The Hockneys: an intimate look into the early life of David Hockney and his family

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Like the painting of his parents, they show a tenderness towards the people who really mattered for Hockney. The sixteen etchings projected a singular artistic persona: witty, charming, youthful, frankly homosexual, and possessed of technical virtuosity and inventiveness allied to a knowing immersion in tradition made explicit in the allusion to William Hogarth’s graphic cycle of the same title.

The story of David Hockney and the famous Bradford family

While working on a painting of a living room and terrace in Los Angeles, he took Polaroid shots of the living room and glued them together, not intending for them to be a composition on their own. There was no doubt an urge on Hockney’s part to exploit the material he had brought back with him, and to tap into the wider imaginative appeal of America. In Hockney’s variant on Hogarth, it is of course the artist himself, already a minor media celebrity on account of his blonde hair and stylish demeanour, who becomes the protagonist of the story, supplanting the tragic figure of Tom Rakewell, and appearing in virtually all the prints either in full figure or as a symbolic head and shoulders bust.Hockney has explored the nature of gay love in his work, such in as the painting We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), named after a poem by Walt Whitman. The resulting images were printed out as massive photomurals and were exhibited at Pace Gallery and LACMA in 2018.

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The story-telling dimension of such Old Master religious art was compatible, of course, with Hogarth’s secular morality tale, while the stylistic reference to the Italian ‘primitives’ reinforces the characterisation of the Hockney/rake figure as a wide-eyed innocent. Over time, however, the conception of the series underwent significant modifications, as Hockney remarked in the statement quoted earlier, which continued: ‘Altogether I made about thirty-five plates of which nineteen were abandoned so leaving these sixteen the published set. It is interesting to note that when Hockney drew a portrait of Berger during his visit to Long Island, it was against a backdrop of Camel cigarettes imagery.They engaged more widely with New York’s gay subculture, which clearly seemed a good deal more exciting and developed than its London counterpart.

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Printmaking must have seemed a more practical option than having to deal with the transportation of canvasses.

He used an iPad in designing a stained glass window at Westminster Abbey which celebrated the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. In 2005, Burberry creative director Christopher Bailey centred his entire spring/summer menswear collection around the artist and in 2012, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, a close friend, named a checked jacket after Hockney. He seems at once a specific and increasingly recognisable individual, and a more generic archetype of the Englishman abroad, wide-eyed and seeking out novel sensations and forbidden pleasures in the pleasure dome that was contemporary New York. It is likely that he and Berger were contemplating making the trip together, given that the latter had been teaching at Tulane University in New Orleans before taking the year off to study in Europe.

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The title of the traditional song hovers above the scribbled indication of the Atlantic Ocean, with stormy clouds floating above, whose vast expanse separates Hockney’s own new and old worlds. It was made by lots of young artists who felt that the art they saw in galleries was a little bit boring.

If you were to Google, famous British painters, there’s a good chance that Hockney’s name will appear.