David Hockney

David Hockney (born 9 July 1937) is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Hockney has owned residences and studios in Bridlington and London as well as two residences in California, where he has lived intermittently since 1964: one in the Hollywood Hills, one in Malibu. He has an office and stores his archives on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, California.

On 15 November 2018, Hockney's 1972 work Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at Christie's auction house in New York City for $90 million (£70 million), becoming the most expensive artwork by a living artist sold at auction. It broke the previous record which was set by the 2013 sale of Jeff Koons's Balloon Dog (Orange) for $58.4 million. Hockney held the record until 15 May 2019 when Koons reclaimed the honour by selling his Rabbit for more than $91 million at Christie's in New York.

David Hockney was born in Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, England, the fourth of five children of Kenneth Hockney (1904–1978) who was an accountant's clerk who later ran his own accountancy business, and who had been a conscientious objector in the Second World War, and Laura (1900–1999) née Thompson, a devout Methodist and strict vegetarian. He was educated at Wellington Primary School, Bradford Grammar School, Bradford College of Art (his teachers there included Frank Lisle and his fellow students included Derek Boshier, Pauline Boty, Norman Stevens, David Oxtoby, and John Loker) and the Royal College of Art in London, where he met R. B. Kitaj and Frank Bowling.

At the Royal College of Art, Hockney featured – alongside Peter Blake – in the exhibition New Contemporaries, which announced the arrival of British Pop art. He was associated with the movement, but his early works display expressionist elements which are similar to some of Francis Bacon's works.

When the RCA said it would not let him graduate if he did not complete an assignment of a life drawing of a live model in 1962, Hockney painted Life Painting for a Diploma in protest. He had refused to write an essay required for the final examination and said that he should be assessed solely on his artworks. Recognising his talent and growing reputation, the RCA changed its regulations and awarded him a diploma. After leaving the RCA, he taught at Maidstone College of Art for a short time. He taught at the University of Iowa in 1964. Hockney also taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1965. Next he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1966 to 1967 and then at the University of California, Berkeley in 1967.

In 1964, Hockney moved to Los Angeles, where he was inspired to make a series of paintings of swimming pools in the comparatively new acrylic medium using vibrant colours. He lived at various times in Los Angeles, London, and Paris from the late 1960s to 1970s. In 1974 he began a decade-long personal relationship with Gregory Evans who moved with him to the US in 1976 and as of 2019 remains a business partner.

In 1978 he rented a home in the Hollywood Hills; he later bought and expanded the house to include his studio. He also owned a 1,643-square-foot beach house at 21039 Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, which he sold in 1999 for about $1.5 million (£1.2 million). In the 1990s, Hockney returned more often to Yorkshire, usually every three months, to visit his mother who died in 1999. Until 1997, he rarely stayed for more than two weeks, when his friend Jonathan Silver who was terminally ill, encouraged him to capture the local surroundings. At first he did this with paintings based on memory, some from his boyhood. In 1998, he completed his painting of the Yorkshire landmark, Garrowby Hill. Hockney returned to Yorkshire for increasingly longer stays and by 2003 was painting the countryside en plein air in both oils and watercolour.