I feel honored to have written about David Hockney before he reached the art world stratosphere. Even in 1982, of course, he was a name. As I recall, someone from the Andre Emmerich Gallery sent me a press release and transparencies of his latest work. I could probably have interviewed Hockney, if not in person then by phone. Swamped with work and mired in office politics as I was in that first year as editor-in-chief, I didn’t think to ask.
The artist is now eighty-six years old, and once more in the news even though he keeps a low profile, unlike so many of his inferiors. In May, a Hockney painting titled “A Lawn Being Sprinkled,” which was once owned by TV producer Norman Lear, sold for $28.6 million in an auction at Christie’s in New York. Lear paid $64,000 for the painting in 1978, a record at the time for a Hockney work.
By comparison, in the recent Christie’s auction a work by Van Gogh sold for $33.2 million. Meaning that Hockney’s work has reached the rare ozone inhabited by Picasso, Monet, Warhol, Van Gogh, and a handful of others.
In 2018, his iconic “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” brought $90.3 million, setting a record as the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by a living artist.
Although Hockney is known for his work in several artistic media, his gorgeous production of Turandot for the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1992, which was staged by the San Francisco Opera the following year, is known primarily to operagoers. There, his colors and shapes almost upstage Puccini. The photos below convey only a hint of the production’s saturated richness.
David Hockney was born in Bradford, England, and settled in southern California in the mid-1960s. So many of his paintings were done there that he is often thought of as a California artist, a label that somewhat limits his range. Below, for instance, see his English landscape and the dual portrait of his parents.