A career of spectacular colour: The changing nature of David Hockney’s art through the decades

David Hockney has been painting so brilliantly for so long that, looking back at his work across the decades, it can feel like one is looking at different artists and different people. The quietly campaigning painter of gay scenes in the late Fifties and early Sixties, when homosexuality was still illegal, seemed a rather different animal from the vibrant painter of later Sixties life , when awestruck members of The Beatles would pay homage in his studio, and different again from the man who became fascinated by technology and pioneered iPad art in his later years. But there were constants, most notably his delight in bold, life-affirming colour , which was so infectious it invariably left viewers of his exhibitions feeling uplifted. 1950s Hockney’s portrait of his father on display at an exhibition in Paris last year (AFP/Getty) The move from Bradford, where he was born, to London’s Royal College of Art was in itself a big change for Hockney. The illicit scenes of gay life he witnessed in the capital made for a bigger change, and were to make for some genuinely revolutionary works. In this decade, he explored his love of figurative painting with works like My Father and Nude . But at the very end of the decade he turned also to depictions of gay life, sometimes disguising them, as he did with Love Paintings , 1960, and Doll Boy , also 1960, which depicted in codified form his fixation with Cliff Richard. 1960s ‘A Bigger Splash’, 1967 (David Hockney/Tate) This decade saw Hockney produce some of his most famous paintings, hugely influenced by his move in 1964 to California, where sun and sexual liberation both contributed to a flowering of his art. Back in London he had already been a key figure in the blossoming Pop Art movement, but with paintings like The Splash (1967), he brought to a British audience the colourful tones of the California landscape. Swimming pools, with their overtones of sexiness, fun and wealth, were to feature more in Hockney’s oeuvre, and become more associated with him than with any other artist. 1970s ‘Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy’, 1970-71 (David Hockney/Tate) This decade sealed Hockney’s reputation as one of the most influential figures in British modern art. Yes, it was notable for his hyper-realistic portraiture, most memorably in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-71), which captured the fashion designer Ossie Clark and textile designer Celia Birtwell, and his 1977 painting My Parents , but it also saw his eagerness to experiment as he transitioned into printmaking, collaborating with Picasso’s master printmaker, and photography, taking 35mm snapshots to assemble later into his acclaimed photo collages. 1980s ‘Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio’ (1980) (David Hockney Collection) Though we still think of Hockney as a painter of figures and landscapes, this decade also marked a departure from his figurative paintings and a move to more experimentation with Cubist-inspired photo collages, using dozens of overlapping Polaroid and 35mm photos to make sweeping composite images. It also saw him produce colourful landscape paintings of the hills round his Los Angeles home, works such as Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio . And there was more. This prolific decade saw Hockney diversify into stage design for operas, such as Igor Stravinsky and WH Auden’s The Rake’s Progress . 1990s ‘Garrowby Hill’, 1998 (AFP/Getty) An interesting decade, because it saw the artist fall back in love with his native Yorkshire. But first he continued his Polaroid work, with experimental photo-mosaics such as the acclaimed 40 Snaps of My House , August 1990 . And there was an enthralling depiction of the Grand Canyon, which used multiple perspectives to convey its vast scale. He visited Yorkshire a lot in this decade to be with his mother, and painted its landscapes and changing skies. Garrowby Hill , painted in 1998 from the highest point in the Yorkshire Wolds, is famous for its winding roads and geometric fields. 2000s ‘Bigger Trees Near Warter’, 2007 (David Hockney/Tate) This decade saw more experimentation, and more fascination with art history and the use of optical devices. Hockney wrote a book expounding his theory that artists as early as the Renaissance used optical aids like the camera lucida to construct space and perspective, and he bought a camera lucida to create artworks. He also began making images on his iPhone. But alongside this experimentation, which put him ahead of the field, he relocated from California to Yorkshire, where he painted huge, multi-canvas oil landscapes including the 12-metre wide Bigger Trees Near Warter . His largest painting, its alternative title Peinture en Plein Air pour l’age Post-Photographique , is interesting in that it references the combination of painting outdoors with the techniques of digital photography. 2010s ‘The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven)’ (David Hockney Collection) Most notable in this decade was the Royal Academy’s groundbreaking 2012 exhibition titled David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture. The show used the latest technology to present nature on a vast scale. In the winter of 2008-09, Hockney had bought an iPhone, and had begun to draw on it with his thumb, using an app called Brushes. That year, he started sending a stream of images to the phones and email inboxes of his friends almost on a daily basis. Just a few years later, this show included a sequence of 51 iPad drawings, plus one mammoth painting, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven) , which formed the show’s centrepiece. “When I agreed to do the exhibition, in 2007, the iPad didn’t exist,” said Hockney at the time. 2020s ‘A Year in Normandie’ (2020-2021) (Getty) Still there was no let-up in Hockney’s prolific output, or in the clamour to see his shows. An immersive show about the artist and his work at the Lightroom in London’s Kings Cross was followed by a massive retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, which included 400 of his works dating back to 1955 and became a site of pilgrimage for his aficionados. And right now, the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park is showcasing a series of new paintings alongside the artist’s monumental digital print, the frieze A Year in Normandie (2020-2021) .