Across a long lifetime and productive until the end, David Hockney, who has died aged 88, was Britain’s most popular artist, and one of very few painters anywhere to be a household name. Already heralded a draughtsman of genius at the Royal College of Art in 1959, over seven decades he created paintings of places and people which are both instantly alluring in their crystalline, stylised yet lucidly observed realism, and highly sophisticated pictorial constructions. “I think the world is beautiful and exciting and mysterious,” he said; his paintings communicate that pleasure.
Hockney made his name with hedonistic Los Angeles pictures including “Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool” and “A Bigger Splash”, on which he worked for days to depict a momentary cascade of water, and original double portraits in meticulously rendered, glamorous domestic settings: “Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy”, one of Hollywood’s first openly gay couples; “Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy”, Hockney’s fashion designer friends Celia Birtwell — his muse into old age — and Ossie Clark in their Notting Hill Gate apartment during their troubled marriage. Defining images of postwar revolutions in sex and class, taste and money, these are icons of the 1960s-70s: upbeat, elated in their sense of freedom and fresh possibilities.
During the half century since, as contemporary art became increasingly conceptual and hermetic, Hockney the virtuoso figurative painter stood out for his democratic appeal and accessibility. “Unfortunately there is within modern art a contempt for people”, he said in 1977. “I do want to make a picture that has meaning for a lot of people. I think the idea of making pictures for 25 people in the art world is crazy and ridiculous.” Instead, he attracted millions: his iPad drawing of a daffodil in his Normandy garden, posted on Instagram with the message “do remember they can’t cancel spring”, was world news during the pandemic in March 2020.