On June 12, David Hockney, one of the most important British and American artists of our time, died in London. He was 88 years old. He painted his most famous paintings in the 1960s and 1970s in California. His characters swim in swimming pools, pose in front of modern palaces and among art collections. Hockney’s works have little in common with contemporary art: they are quite conservative in style, surprisingly upbeat in mood, and seem practically apolitical (in fact, this is not the case). In addition to painting and photography, Hockney left his mark on the history of art: he postulated that the Old Masters used lenses and mirrors to create realistic images. Critic Anton Khitrov talks about the artist’s career and legacy.
Britons celebrate David Hockney as a national treasure. On Friday, when the artist’s representative, Erica Bolton, announced his death, the BBC immediately released a story connected.
Journalists highlighted Hockney’s importance to queer culture and his record at Christie’s auction. We are talking about the work “Portrait of the Artist”, which was auctioned in 2018 for more than $90 million. This is the most expensive painting ever sold at auction to this day during the author’s lifetime.
Money is a convenient, though not the most accurate, way to measure an artist’s fame. Not surprisingly, Christie’s story was mentioned in all the news reports of Hockney’s death. However, success at the auction is far from the main achievement of the Briton.
Perhaps the most important thing is that Hockney managed to achieve a brilliant career in art without joining any movement. He was a completely original character and unlike anyone else.
It is often classified as pop art, but the artist himself stubbornly rejected this label. Certainly his most famous works really resemble advertising brochures and photographs from glossy magazines – yet he painted reality and not its media reflection, like Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein.
Also, since Hockney is from England and studied, he is periodically attributed to the London School, which, along with the continental “New Wilde”, proved that traditional acting could be modern (in the middle of the 20th century, almost no one believed this in the West). But for a “Londoner,” Hockney is still very cheerful: just compare his lively paintings with the bleak paintings of Francis Bacon, the unflattering portraits of Lucian Freud, or the austere landscapes of Frank Auerbach.
In short, Hockney defies classification. He was really a friend of both ‘Londoners’ and pop artists. But he has no more in common with both than with the great artists of the past, his teachers and his corresponding interlocutors – from the masters of the Renaissance to Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.
Even in recent years, Hockney has been constantly in the news, something that many artists his age cannot achieve. In 2020, at the height of the Covid pandemic, he encouraged fans by posting nature sketches of Normandy on his iPad; The artist gave one of the drawings containing daffodils the title “Remember, they cannot cancel spring.” In 2025, he showed a major retrospective in Paris, at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which became the most prestigious art event of the year in Europe. And literally a few months before his death, out loud criticize The British Museum’s ambitious plan to display the Bayeux Tapestry, a fragile medieval monument that might not withstand transportation (indeed, Hockney moved to Normandy at the end of his life partly out of interest in the tapestry).
For all the conservatism of the artist who painted traditional landscapes, portraits and still lifes contrary to fashion, he was always interested in new technical means. In the 1960s, after moving from dreary post-war England to sunny Los Angeles, he began painting with acrylic paints, a relatively recent invention. In the 1990s, he discovered how to create drawings using a photocopier. In the 2000s, he mastered computer drawing; In the 2000s, he switched to using the smartphone and tablet.
Perhaps Hockney’s most famous work is The Biggest Splash from 1967. The artist painted a swimming pool into which a diver has just jumped: we don’t see a person, but we see spray flying over the water. This attempt to freeze a moment, that is, to solve the problem of photography using pictorial means, is not actually characteristic of Hockney at all, but rather resembles the art of realist photographers (by the way, his peers).
Hockney himself, in the early 1980s, came up with the opposite method: solving pictorial problems using photographic media. He made his debut as a photographer, presenting works using his own style “image”. It worked like this: Hockney photographed nature from different angles, then assembled a collage to show the entire object or scene, not just from one point.
The author asserts that this is what distinguishes the moving human gaze from the fixed camera gaze, and the painter’s style from the photographer’s style. Hockney discovered something similar early in his career in the 1960s: the artist would often depict what he was going to paint from several points. But over time, the combination of angles became his favorite technique, which was also used Video artand later on on a large scale Landscape.
At the turn of the century, Hockney set out to prove that the Old Masters had worked with the same technique. He studied numerous Western paintings and drawings, called on art historians and scholars for help – and ultimately put forward a scientific hypothesis: starting in the 15th century, artists widely used optical tools (such as, for example, a spherical mirror) to copy reality.
Not all experts supported the artist. Some were able to find serious arguments against it, while others simply did not want to believe it: for example, the writer Susan Sontag said: He saidAccepting this hypothesis is the same as admitting that all the great lovers in the world have taken Viagra. For Hockney himself, the assumption of the optical devices of Caravaggio and Vermeer did not detract from their skill in the least: they had, he thought, not only traced the projection, but created a complex “complex” of several.
Whether the Briton was right about Caravaggio and others is a question for art historians. In a private conversation about Hockney, there is something else that is important. First, he considered himself the heir to a centuries-old tradition. Secondly, I saw nothing wrong with relying on technology. Third, he had an original understanding of the difference between a photographer and a painter. The artist emphasized that the problem is not the presence or absence of the camera, but rather the movement of the gaze itself, and the “quality of the collage” in the final image.
It is for this reason that Hockney should not be classified as pop art – with all its interest in consumption, luxury, and images of successful life. Pop artists were the first to notice that the media had replaced reality, but they did not try to fight it, but merely recorded it as fact: Warhol wrote posters instead of soup, Lichtenstein wrote patriotic comics instead of real battle scenes, and so on. Hockney tried to show the world as people see it, not as it appears in pictures, films or advertisements. His goal was to return to the reality given to us in sensations.
However, Hockney had little faith in the reality given in sensations. More precisely, he documented, but remembered that sensations are determined by cultural and social experience, and reality is often structured as such as performance.
He constantly returned to the theme of theater – and it is no coincidence that his biography included so many successes cooperation With opera directors. In couple and group photos Line up A theatrical scene that is deliberately unnatural, sometimes even puts His heroes are on the stage and frame the composition with a curtain. Fashionable modern mansions among the wealthy in California – transparent and full of light – books Like theater wings, furnished for show.
In fact, the home swimming pool, Hockney’s favorite setting, is little more than a stage attached to the house: the person at the edge of the pool looks like an actor on stage – and often acts accordingly (remember how pool parties are depicted in Hollywood films).
Hockney even writes nature as if it were a theatrical backdrop: stylized and ornate, as if it required someone to dance in front of it. The plates are appropriately sized. In 2007, for example, the artist wrote “Big trees near Warther” On 50 canvases; This work measures about five by twelve metres, and is noticeably larger than Alexander Ivanov’s The Appearance of Christ to the People.
Performance, that is, simply working for an audience, is not the only association that the image of theater evokes in Hockney’s work. There is something else – appearance and refusal to hide. Hockney is known, among other things, as one of the major queer artists of the twentieth century.
In 1961, he exhibited his first painting with gay figures, “We Boys Clinging to Each Other,” and the following year he came out. There are only five years to go before same-sex relationships are decriminalized in the UK. In California – all fourteen. However, in Hockney’s picturesque theatre, same-sex couples were given the same rights as same-sex couples. And in the same painting, “Portrait of an Artist,” which sold for a record $90 million, it is not Hockney himself standing by the pool, as one might infer from the title, but another artist — his lover, Peter Schlesinger. For art history, this means almost more than the auction price.