DAVID HOCKNEY Biography - Other artists & entretainers

 
 

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DAVID HOCKNEY

Name: David Hockney                                                                 
Born: July 9, 1937                                                                   
                                                                                     
David Hockney, CH, RA, (born July 9, 1937) is an English artist, based in Los       
Angeles, California, United States. An important contributor to the British Pop     
art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential artists     
of the twentieth century.                                                           
                                                                                     
Hockney was born in Bradford and educated at Bradford Grammar School, Bradford       
College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, where he met R. B. Kitaj.     
While still at the Royal College of Art, Hockney was featured in the exhibition     
Young Contemporaries, alongside Peter Blake, that announced the arrival of           
British Pop Art. He became associated with pop art, but his early works also         
display expressionist elements, not dissimilar to certain works by Francis Bacon.   
Sometimes, as in We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), named after a poem by         
Walt Whitman, these works make reference to his homosexuality. From 1963 Hockney     
was represented by the influential art dealer John Kasmin. In 1963 Hockney           
visited New York, making contact with Andy Warhol. Later, a visit to California,     
where he settled, inspired Hockney to make a series of oil paintings of swimming     
pools in Los Angeles. These are executed in a more realistic style and use           
vibrant colours. He also made prints, portraits of friends, and stage designs       
for the Royal Court Theatre, Glyndebourne, La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera       
in New York City.                                                                   
                                                                                     
Hockney studied lithography in art school in Bradford, Yorkshire. His first         
print was Myself and My Heroes (1961), where he appears beside a haloed Gandhi       
and Walt Whitman. His first major project in printmaking was a series of sixteen     
etchings where he represents Hogarth's A Rake's Progress autobiographically. In     
the 1960s in California, he created with Ken Tyler another series of prints         
titled A Hollywood Collection. Many of his lithographs are portraits of his         
friends, most frequently of them Celia Birtwell. In 1970-1 Hockney painted Mr       
and Mrs Clark and Percy a double portrait of Celia Birtwell and her then husband     
the fashion designer Ossie Clark in their Notting Hill home. The painting has       
become one of the most popular in the collection of the Tate Gallery and was         
voted as one of the UK's most favourite paintings in a 2005 poll carried out by     
BBC Radio 4. His first prints during the 1980s were two big lithographs of Celia     
published by Gemini G.E.L. (the studio started by Ken Tyler) in 1982). Hockney       
also made two etchings honoring Pablo Picasso, whose work he admired and was         
influenced by, after Picasso's death in 1973.                                       
                                                                                     
In an unusual use of paintings, the opening credits of the 1978 Neil Simon film,     
California Suite, based on his play of the same name, show a leisurely display       
of about a dozen California-themed Hockney paintings.