Observing David Hockney

“I’m 82, I’m going to die. We die because we are born.”

It was April 2020 and British artist David Hockney was writing to his friend Ruth McKenzie. The emotional correspondence later appeared in his last book, Spring Cannot Be Cancelled, part of his attempt to capture the liminal space of the COVID-19 lockdown. “The only things that matter in life are food and love, in that order, and also our little dog Ruby. I truly believe this, and for me, the basis of art is love. I love life.”

David Hockney died on June 11 at his home in London, just a month short of his 89th birthday. He was a true art-world luminary, a profound observer, a dachshund parent, and a voice of his generation.

Hockney was a painter, printmaker, photographer, and draughtsman who also designed sets, magazine covers, and the lone stained-glass window. He was a breakout star from the jump — as a young gay man he folded seamlessly into the star-studded London pop art movement, and was determined to live out loud. “In the early 1960s, paintings like We Two Boys Together Clinging, painted at a time when homosexuality was a criminal offense, announced the arrival of a new generation of painters,” Nicholas Serota, Arts Council England chair, told The Guardian.

In 1964, Hockney moved to Southern California, looking to escape the dreariness of England to join what he came to believe was a vibrant American art scene. “I thought people who produced such work must live in colour, so I went in search of it,” he says in David Hockney, a biography by BBC journalist Peter Adam. “I had spent the first ​20 years of my life in the gothic gloom of the ⁠North. Here I felt free.”

Freedom suited him. Living in Santa Monica, he produced a body of painted work that changed the way people saw Southern California: sunlight and pools, splashes and glances, and a dedicated tenderness to the human form (particularly gay and male) that was captured in color, light, and a deceptive simplicity.

It was radical inclusiveness at its tender, brightest best. “I’m interested in ways of looking,” he said in an early interview with PBS. “Everybody does look. It’s just a question of how hard.”

Hockney achieved enormous financial success.

His museum shows are reliable blockbusters; in 2018, his “Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures)” sold at Christie’s in Manhattan for $90.3 million, a world-record price for a living artist. It was that bankability that made his willingness to experiment in his practice even more remarkable: he made art with Polaroid cameras, fax machines, copiers, designed sets and immersions, and loved his iPad, on which he created a large body of drawings. He “always had this desire to reach people in new ways,” art producer and collaborator Mark Grimmer told the New York Times. “He would try anything.”

Love of life — and a killer sense of style — is a part of Hockney’s enduring legacy. But it is his lifelong commitment to observation, and the radical act of finding beauty in the banal, that gave his work its wide welcome.

If you’ve got time this week for one internet rabbit hole, spend it on remembrances of Hockney. The bespectacled peroxide-blonde worked tirelessly to make his work appear effortless, and despite his experimental nature, he claimed painting as his true love.

He was transfixed by the human face. “How can you see a person… how would I know if I’d got you really well?” he told PBS in 2018. “Painting can’t die because photography isn’t good enough. It’s just a snap. But why not look longer? Maybe you’ll see more.”

“People are dismissive of the word ‘pretty’. I like pretty, and I think most people do too,” he told Geordie Greig, his friend and chronicler for more than fifty years. Greig thinks it was Hockney’s great unlock. “[It] was a simple mantra that art should celebrate, but it hid a complex and deeply sophisticated profundity of an artist who was to progress over the next half century to become the world’s biggest art star since Picasso.”

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This edition of The Observatory was edited by Rachel Paese.