‘David Hockney caught the look of the modern world’: a tribute to the artist whose work was a feast of visual pleasure
AI Summary
David Hockney, a Bradford-born painter who became one of the most influential contemporary artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, died on June 11 at age 88. He rose to prominence as a pop artist in the 1960s and created celebrated works depicting California landscapes, swimming pools, and English countryside scenes, working across painting, photography, stage design, and printmaking. His works achieved enormous commercial success, with some paintings selling for tens of millions of dollars at auction, reflecting his lasting impact on global culture.
He was subversive and bold, yet also playful and accepting – putting the fun into pop art and finding freedom and fulfilment amid the blue skies and pools of California. David Hockney, who has died aged 88, lived and painted the truth
David Hockney changed the world just by looking at it. His art was a feast of unabashed visual pleasure, one long orgy of the gaze, the delighted lifelong epiphany of someone who cherished flowers in a vase and freeways in the sun and thought endlessly about new ways of making pictures of such passing treasures. It didn’t seem to occur to him that the way he saw was revolutionary – all he cared about was truth. But no one had ever captured the look and feel of the contemporary world with such acceptance before. He has the same simple perfection as the Beatles – just as they caught the sound of the modern world, he caught its look.
The most revealing fact about Hockney is that he loved LA. Where some might see a moronic inferno, he saw freedom and possibility under an unjudging blue sky. Low-lying houses with patio doors glinting vacantly, tall thin palm trees with tiny heads, the white spume of a diver’s splash – Hockney’s California is a vision of paradise. He is the Matisse of pop art, A Bigger Splash the 1960s answer to Matisse’s 1904 manifesto for hedonism, Luxe, Calme et Volupté.
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