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David Hockney changed the world just by looking. His art was a feast of undisturbed joy, a long-term habit, the lifelong joy of a man who loved flowers in pots and sunny streets and endlessly thought of new ways to create images of such fleeting wealth. It didn’t seem to him that his perspective was changing – what he cared about was the truth. But no one has ever captured the look and feel of today’s world with such acceptance. He has the same simple perfection as the Beatles – just as he captured the sound of the modern world, he captured the look.
The most famous thing about Hockney is that he loved LA. Where others saw an eagle, he saw freedom and possibility under a sky free of judgment. Low-rise buildings with glistening patio doors, tall thin palm trees with small heads, whitewashed fountains – Hockney’s California is a vision of paradise. He is the Matisse of pop art, A Big Splash the 1960s response to Matisse’s 1904 manifesto of hedonism, Luxe, Calme et Volupté.
Pop art had a very sad chevrolet line. Many of his biggest critics – Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter – were not fans but cold critics of the new western consumer group that was being created by 1960. Then Hockney came. A childhood in the black smoke shops of Bradford produced a young artist as devoid of nose as he was of snobbery. His first paintings, which he made while he was a student at the Royal College of Art in London, accept modern life not out of wonder or imagination but because it was his life: from desk lamps to dancing to bathing, why not show how his generation lived?
Being gay was just part of the reality he lived and portrayed. It wasn’t much of a problem and he would be disappointed if we remembered him as “the average British artist in public”. It is his calm and effortless depiction of the taboo sexuality of early 1960s Britain that makes his art so disturbing. Starting in 1960-1 with his painting Doll Boy, which admits his obsession with Cliff Richard (“so beautiful, so beautiful”) to the 1968 picture of mature and confident people, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, the development of Hockney’s art in the decade of evolution is more about finding a homosexual life.
However, Hockney does not participate in the new, free, fulfilled world that he wanted to move to London – and found in California. He is also observant, and he is very confident. When he visited the US for the first time in 1961, he chronicled the trip in a series of photographs inspired by William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress. A handsome rake, grassy and Hockney, he was immediately absorbed and confused by America when he realized that there are gay people and he can be surrounded by people in jeans who listen to pop music in their ears (this was almost 60 years ago: Hockney was already comparing the way we live here, even before).
By the end of the 1960s, an eerie stillness dominated his paintings as he appeared in the open, the viewer. The loneliness of looking is the subject of what may be his greatest painting, Portrait of the Artist (Pool with Two Figures). It is very cheap, selling in 2018 $90.3m. In this large canvas from 1972, an incredibly bright work, a young man in a pink jacket stands by an open swimming pool watching a swimmer whose pale body sways under the clear turquoise water. To give details of the scandal Hockney was disgusted with, the man in the pool is Peter Schlesinger and the painting depicts the end of their relationship, a heartbreak that gives a bitter authority.
However if looking can be personal, it can also be fun. It’s embarrassing to admit that, for all the emotional complexity of this painting, the bright, melting landscape of the multi-colored mountains with the sun across the pond is alluring. Such appearances puzzled Hockney and his art shares its wonder. Some of his most memorable paintings are simple: his 1972 painting of Mount Fuji and Flowers, or his beautiful study of a delicate teacup against a swirling blue ocean, Breakfast in Malibu, Sunday 1989.
In both of these images, the delicate scenes of life are juxtaposed with the grand and majestic images of nature. It’s the kind of old game – where he’s playing Chardin against Turner or Hokusai – that Hockney was able to master because he was curious about artistic styles and how they changed the way we see the world. There was nothing irrational about his reality. One of his greatest heroes was Picasso. Not only did he present an imaginary meeting between the two in a vivid imitation of Picasso’s style but, in an experiment that took him away from his easel, he tried to apply the revolutionary ideas of Picasso’s Cubism to painting. His layered images that seek to capture multiple perspectives and fractured views of the world are some of his most instantly recognizable works.
Hockney once took me to a Caravaggio exhibition at the National Gallery to show why he believed the artist must have used an early camera. Later in London where he lived, he created a Japanese scroll showing how Eastern art uses a dynamic, static concept that is more connected to the world than the one-dimensional concepts that have dominated Western art. His criticism was impressive and the scroll, which was not original but a copy. In other words, he considered it important not because of its general availability but because of its use.
Hockney’s house in Bridlington was also beautiful but modestly decorated. He did not use his wealth to live in luxury but to work and research. There was a humility and directness about him that was very touching. He became famous for his last-ditch refusal to quit smoking but, as a non-smoker, I can testify that when he once drove me across Yorkshire he used a very high quality ashtray which kept his smoke to himself. He was a respectable libertarian.
The man came to the public and made Hockney famous. He had a certain kind of fame that is not found among young British artists and is very similar to David Attenborough or the Queen. David Hockney was the real thing – a great artist and a great man.
