David Hockney's path to art: So much more than just talent

David Hockney is one of the most famous artists in the world. He has been among the top 100 artists on the world's best-of list of art since this (computer-generated) ranking was launched in 2001.

However, since Hockney was born in 1937 and became famous in the English-speaking part of the art world in the 1960s, even the educated older average German has known Hockney as a “famous artist” for quite some time.

The question is, how well do average Germans (regardless of age) know David Hockney? Often only from nice, colorful, somewhat kitschy posters – and in the usual short article on the occasion of an exhibition opening, Hockney's work is very often reduced to pleasing Pop Art .

That's not enough; there's much more to it than that. Appealing art that appeals to the masses worldwide might bring short-term recognition, but it won't make you an internationally acclaimed artist. Those truly world-class artists are loved and admired because they give the world more than just beautiful art, each in their own unique way.

To truly understand an artist, one must delve deeper, to understand that certain something more. Simply looking at their art isn't enough; it requires multiple perspectives on the person and their personality, ideally reaching into the very heart of the artist. Something they rarely wear on their sleeve..

So detective work is required, an exciting story that can produce a wide variety of results and interpretations.

Let's pick up the trail, right at the beginning with David Hockney's development as an artist, behind which lies an unusual degree of assertiveness, perseverance and ability to think independently among several people involved:

Born to be an artist?

David Hockney was born on July 9, 1937, in Bradford, Yorkshire. Bradford lies in the central heart of good old England and was then a rather dirty industrial town; David Hockney's parents were not among the industrial bosses, but rather among those who worked for them.

Some explain his astonishing rise by suggesting that David Hockney was born an artist (a claim often made about great artists). That would be nice, but extraordinary talent only appears suddenly through lightning strikes (perhaps the aspiring artist simply melts into a pile of ashes), not through birth – so no, Hockney wasn't born an artist. Nor was he made into one; thankfully, selfless patrons were rare even back then.

That's not really the point, but rather that someone has the opportunity to recognize their talents and isn't prevented from developing them. Because people are born full of curiosity and creative drive; everyone wants to try as much as possible in their youth and find the areas that particularly interest them.

In free societies where every member is valued and respected, this kind of exploration would be encouraged so that people can choose professions that match their interests and talents. When people can pursue their interests and talents, no one needs to be forced into a particular profession or coerced into one – this approach is intended to bring the economy consistent, solid growth and the state satisfied citizens.

Then nobody would want to be a garbage collector anymore? Yes, with adequate pay they would; it would be a splendid job for young, energetic people who could earn a good living for a few years (and in the process, they would be able to release the aggression that currently costs taxpayers more money than is needed to pay garbage collectors adequately).

In most societies on this planet today, curiosity is stifled very early on, and creative drive even more so – in Western industrialized nations, the average child isn't even allowed to explore their way to school alone. Schools often foster a climate that transforms the desire to learn into deep aversion, or even fear and frustration, leading to bullying and other forms of abuse.

Schools and vocational training are meant to do no more than produce perfect work robots. These robots then fill the jobs that are currently needed in an economy geared towards maximum growth (but where exactly?). Jobs needed to keep a consumer machine full of disposable products running smoothly, not to satisfy human needs.

These jobs sometimes pay enough to indulge in endless consumption (why? for what purpose?). Increasingly, however, apathy is compounded by frustration at not being able to make a decent living from these jobs – because the supposedly desirable shared goal of enabling the purchase of as many consumer goods as possible with one's wages actually only provides a carefree life for a select few, and it doesn't satisfy anyone (the insidious thing is that some affluent middle-class citizens, who have declared consumption their purpose in life due to a lack of other ideas, only realize too late that it's not enough).

But even in these societies, there are always children who pursue curiosity and creativity with some persistence, and parents who accept their children as they are and simply support them on their own path in and through this strange life.

How fortunate for the art world that David Hockney was such a child and had such parents: Hockney was born curious and creative like all children; his parents were perfectly ordinary members of modern society, just a crucial little bit different. His father owned a small accounting firm, and his mother, after various jobs, was initially quite busy raising their five children.

She did such a good job raising him that she soon didn't have to work at all anymore… More about the parents in the third part of the Hockney articles, but in fact, David Hockney's path to becoming an artist began right after his birth, because both his parents didn't stifle his creativity and awakened in him art and a self-determined life

Insights into the world of David Hockney – a conversation with curator Edith Devaney in his Los Angeles studio (English)

Finest, finest: school, art education, fellow students

From a very young age, young David received strong support from his family. This support was sufficient to secure a scholarship to Bradford Grammar School, which he successfully completed at this prestigious institution for the upper classes. Afterwards, from 1953 to 1957, Hockney attended the School of Art at Bradford College and was accepted to the Royal College of Art in London in the autumn of 1959.

Even back then, it was one of the world's leading addresses for academic art education; the college has just achieved the rank of the world's best university for art and design QS World University Rankings

Hockney completed his art studies at the RCA in 1962; during this time he made friends with fellow students who would soon become decisive for his life: At the same time as Hockney, the later Pop Art icon RB Kitaj his studies at the RCA.

The slightly older American had nearly 10 years of art training (Cooper Union Institute in New York, Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna) and a considerable amount of life and world experience ahead of Hockney: married since 1953 and just become a father, he had traveled across Europe with his wife Elsie Roessler, and had US Army postings in Darmstadt and Fontainebleau.

Nevertheless, a close friendship developed between the two exceptional students, so close that Ronald Brooks Kitaj is the only person in the world who was allowed to paint David Hockney almost naked.

Derek Boshier , Peter Phillips, and Allen Jones also joined RCA in 1959. During his tedious national service, Boshier had thoroughly studied the work of the Canadian philosopher and communication theorist Herbert Marshall McLuhan, who, barely 10 years later, would be known as the “father of media theory .

Phillips came from Birmingham and had worked his way up through the city's art schools to the Royal College of Art. Before matriculating, he had gathered artistic impressions in Paris and Italy, and alongside his studies, he was able to curate his first exhibitions at the RBA Galleries (an exhibition space for talented students, which will be explained in more detail later).

Allen Jones had interrupted his studies at the excessively progressive Hornsey College of Art to spend a year receiving established art training at the leading institution. A year later, future Alien director Ridley Scott from West Hartlepool College of Art (where he had just graduated with honors in graphic design and painting) and Patrick Caulfield from Chelsea School of Art joined him, and suddenly a rather wild avant-garde clique was assembled, fueling each other's creativity.

RB Kitaj played with European and, even more so, with native American influences; inspired above all by Robert Rauschenberg, the star of the overseas art scene at the time. Derek Boshier developed rigorously didactic and critical commentaries on the Space Race, all-powerful multinational corporations, and the Americanization of English culture.

Allen Jones wants to break down the ossified sexuality of the English Fifties, initially using women in pornographic poses as “furniture” to expose sexual taboo

Peter Phillips was profoundly impressed by the American artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg , Ridley Scott was immersed in all these influences on his way to a second diploma with distinction, Patrick Caulfield dissected Juan Gris, Legér and René Magritte , and David Hockney absorbed all influences to combine them into “his own thing”.

No pop art here

The students who gathered at the Royal College of Art knew very well that they had landed at one of the best art schools in the world. They wanted to contribute to creating the new art of their time; they wanted to bring to light what art had to say about the development of post-war society. The first major waves of Pop Art were already washing over from America, and in Great Britain, the avant-garde of the interwar period had long since conceived the English version of Pop Art and created initial works in this direction.

The Briton Richard Hamilton had even presented one of the key works of Pop Art in 1956 with the collage “Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?” ; and Hamilton taught at the Royal College of Art from 1957 to 1961, so he was one of the teachers at the RCA during Hockney's time.

Hamilton is widely credited in art history with coining the term "Pop Art"; his collage "Just What…" was first presented to the public at the "This Is Tomorrow" exhibition in August 1956 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, an event the birth of Pop Art . It seemed almost impossible to avoid Pop Art, especially for students at a college where Hamilton taught.

But that's what art historians say in retrospect. Even if David Hockney had visited the exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery (he was certainly interested, but Hockney was studying in Bradford at the time, and back then you didn't just travel to London for an exhibition), the later key work was just some interesting collage to the young artist at the time.

Hockney would not necessarily have met or seen Hamilton at the RCA – back then it was not common to simply attend other people's lectures/tutorials, and Hockney was said to have been rather shy and reserved in his youth.

At the RCA, Hockney attended the painting class of Carel Weight , a venerable British painter who was appointed the official British War Artist in 1945. Weight had primarily presented “war paintings,” including scenes from Austria, Greece, and Italy, often with an educational tone—here you can see 178 paintings that David Hockney certainly didn't want to paint.

Hockney would never have made it to the Royal College of Art if he hadn't been wise enough to avoid rebellion in the wrong places. Therefore, it's reasonable to assume that he absorbed everything Weight could teach him without letting youthful arrogance sabotage his own access to crucial knowledge.

And Weight had something to pass on that Hockney – given his criticism of traditional painting and his then still criminalized sexual orientation – could more than use; namely, his own attitude towards the art world:

Carel Victor Morlais Weight was born into middle-class London society, the son of a bank clerk and a chiropodist, and considered the ultimate test of a painting to be its appeal to the average citizen. He disliked the art world, art dealers intensely, and wasn't afraid of critics, despite his highly individualistic work (when and where he was given free rein, see, for example, "Recruit's Progress – Medical Inspection" from 1942; such things "weren't painted back then").

Hockney also attended classes with several other painters who passed on their knowledge at the Royal College of Art. These teachers, too, left their mark on Hockney's later works

Landscape painter Roger de Grey, for example, can be found in tree-lined avenues and forests, and in David Hockney's Yorkshire paintings.

Art by Roger de Grey: t1p.de/blpa

Avenues, forests and Yorkshire scenes by David Hockney: t1p.de/wwxb , t1p.de/bp84 , t1p.de/01pi

Painter and musician Ceri Giraldus Richards Surrealism in the 1930s and was one of the most experimental young artists in Britain at that time. He was certainly not out of touch during Hockney's time at the RCA either.

He planted the seeds of Impressionism and Surrealism in Hockney and was probably the one who deeply impressed Hockney with paintings and drawings based on poetic literature (in Richard's case, poetry by Dylan Thomas, Vernon Watkins, and others). Hockney soon took up this inspiration in his series of paintings about the legendary Greek lyric poet Constantine P. Cavafy.

Art by Ceri Giraldus Richards: t1p.de/p8xi

Impressionist touches, surrealist excursions and tributes to poets by David Hockney:

• “The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011” , iPad drawing printed on paper, edition 6 of 25
• “Moving Focus – An Image of Gregory”, 1984
• “Henry at Table”, 1976
• “The Arrival” , 1963, plate 1 from: “A Rake’s Progress” , a series of etchings about Hockney’s first trip to New York in the summer of 1961, in which he refers to the famous cycle of the same name by the English artist William Hogarth
• “14 poems by CP Cavafy. Selected and illustrated with 12 etchings by David Hockney”, 1966

60 Years of Hockney – A Retrospective of his Exhibition at Tate Britain

The painter Colin Graham Frederick Hayes applied oil and watercolor paint to the canvas, with the emphasis definitely on "color". He certainly played a part in the fact that David Hockney's paintings can be bursting with color.

Art by Colin Hayes: t1p.de/3tb1

A riot of color by David Hockney: “A Closer Winter Tunnel, February – March” , 2006, t1p.de/899o ; “Nichols Canyon” , 1980, t1p.de/u19d

Sandra Betty Blow , not yet 35 at the time of Hockney's matriculation, had first encountered abstract expressionism shortly after her college years. In the years before teaching at the RCA, Blow had collaborated with the Italian "material artist" Alberto Burri, who instilled in her an Informel influence and a fundamental openness to new materials, including for two-dimensional representation.

met the artists Lucian Freud “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” , which was auctioned for $142.4 million in 2013 and remained the world’s most expensive painting for a year and a half) and was in the midst of developing into a groundbreaking figure in abstract art .

It doesn't take much imagination to draw a parallel between the art of a woman who could create the impression of flames and spray, wood and tar in oil paintings ( t1p.de/b2ev) and David Hockney's moving water paintings.

In the development of David Hockney into an artist with his own style and profile, as described below, attentive people will often find their ears ringing more than if Sandra Blow had gone straight in… (the author doesn't dare, the joke is simply too corny, but the name is already an “associative challenge”).

Art by Sandra Blow: t1p.de/ldr4

Water sketches and abstract art by David Hockney: t1p.de/kazp , t1p.de/d4ip ; “Almost Like Skiing” , 1991, t1p.de/utbc ; “Third Detail (from Snails Space series)” , 1995, t1p.de/4oyf ; “The Other Side” , 1990–1993, t1p.de/djec

What the teaching artists Robert A. Buhler ( t1p.de/cq12 ) and Rodney Joseph Burns ( t1p.de/nk3m ) left behind in David Hockney's work should be left to the reader's own discovery, but it certainly wasn't Pop Art.

How much David Hockney had to do with Pop Art can best be understood from interviews with him, for example, the one in Die Zeit in October 2012 on the occasion of the exhibition “A Bigger Picture” at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne: He often lived quite close to the center of pop culture, thought pop was great, wore white-blond hair for 30 or 40 years (blondes have more fun, and “men are better at looking than thinking” also fits here); but that was about it, you will hardly hear David Hockney say that he painted Pop Art.

David Hockney's masterpiece breaks auction record: “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)”

When David Hockney is stylistically categorized as Pop Art, contrary to his own very clear statement, it is an overreach on the part of the respective critic.

Is such an intrusion permissible? In art history, there are two opposing positions from which this question can be answered: The artist creates art , and the art historian evaluates it and classifies it according to its significance for society, also into a particular style if it is clearly a good fit.

Or: The artist creates works of art, which he also designates as art, through the will to engage in artistic activity. If this is part of the artist's copyright , then it must certainly also include the ability to assign or not assign the self-created work to a particular style.