In November of 2018, Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), a dazzling seven-by-ten-foot, acrylic-on-canvas painting from 1972, set the all-time auction record for a living artist when it was hammered down at Christie’s for $90.3 million. (It was later eclipsed by Jeff Koons’s Rabbit.) Hockney once said, “The price of art is nothing to do with works of art really. It’s just a little game that keeps people amused.”
David Hockney was born on July 9, 1937, in the West Yorkshire city of Bradford, a half hour west of Leeds. Someone once likened his signature Yorkshire accent, which he retained all his life, to lumpy custard. The Hockneys of Bradford were a Northern working-class family with a progressive, eccentric bent. The artist’s father, Kenneth, was a conscientious objector in the Second World War; his mother, Laura, was a strict vegetarian. The title of his brother John’s memoir, The Hockneys: Never Worry What the Neighbours Think, captured the household bent. Another brother, Paul, grew up to become Bradford’s Lord Mayor as well as the artist’s accountant. David had a particularly tight bond with his sister, Margaret, a nurse. She would inspire Hockney, in the final decades of his life, to take up the iPhone as an artistic implement, leading to the artist’s prolific, late-career exploration of picture-making—in particular, landscapes—in the digital realm.
The young David displayed hypergraphic tendencies—the compulsive need to make a mark, to depict. Paper was scarce during the war, so the boy would roust himself out of bed early and intercept the delivery of newspapers and magazines, going at their blank margins with his pencil, drawing figures, cartoons, landscapes, whatever struck his fancy. Soon enough, he took up painting. “I used to paint just around where I lived,” Hockney recalled of his boyhood. “Eventually, I got a pram and put the paints in it, and I’d wheel it out.” In 1953, Hockney entered the Bradford School of Art; he loved it so much he would spend 12 hours a day there. At 17, he sold his first work, an oil painting of his father, for ten pounds. Hockney’s parents and siblings remained lifelong, recurring subjects.
After a two-year National Service stint as a hospital orderly (thanks to his own conscientious-objector status), Hockney landed at the Royal College of Art, in London, in the fall of 1959. With the turning of the decade, British postwar art was tipping into a vivid new era, one that included the likes of R.B. Kitaj and Derek Boshier (both friends of Hockney’s at RCA), along with Peter Blake, Bridget Riley, and Pauline Boty. Kitaj and Hockney were especially close, with the older, American Kitaj, acting as something of a mentor. Amid all of the young, attention-grabbing prodigies at the Royal College, Hockney’s technical prowess—a dimension of his art that would be noted throughout his career—made him stand out. Kitaj said that his friend made “the most beautiful drawing I had ever seen at an art school.” It depicted a human skeleton.
According to Kitaj, “Hockney had a two-week abstract period.” But the angsty machismo of abstract expressionism didn’t suit him, so he toggled to figurative painting and began incorporating imagery from commercial culture into his work: the stuff of Pop. There were boxes of Typhoo tea (his mother’s favorite), male figures inspired by the singer Cliff Richard. Still an art student, Hockney was already busy crafting some of the foundational images of British Pop art, as he distilled a panoply of inspirations, both visual and literary, from Bacon to Dubuffet, Whitman to Cavafy. Hockney’s metabolism when it came to absorbing influence and emitting utter originality was rapid, inexhaustible, and, even early on, subject to public scrutiny, as would befit a precocious art star. Henry Geldzahler, the Met curator and all-purpose New York art gadfly, would later observe that Hockney “conducted his education in public with a charming and endearing innocence.” (Geldzahler became one of Hockney’s close associates and the subject of his portraiture.)