Tate Britain, London).
Hockney first visited Los Angeles in 1964. Entranced by the landscape, light and lifestyle, and in particular the blue swimming pools, he moved to California in 1966.
Portrait of Sir David Webster (1971)
The Portrait of Sir David Webster is a 1971 portrait by the English artist David Hockney of the arts administrator David Webster. It was commissioned to mark Webster's retirement as the General Administrator of the Royal Opera House in London. The portrait hung for several decades in the opera house.
The painting depicts a side profile of Webster in Hockney's studio sitting on a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 'MR' chair by a glass-topped coffee table on which stands a vase of pink tulips, a favourite flower of Hockney's.
In the dull village
In the dull village is an etching and aquatint print made by David Hockney in 1966, one of series of illustrations for a selection of Greek poems written by Constantine P. Cavafy. It depicts two men lying next to each other in bed, naked from the waist up, with their lower halves covered by bedclothes.
Cavafy was a Greek poet who was born in Alexandria in 1863. He spent several years in Liverpool in his youth, and later in Constantinople, but spent most of his life in the city of his birth. Many of Cavafy's poems are inspired by the Hellenistic era, and he is one of the earliest modern authors to write openly about homosexuality. Cavafy died in 1933, four years before Hockney was born.