Farewell to the Great David Hockney

David Hockney, Pearblossom Highway, 11th - 18th April 1986

The recently-deceased David Hockney is best known for his masterful, colorful oil paintings of modern California milieus, as well as for his portraits of friends. Actually he's probably most well known for just a couple images representing these genres: first his LA swimming pool scenes with one of his gay lovers sunning or swimming; and second his dual portrait of his friends and gay icons Christopher Isherwood and Don Bacardi. The overreliance on these in popular media has really hurt our perception of his work I think. It's the Georgia O'Keefe problem. Through sheer overexposure on calendars and posters, she is perceived as a middleweight pop artist. But once you see some of her works in person you can see that she is a spectacular painter and conceptualist. The same goes for Hockney, though maybe it's just me who is annoyed by the limited presentation of Hockney's work in public. That said, he was a strong and wide-ranging artist. I find his photo collages (using Polaroids) to be especially creative and compelling. For example, the one shown here. Question: Was Hockney a giant of the fine arts/painting world to the same extent that the late Sonny Rollins was a giant of jazz? I suspect not quite. But he certainly was one of the signal artists of his generation.