Postscript: David Hockney 1937 - 2026

David Hockney in his studio, 1978 (photo by Snowdon)

I see in the Times that David Hockney has died: “David Hockney, Who Restored the Human Form to Art, Dies at 88” (The New York Times, June 12, 2026). He’s perhaps best known for his “pool paintings,” e.g., A Bigger Splash (1967), Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool (1966), Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1971). Rebecca Mead says of them, “They capture a kind of carefree milieu that manages to be suggestively hedonistic while being almost Edenic in the loving treatment of male nudity” (“David Hockney’s Hidden Depths” (newyorker.com, June 16, 2026).

My favorite Hockney is California Art Collector (1964). Julian Bell, in his “More Light!” (The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2017), describes it brilliantly:

In California Art Collector (1964), it is the unfamiliar luxury of long-fiber carpets, as much as that of private swimming pools, that seems to have snagged his attention. Patches of wavy, watery brush rhythms ruffle the creamy primer at the base of the six-foot canvas, abutting other, denser paint patches—notably the chunky white and buff of an armchair fabric with floral patterning and the flamboyance of a carnation-pink wall. Between armchair and wall, we see the green of the collector’s dress surmounted by her head in profile, which turns to commune with a modernist sculpture while behind it another head, that of another sculpture, turns to face the opposite way.

Bell continues:

Patches abutting, or patches laid side by side on a warm accommodating ground: these are ways that Hockney’s pictures are often pieced together. They become floors on which rugs have been strewn. Hockney displays a childlike delight in setting one type of content against another. In California Art Collector, floral chintz against green velour, the three discrete color blocks of that modernistic snowman, the stage-prop rainbow wedged between wall and distant pool; or in Hockney’s subsequent pictures of California pools, grids against undulations, translucent splashes against dense sun-soaked blues.

(Unfortunately, no decent reproduction of California Art Collector exists on the internet.)

I also love Hockney’s landscapes, e.g., Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio (1980), Nichols Canyon (1980), and the astonishing Garrowby Hill (1998) for their ravishing color combinations and ingenious multipoint perspectives. 

David Hockney, Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio (1980)

Hockney was also a creative photographer. His photocollages are inspired! See, for example, his spectacular The Scrabble Game (1983). Lawrence Weschler said of it:

And the extraordinary thing about this collage is that it lends itself to that kind of second-guessing—it opens out onto that kind of storytelling. Indeed, it simultaneously tells a story and presents a group portrait. Dozens of hands, eyes, faces, a spinning board at countless angles: and yet at all times a recognizable picture of a group of three—implicitly four—individuals (five if you count the cat) engaged in an immediately recognizable activity. (“True to Life,” The New Yorker, July 9, 1984) 

In trying to determine just exactly what it is that draws me to Hockney, I return to Rebecca Mead’s word “hedonistic.” His pictures express pleasure – the pleasure of color (the "flamboyance" of that carnation-pink wall) and texture (that “floral chintz against green velour”) and light (those California pools, “grids against undulations, translucent splashes against dense sun-soaked blues”). 

David Hockney, The Scrabble Game (1983)