PrideFest America 2001 Archives

PrideFest America Archives

Artistic Alternatives:
The Works of Keith Haring, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschendberg, and Andy Warhol
March 20 to May 13, 2001

David Hockney
by Dr. Amy Ingrid Schlegel, Curator, Philadelphia Art Alliance

Kaisarion with All His Beauty
Listen to Commentary

Born in 1937 in Bradford, England into a politically radical working-class family, David Hockney studied at the Bradford School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. At the Royal College in the early 1960s, Hockney banded with a handful of other artists in their early 20s to form what art critic Lawrence Alloway called "the third phase of [British] Pop Art." In 1961 Hockney turned to graphic work because he could not afford painting materials. Some of his earliest etchings are included here: Kaisarion with All His Beauty comes from the 1961 series "Me and My Heroes" and is based on the poetry of the openly gay ancient Greek Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy. Hockney also created 13 etchings to accompany a 1966 livre d'artist translation of Cavafy's poems, two of which are included here: He Enquired After the Quality; and Two Boys Aged 22 and 23. Hockney recalled that he visited Beirut in early 1966 "just to get atmosphere and drawings for the prints . . . I thought Beirut was more like Alexandria would have been when Cavafy was there. . . ."

In 1961 Hockney and his cohorts participated in the important juried exhibition "Young Contemporaries" in London. Hockney recalled that: "For a student, the exhibition was a big event. That's when I began to sell my pictures. It was probably the first time there'd been a student movement in painting that was uninfluenced by older artists in [England] . . . this generation was not [influenced by American Abstract Expressionism]." Alloway, one of the jurors, characterized the "Young Contemporaries" work as: "connect[ed] with the city. . . by using typical products and objets, including the techniques of graffiti and the imagery of mass communications. . . The impact of popular art is present, but checked by puzzles and paradoxes . . . their work . . . combines real objects, same-size representation, sketchy notation, and writing." Indeed Hockney's work of the 1960s and 1970s combines handwritten, graffiti-like text and a seemingly quickly rendered, naive, sketchy figurative drawing style, in both his paintings and prints. Alloway described Hockney's approach as an overlay of children's art, primitive painting, and graffiti. Art critic Arthur Danto sees Hockney's work of the early 1960s as "about love -- erotic and indeed homoerotic love rather than the abstract . . . but [it is] unashamedly literary as well."

Two Boys Aged 22 and 23
Listen to Commentary

While still a student at the Royal College, Hockney received the Guinness Award for Etching and was included in the prestigious 1961 Paris Biennale. In 1963 he traveled for the first time to Los Angeles, where he met Andy Warhol and curator Henry Geldzahler (who became a good friend and favorite subject; several portraits of Geldzahler appear here). By 1964 David Hockney had settled in Hollywood, where he has lived ever since, with the exception of two years in Paris (1973 to 1975). Once in Los Angeles, Hockney's painting style changed dramatically, taking on a weightier, more traditionally representational manner. Portraits of friends and lovers, domestic scenes of couples (gay and straight) (a lithograph of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardi is included here), the outdoor swimming pool, and bathing emerged as some of his favorite subjects from the mid-1960s through the 1970s.

During the 1980s, Hockey experimented intensely with photography, creating photographic collages (Ian Washing His Hair, London [1983] is included here) and prints of previous work reproduced on the photocopier machine.

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