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)

Interesting Emendations: Lawrence Weschler's "Taking Art To Point Zero - II"

Robert Irwin, Scrim veil-Black rectangle-Natural light, 1977 (Photograph by Warren Silverman)

I see that the Whitney has re-installed Robert Irwin’s brilliant light installation, Scrim veil–Black rectangle–Natural light, on its fourth floor for the first time since he conceived it for the site, in 1977. This show was the subject of one of The New Yorker’s most inspired art descriptions – Lawrence Weschler’s account of his experience of the exhibit in his great “Taking Art To Point Zero – II” (The New Yorker, March 15, 1982):

As the elevator doors eased open onto the vast, empty room on the fourth floor of the Whitney, you were immediately in the thick of it, the thin of it. For a fragile moment, all your expectations were suspended and the world itself seeped in. Already, as you walked out of the elevator, you were triangulating, calibrating, trying to take a fix, to mend the tear in the fabric of your mundane anticipations. But even as you were doing so you were newly aware of the way in which that’s something you do all the time. Nor was the room all that easy to put back together again: the optics were slightly skewed, such that just as you began to figure out how the effect had been achieved your calculations were melting in the uncanny undertow of immediate perceptions. The only light was the natural light of day streaming in from a large, peculiar window over to the side and unfurling the length of a hauntingly sheer scrim piece that bisected the room longitudinally, suspended from the ceiling down to eye level. Also at eye level, a thin black line skirted the walls of the room, describing a huge rectangle and then flashing out along the base of the bisecting scrim. The pearlescent scrim was by turns utterly transparent and pristinely opaque – both, and then neither. As you walked around the space, under the scrim, into the corners, along the walls, the room itself seemed to hum. Things that had always been there – the even, modular hive of the ceiling, the dark rectangular grid of the floor – you noticed as if for the first time. There was a sense of great excitement in all of this, but at the same time an evenness, a lightness, almost a serenity. (Emphasis added)

Weschler’s wonderful account doesn’t just describe Irwin’s exhibit, it delivers us directly into the rub of it, puts us squarely there. Interestingly, Weschler changed it when he included it in his Seeing Is Forgetting The Name of the Thing One Sees (1982). Here’s the revised passage:

As the elevator doors eased open onto the vast, empty room on the fourth floor of the Whitney, you were immediately in the thick of it, the thin of it. For a fragile moment, all your expectations were suspended, and the world itself seeped in. Already, as you walked out of the elevator, you were triangulating, calibrating, trying to get a fix, to mend the tear in the fabric of your mundane anticipations. But even as you were doing so, you were newly aware of the way in which that is something you do all the time. Nor was the room all that easy to put back together again: the optics were slightly skewed, such that just as you began to figure out how the effect had been achieved, your calculations were melting in the uncanny undertow of immediate perceptions. The only light was the natural light of day streaming in from that large, peculiar window over to the side and spreading the length of the hauntingly sheer scrim that, suspended from the ceiling down to eye level, bisected the room longitudinally. Also at eye level, a thin black line skirted the walls of the room, describing a huge rectangle and then flashing out along the base of the bisecting scrim. The pristine scrim was by turns utterly transparent and then utterly opaque, both at the same time, but then neither at once. As you walked around the space, under the scrim, into the corners, along the walls, the room itself seemed to stand up and hum. Things that had always been there – the even, modular hive of the ceiling; the dark, rectangular grid of the floor – you noticed as if for the first time. There was a sense of great excitement in all of this, but at the same time, an evenness, a lightness, almost a serenity. (Emphasis added)

I count seventeen changes - some minor (e.g., the placement of the comma after “achieved” and the semi-colon after “ceiling”), some more significant (e.g., the substitution of “spreading” for “unfurling” and “pristine” for “pearlescent”). I’m slightly more partial to the New Yorker version; “unfurling” and “pearlescent” strike me as more evocative. Both versions are beautiful; both capture Scrim veil–Black rectangle–Natural light’s essential subject – the art of perception.