Art<\/a> in London, accept modern life not ironically or ideologically but because it was his life: from desk lamps to dancing to taking a shower, why shouldn\u2019t he show the way his generation lived?<\/p>\n\u2018He found the right style to show gay life as it is\u2019 \u2026 David Hockney, 1966, by Jane Bown. Photograph: Jane Bown\/From Observer Picture Library<\/p>\n
Being gay was just part of the truth he lived and painted. It wasn\u2019t a big deal and he\u2019d be upset if we remembered him as \u201cBritain\u2019s first openly gay artist\u201d. It\u2019s exactly his relaxed and untroubled depiction of a sexuality that was illegal in early 1960s Britain that makes his art so insouciantly subversive. From his splashy 1960-1 painting Doll Boy that confesses to his passion for Cliff Richard (\u201cvery attractive, very sexy\u201d) to a composed 1968 portrait of a mature and confident couple, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, the development of Hockney\u2019s art in that decade of revolution is very much about finding the right style to show gay life as it is.<\/p>\n
Yet Hockney is never simply a participant in the new, free, fulfilled world he sought in swinging London \u2013 and found in California. He is an observer, too, and a highly self-conscious one. When he visited the US for the first time in 1961, he made a comic record of the trip in a series of prints modelled on William Hogarth\u2019s The Rake\u2019s Progress. The bespectacled, weedy Rake is Hockney, at once entranced and mystified by America as he discovers there\u2019s a gay scene and ends up surrounded by jeans-wearing clones listening to pop music on earphones (this was nearly 60 years ago: Hockney was already picturing the way we live now, even back then).<\/p>\n
By the end of the 1960s, an eerie stillness dominated his paintings as he became more openly the observer, the looker-on. The loneliness of looking is the theme of what may be his greatest painting, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). It\u2019s certainly his most expensive, selling in 2018 for $90.3m. In this huge 1972 canvas, an almost mystically radiant work, a young man in a pink jacket stands by an open air swimming pool watching a swimmer whose pale flesh flickers under translucent turquoise water. To give the kind of gossipy detail Hockney came to loathe, the man by the pool is Peter Schlesinger and the painting captures the end of their affair, a trauma that gives it painful authority.<\/p>\n
Visions of paradise \u2026 Hockney at home in Malibu, California, in 1991. Photograph: Paul Harris\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Yet if looking can be solitary, it is also a delight. It\u2019s almost embarrassing to admit that, for all the psychological tension of this painting, the glowing, molten landscape of the multi-coloured sun-blessed hills beyond the pool is just as captivating. Such sights ravished Hockney and his art shares his wonder. Some of his most memorable works of art are simple still lifes: his 1972 painting Mount Fuji and Flowers, or his gorgeous study of a fragile porcelain teapot against a roiling and heaving blue sea, Breakfast at Malibu, Sunday 1989.<\/p>\n
In both these pictures, fragile still life scenes are juxtaposed with immense and sublime images of nature. It\u2019s the kind of art historical game \u2013 in this case playing Chardin against Turner or Hokusai \u2013 that Hockney could carry off deftly because he was so curious about art\u2019s changing styles and how they shape our perception of the world. There was nothing naive about his realism. One of his biggest heroes was Picasso. He not only portrayed an imaginary meeting between the two of them in a brilliant assimilation of Picasso\u2019s own graphic style but, in an experiment that took him far from his easel, tried to apply the shifting perspectives of Picasso\u2019s cubism to photography. His layered arrays of photographs that seek to capture the many glances and fractured glimpses in which we really see the world are among his most instantly recognisable works.<\/p>\n
Hockney once took me around a Caravaggio exhibition at the National Gallery to demonstrate why he believed the painter must have used some kind of early camera. Then at his London residence, he produced a Japanese scroll to show how eastern landscape art uses shifting, unfurling viewpoints that are much more embracing of the world\u2019s scale than the single-point perspective that has obsessed western art. His argument was fascinating and so was the scroll, which wasn\u2019t an original but a facsimile. In other words, he valued it not for its rareness but its use.<\/p>\n
Have a seat \u2026 Hockney smokes by two works. Photograph: J-P\/Photo Credit: Jean-Pierre Gonc\u0327alves de Lima<\/p>\n
Hockney\u2019s house in Bridlington too was beautifully but unpretentiously decorated. He didn\u2019t use his wealth to live luxuriously but to work and research. There was a modesty and directness about him that was hugely affecting. He became famous for his last stand refusal to give up smoking but, as a non-smoker, I can testify that when he once drove me across Yorkshire he used a hi-tech ashtray that kept his smoke to himself. He was a courteous libertarian.<\/p>\n
That character came through in public and made Hockney a celebrity. He attained a kind of popularity that has eluded younger British artists and has more in common with that of David Attenborough or the queen. David Hockney was the real thing \u2013 a great artist and a great human.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"David Hockney changed the world just by looking at it. His art was a feast of unabashed visual…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":731730,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134],"class_list":["post-731729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=731729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731729\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/731730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}