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David Hockney’s first solo show, which opened in London in 1963, was Pictures With People In, a defiantly figurative title for the poster boy of a new and challenging school of painting, “Pop Art”. He had recently left the Royal College of Art and nearly without his degree, for refusing to draw a nude from life – a requirement – but in the end they awarded him a gold medal.
That year also saw Hockney’s first appearance in Vogue, a group portrait with fellow painters Howard Hodgkin, John Howlin and Ian Stephenson. Vogue called them “The Impact Makers”. Three of the four arrived soberly dressed, one of them, Hodgkin, in a black suit, folded his arms and stared glumly ahead. Stephenson and Howlin looked equally ill at ease. Only Hockney, standing apart from the others, appeared unperturbed. Already blonde-haired care of “Champagne Ice” – “You see, I came home slightly drunk one evening and saw an advertisement on TV which said that blondes have more fun” – his raffish personal style set him further apart: a pale-blue seersucker blazer and fuchsia-pink tie. And then there were those emblematic, owlish spectacles with rims as large as bicycle wheels.
Hockney, born in Bradford in 1937, was the second youngest and the most famous of the four, the most used to being photographed, the most publicly lauded. Just ahead of him lay California, its swimming pools and “A Bigger Splash”, and later on opera and stage sets, “Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy”, Stanley the dachshund, multi-print Polaroid film collages and research into the properties of lenticular devices, eye-boggling iPad pictures and late-in-life “fully immersive” exhibitions. But for now he leant on a large canvas, insouciantly smoking a cigarette.
In 1964 he decamped to Los Angeles. “I used to think London was exciting,” he explained, “Well, it is compared to Bradford; but compared with New York or San Francisco, it’s nothing.” But London would not let him go so easily. He found himself part of its cultural elite, a leading player in “Swinging London” – no matter that he was on the far side of the world. Still, for all his time on America’s West Coast he never lost his Northern accent, which made him almost unintelligible to Vogue’s Cecil Beaton, but as his friend and contemporary RB Kitaj observed: “Northern England is his native strength – and he knows it.”
By then in his sixties, Beaton, a star at Vogue for decades, found in Hockney and his colourful entourage natural successors to the “Bright Young Things” of the ’30s. “I find myself completely at ease with him and stimulated by his enthusiasm, for he has this golden quality of being able to enjoy life,” Beaton said of the younger man. In 1968 he photographed Hockney for Vogue in his west London flat, completing the first and one of the best known of his magisterial double portraits, “Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy”. The great English novelist had been an exile in Los Angeles since the Second World War, and Hockney sought him out the minute he arrived, an admirer of Isherwood’s gay-themed texts and sexual openness.
Lord Snowdon had first photographed Hockney in 1963 for The Sunday Times. Fifteen years later in 1978 he photographed him again, this time for Vogue. “Hockney at Home” found the painter in a new studio at Powis Terrace, Notting Hill. “I’m always complaining about London, but I keep coming back,” Hockney told Vogue. Not long after he decided to make Los Angeles his permanent home.
“David was rather fun,” recalled Snowdon, who admired his canary-coloured trousers and mismatched socks, but took greater delight in the studio’s pinboard, featuring – prominently – naked snapshots of his former partner, model and muse, Peter Schlesinger. Snowdon failed to slip the images past the editor-in-chief and into the magazine, but the Hockney bathroom made it, complete with his latest hair dyes in shades “Happy Honey” and “Winsome Wheat”.
Everyone found David fun. “Los Angeles should have a Piranesi,” he told Vogue as the Tate’s David Hockney: A Retrospective opened in 1988, “So here I am!” His image was now carefully contrived as he padded around his sun-filled house in the Hollywood Hills (it once belonged to Anthony Perkins, star of Psycho), with Stanley the dachshund and a pink (or blue, sometimes red) hearing aid. “Everyone has the publicity they want. David would put on a green and yellow frock in order to get it,” said Lucian Freud, possibly in admiration.
A fiftieth birthday tribute, published in 1987, had shown Vogue’s readers how far he had come. “There is no fat of pomposity, no self-importance of success about him – and what success!” declared Stephen Spender. “A line in his work is like a line in a tune of music…” A celebratory sunlit picture saw him in his swimming pool (of course), but he would always remember where he came from, where it all started with pictures of his earliest model, his father, an office clerk in a small office and a keen amateur painter. “I’ve got Bradford. They can’t take that away from me.”
And so David Hockney’s presence in Vogue echoed down the years. In 1992 he was “Our Man in Malibu”, the man who had invented California for the British sensibility: palm trees, swimming pools, lawn sprinklers, boys in briefs in showers, and pastel-hued low-rise modernist bungalows. “As I flew over San Bernadino and looked down and saw the swimming pools and the houses and the sun,” he recalled, “I was more thrilled than I’ve ever been.”
By 2006, now heading towards 70, Vogue found him back in his native Yorkshire, near Bridlington, where he had taken a studio to paint en plein air its expansive landscape. He had first seen the seaside town from the train window as a child in the ’40s and here he was full circle, temporarily displaced from sunny LA. “The first winter I spent here… I began to see how beautiful winters were.”
When Tim Walker made an 80th birthday portrait on the eve of another Tate retrospective – was it his third? – his old friend, Peter Blake, who first exhibited with him in 1961, led the tributes with an admonition to “Stay ahead of the avant-garde,” adding, “of course, it’s impossible but if anyone ever did it, it’s David. He’s always ahead of people’s perception of him.” (By now Peter Blake was Sir Peter Blake. Hockney himself had turned down a knighthood in the early ’90s, but accepted in 2012 the Order of Merit.)
In August 2020 another milestone: his first cover for British Vogue. (Vogue Paris had got there first, giving him the cover and guest editorship of an entire issue at Christmas 1985.) Hockney was now based in Normandy, but he gave for the cover Wheat Field Near Fridaythorpe – about as Yorkshire as you could get. The world was beginning to emerge from enforced hibernation and he was as irrepressible as ever. “It’s quite fantastic. The other night I got up to pee at 4am and saw the largest and brightest full moon full moon in a long time… I recorded it on the iPad. Photography is useless for this, it pushes everything away, including the moon.”
In 2023 on the eve of his National Portrait Gallery retrospective, Drawing from Life, Vogue got a first look at his latest portrait of pop lodestar, Harry Styles. “I’m in awe of the man, with enough one-liners for a lifetime,” said his spellbound sitter. “David Hockney has been re-inventing the way we look at the world for decades.”
When a vast exhibition of nearly 400 works opened in spring 2025 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Frank Gehry’s “cloud of glass”, now a bona fide Parisian landmark, Hockney was approaching 87. The grandest exhibition of his long career, it incited an almost unprecedented thrill. Critical acclaim and public regard for one of the greatest painters of our time, whose lifespan crossed one century to the next, remained undiminished. Nearly a million people visited it.
David Hockney lived long enough to witness the explosion of the art market and specifically the stratospheric escalation of his own secondary market worth. “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)”, which sold in 2018 for $90.3 million, remains the highest price ever paid at auction for a painting by a living artist. “It’s an absurd world, isn’t it?” Hockney told Vogue in 2025. “And it looks as though it’s going more absurd.”
There is much that made him unique as an artist, but as a human being? Celia Birtwell, likely now his oldest living friend and one third of the celebrated “Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy” (1971), perhaps put it best when she told Vogue in 2017: “He thinks if you laugh every day, you’re probably going to live forever… Of course I don’t believe him. But it’s a nice idea.”
This article was originally published on British Vogue.
