David Hockney’s Hidden Depths

Known for his colorful, light-filled portraits, landscapes, and still-lifes, many of them depicting friends or lovers, Hockney, who died last week, in London, at the age of eighty-eight, became a beloved public figure early in his career, with a creativity that never curdled and a popularity that never waned. In the United Kingdom, which he left in the nineteen-sixties and to which he returned throughout the years, his death was important enough to be announced by news alerts. His life was celebrated in admiring headlines and remembrances that noted his continuous exploration of the possibilities of his art form. Like his contemporaries R. B. Kitaj and Peter Blake, Hockney participated in a British expression of Pop art, making figurative paintings in bright colors. He remained loyal, always, to drawing—a millennia-old technology, he would remark, that could hardly be cast aside in a generation, despite the privileging of conceptual art by so many of his peers. Nonetheless, he also embraced the new: he was among the first artists to make work on an iPad, creating still-lifes and landscapes in a 2011 series titled “The Arrival of Spring,” works that he produced in East Yorkshire. He reprised the motif for a series made in France during the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020, in which he observed and quietly celebrated the gradual return of new life as he moved further and further into his own old age.

The death of an old man after a life well lived is never a tragedy; but it is a loss, and Hockney has been mourned throughout the kingdom, including by King Charles himself. The monarch—who, like his mother, the late Queen Elizabeth, had reportedly angled to be painted by Hockney, without success—issued a statement describing the artist as “a giant of the world of art and painting, a Yorkshireman through and through and a dear friend and inspiration to so many.” Charles also remarked on the bright-yellow Crocs that Hockney wore, with a checkered suit, to a lunch held, in 2022, for members of the Order of Merit. (Hockney was appointed to the order, one of the most prestigious honors in Britain, in 2012, though he had turned down a knighthood in 1990.) The King said, “I trust they will see him tread safely into the hereafter as we mourn a man whose irrepressible charm, talent and constant innovation will be most sorely missed, but whose dazzling creativity lives on in galleries and museums around the world.”

Exhibitions of his work were reliable blockbusters for British institutions. His 2012 show at the Royal Academy was the second most visited by daily attendance, bested only by Monet; his retrospective at Tate Britain, in 2017, is still the museum’s most visited show. His appeal to a general audience was understandable: his paintings were representational, legible to a nonspecialist, aesthetically pleasing, and filled with beauty. What’s not to like? At the same time, his work offered substance and complexity beneath the often beguiling surface. One of his best-known paintings, “A Bigger Splash,” which Hockney made in 1967 and which became part of the permanent collection of the Tate in 1981, shows a modernist house flanked by a pair of skinny palm trees, before which extends a brilliant-blue swimming pool equipped with a yellow diving board. There is no one in sight, but the surface of the water bursts with evidence of someone having just dived in, disappearing into the cool aqueous depths. The painting is suggestive of heat, with the palm trees offering no shade, and of a full-body relief from that heat: someone—probably male, probably young, almost certainly beautiful—is about to emerge from the pool’s sublimity, gasping with pleasure.

“A Yorkshireman through and through” is a cliché that implies integrity, bluntness possibly edging into bloody-mindedness, and a fierce pride in this northern part of the nation. Hockney certainly showed that regional loyalty, despite spending long stretches of his life in London, in the U.S., and in France. In his sixties, he returned to Yorkshire, painting brilliantly colored landscapes that would go on to be paired, in an exhibition in Amsterdam titled “The Joy of Nature,” with the works of van Gogh. Hockney was born in Bradford, a city with roots that date to the Saxons, which became an important hub, in the nineteenth century, for the wool trade and the textile industry. He attended Bradford Grammar School, where he quickly learned that art studies were reserved for the least academically minded students, and thereafter studiously maintained grades dismal enough to be placed in the bottom set. Hockney was fortunate in his choice of parents: his father, an accountant’s clerk and a maverick tinkerer, and his mother, a Methodist and a vegetarian, gave him object lessons in unconventionality: Hockney’s younger brother, John Hockney, once wrote a family memoir titled “The Hockneys: Never Worry What the Neighbours Think.” At sixteen, Hockney attended art school in Bradford, and then—after completing two years of national service, working in hospitals—went on to the Royal College of Art in London. On graduating, he was awarded the school’s top prize, the Gold Medal for Work of Outstanding Distinction. He wore a gold-colored jacket to the ceremony. While his jacket wasn’t real gold lamé, he noted, “Their medal wasn’t gold, either.”