Artwork of the 80's
Side nav buttons CAM Home ARTWORK OF THE 80'S: Timeline: ARTWORK OF THE 80'S: Styles & Movements: ARTWORK OF THE 80'S: Artists & Works: ARTWORK OF THE 80'S: Introduction:

Artists & Works
David Hockney
American, born Britain(b. 1937)
UNTITLED from Homage to Picasso (1973)
etching and aquatint
29.75" x 22.125"

STYLE: HOMAGE TO PICASSO

  

David Hockney has worked in printmaking, painting, drawing, filmmaking, and theater design. He attended the Royal College of Art in London in the fifties, where he met R.B. Kitaj. He became involved in the British Pop movement, and visited America, where he became enthralled by the American way of life, particularly the Californian way of life. Hockney's success as an artist came very early; he never had to rely on teaching. He has had many major retrospective exhibitions, in part because his output is so varied, though he is perhaps best-known for his photo-collages. Hockney's work is renowned worldwide and is in most major collections.

Hockney has always had a strong commitment to portraying beauty. He also loved to depict Hollywood, its sunshine, swimming pools, delights, and deceptions. Starting out as a painter, he also became interested in printmaking, photography, and other technologies, usually working with master printmakers and other experts in these fields to test the limits of what he could accomplish. Picasso was always a hero to Hockney; in his print for the portfolio, he portrays himself gazing at a bust of the master.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

David Hockney and Larry Rivers, Art and Literature 2, Summer, 1964
"Let's put it this way. Loads of people, particularly artists, hate pretty pictures. Now I've never met anyone who didn't like a pretty face. They don't complain the face is too pretty, too beautiful and want something interesting. You go for the beautiful before the interesting. I don't know what interesting means."
Roberta Smith, New York Times, 4/3/96
"Mr. Hockney, who was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, in 1937, started out talented: the show begins with two ink drawings from a nude model made when the artist was about 17 and attending a local art school. They show an artist in complete control of both subject and medium, already able to place the figure convincingly in space, already experimenting with his materials and style. He reduces his lines to delicate dots in some areas, smudges them into dark clouds elsewhere, as if he never wanted the viewer to lose sight of the complex and shifting process of creativity. From this solid beginning, Mr. Hockney has never stopped developing, and in a sense one of the attractions of his art is that he remains an excellent, hard-working student. The show whizzes through phase after phase of his peripatetic career, from landscape to portraiture to still life. And through multiple media, from colored pencil and crayon, to pencil, charcoal, ink and gouache, to some techniques, involving reproduction on photo-copying and fax machines, that he has concocted himself."