David Hockney's way to art: so much more than just talent

David Hockney is one of the most famous artists in the world. on the world's best list of art among the 100 leading artists since this (computer -aided) ranking was launched in 2001.

However, since Hockney was born in 1937 and was already known in the 1960s in the English -language part of the art world, the educated older average German stallion has also known as a "famous artist" for a while.

The only question is how well average German (regardless of their age) David Hockney know. Often only from nice, colorful, somewhat kitschy posters - and in the usual short article on the occasion of an exhibition opening, Hockney's work is also very happy to shorten in a pleasing pop art .

That is too little, there is much more behind it. With pleasing art that appeals to the taste of the large mass worldwide, you become known for a short time, but not as an internationally known world artist. These world artists are loved and admired because they give the world more than beautiful art, each in its special way.

If you want to understand an artist, you want to come behind this "more" behind this certain something. This is not enough for this alone, this requires several looks at person and personality, as possible in the middle of the heart of the artist. That he rarely deals with it openly on a tray ...

So detective work is required, an exciting story in which a wide variety of results and evaluations can come out.

Let's take the trail, at the very beginning at David Hockney's development as an artist, behind which there is an unusual level of assertiveness, persistence and ability to think independently with several participants:

Born to the artist?

David Hockney was born on July 9, 1937 in Bradford, Yorkshire. Bradford is located in the central heart of good old England and was a rather dirty industrial city at the time; David Hockney's parents were not one of the industrial companies, but among the class of those who work for these bosses.

Some explain his amazing climb by the fact that David Hockney was born as an artist (which is always claimed by great artists). It would be nice, but there is also special skills in a flash only through lightning strikes (possibly, maybe the expectant artist also dissolves into a pile ashes), not through birth - so no, Hockney was not born as an artist. Hockney was also not made an artist; Fortunately, unselfish patrons were rare even then.

That is why it is actually not, but about someone has the chance of recognizing their talents and not preventing them from developing them. Because people are born full of curiosity and creative zest for action, everyone wants to try out as much as possible in youth and find the areas that are particularly interested.

In free societies in which each member is valued and respected, one would enable this to try it out so that people choose professions that meet their interests and talents. If people can pursue their interests and talents, nobody has to be made to anything or pressed into a profession - such a procedure is intended to bring the economy to the economy.

Then nobody would want to be a garbage man anymore? But, with adequate payment, a splendid job for young powerful people who could earn a good basis for a few years would be (and would completely reduce the aggression, the consequences of which the taxpayers currently cost more money than is missing to pay the garbage men).

In most societies that live in this world today, curiosity is slowed down very early, and the creative zest for action-in the western industrialized nations, the average child must not even discover its way to school alone. At school there is often a climate that transforms the desire to learn deeply, or in fear and frustration with a result of bullying and other injuries.

Schools and vocational training want and should not do more than producing the perfect work robot. Which then fill out the jobs that are currently needed in a growth (where?) Drilled. Used to let a consumption machine full of disposable products run smoothly, not to satisfy the needs of people.

There is sometimes enough money for these jobs to indulge even the endless consumption (why? What?). However, the frustration that this job is not able to live properly is increasingly to be able to live - because the supposedly striving to achieve a common goal of enabling the wages of buying as many consumer products as possible, only a few chosen ones actually help to make a carefree life, it does not satisfy it (the nasty: some wealthy middle -class citizens who have declared the consumption of a lifestyle due to the lack of other ideas late, that is not enough).

But also in these societies there are always children who persecute curiosity and creativity with some persistence and parents who accept their children as they are and simply support on their own way in and through this strange life.

How good for the art world that David Hockney was such a child and had such parents: Hockney was born curiously and creatively like all children, his parents were normal members of modern society, just the crucial tick differently. The father's owner of a small accounting company, the mother after various jobs with the upbringing of the five children.

However, she did this educational job so well that she soon did not have to work at all ... More about the parents in the third part of the Hockney articles, but in fact David Hockney's path started the artist's profession right after his birth, because both parents did not stimulate his creativity and aroused the desire for art and self-specific life in him.

Insight into the world of David Hockney - conversation with the curator Edith Devaney in his studio in Los Angeles (English)

Fine Finer Finest: School, Art Formation, Fontons

Little David has received support in the family since early youth. Enough support to achieve a scholarship for the Bradford Grammar School and successfully go through this place of school for the elegant upper class. Then Hockney visited the School of Art at Bradford College from 1953 to 1957 and was accepted at the Royal College of Art in London at autumn 1959.

Even then, that was one of the world's leading addresses for academic art education; The college in the influential QS World University Rankings to "clear" the world's best university for art and design for three years in a row.

At the RCA, Hockney completed its art education until 1962; During this time he made friends with co-students who would soon become decisive for his life: at the same time with Hockney, the later pop art icon RB Kitaj his studies at the RCA.

Hockney had almost 10 years of art formation (Cooper Union Institute in New York, Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna) and a lot of life and world experience: married since 1953 and has just become a father, with his wife Elsie Roessler across Europe, USarmy stations in Darmstadt and Fontainebleau.

Nevertheless, there was a close friendship between the two exceptional students, so narrow that Ronald Brooks Kitaj is the only person in this world who was allowed to paint David Hockney almost naked: jmberlin.de/blog/2012/11/david-hockney-besucht-kitajs .

Derek Boshier , Peter Phillips and Allen Jones also came to RCA in 1959. During the boring national service, Boshier thoroughly studied the work of the Canadian philosopher and communication theorist Herbert Marshall McLuhan, who would be on everyone's lips the “father of media theory”

Phillips came from Birmingham and had prepared to the Royal College of Art via the art universities in Birmingham. Before enrollment, he had collected art impressions in Paris and Italy, in parallel to his studies he was able to equip the first exhibitions at the RBA Galleries (exhibition space for gifted students, will later be explained more precisely).

All Jones had interrupted the training at the excessive progressive hornsey College of Art to take a year -established art education at the leading institute. A year later, the later alien director Ridley Scott from the West Hartlepool College of Art (where he had just passed a diploma with a distinction in graphic design and painting) and Patrick Caulfield from the Chelsea School of Art was added, and was already a very wild avant-garde clique, which fueled each other:

RB Kitaj played with European and even more with homeland, American influences; Inspired primarily by Robert Rauschenberg, the then star of the art scene overseas. Derek Boshier developed strictly didactically critical comments on the Space Race (race into space), almighty multis and Americanization of English culture.

All Jones wants to break up the ossified sexuality of the English Fiftys, initially with women in pornographic poses as a "piece of furniture" in order to pillorate sexual taboo

Peter Phillips is sustainably impressed by the American artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg , Ridley Scott was together with all the influences on the way to the second diploma with distinction, Patrick Caulfield dissected Juan Gris, Legér and René Magritte , David Hockney to form "his own thing".

Nothing there pop art

The fellow students who came together at the Royal College of Art knew very well that they had ended up at one of the best art education centers in the world. They wanted to contribute their part to create the new art of their time; They wanted to bring out what art had to say about the development of post -war society. The first big waves of pop art have already spilled over from America, in Great Britain the avant-warrior garde had long thought the English variety of pop art and created the first works in this direction.

The Briton Richard Hamilton even had so different in 1956 with the collage "Just what is it that make today, so appealing?" ( t1p.de/88Gu ) one of the key works of pop art; And Hamilton taught 1957 to 1961 at the Royal College of Art, so in Hockney time was one of the teachers at the RCA.

Hamilton is even attributed to the authorship of the term “pop art” in large parts of art science; The collage "Just what ..." was presented to the public for the first time in the exhibition "This is Tomorrow" August 1956 in the Whitechapel Art Gallery London, an event that is the birth of Pop Art . So there seemed to be hardly a path past the pop art, especially not for students on a college where Hamilton taught.

But that says today's art science review. Even if David Hockney had visited the exhibition in the Whitechapel Gallery (interest was certainly there, but Hockney learned in Bradford at the time, and at that time you didn't just go to London for an exhibition), the later key work for the young artist was only some interesting collage at the time.

Hockney will not necessarily have met or saw Hamilton at the RCA - at that time it was not common to simply attend foreign lectures/exercises, and Hockney is said to have been rather shy and reserved in his youth.

Hockney visited the painting class of Carel Weight , a time -honored British painter, who was appointed the official war artist of the British in 1945. Weight had primarily presented "war pictures", also from Austria, Greece and Italy, often with educational touch-here you can see 178 paintings that David Hockney did not want to paint: arkuk.org/discover/search/actor:weight-carel-victor-morlais-19081997/9 .

Hockney would never have penetrated to the Royal College of Art if he hadn't been smart enough to save updoing in the wrong places. Therefore, it can be assumed that he took away what WeiGht could teach him without installing the way to important knowledge through youthful arrogance.

And Weight had something to pass on what Hockney - in his criticism of the traditional painting and his then punished sexual orientation - could use more than well; namely your own attitude to the company around art:

Carel Victor Morlais Weight was born in the middle of the London citizens' milieu as the son of a bank clerk and a foot maintenance officer and saw as the top test of a painting that the normal citizen got away. He did not like the art world very, not at all, and was not afraid of critics, despite his very individual work (if and where free development was possible, see e.g. "Recruit's Progress - Medical Inspection" from 1942, T1P.de/18NW , you did not "paint" back then).

Hockney also visited courses with several other painters who passed on their knowledge at the Royal College of Art. These teachers also left their traces in Hockney later works:

Landscape painter Roger de Gray can be found, for example, in tree-paced avenues and forests and David Hockney's Yorkshire pictures.

Art by Roger de Gray: t1p.de/blpa

Alleen, forests and Yorkshire pictures by David Hockney: t1p.de/wwxb , t1p.de/bp84 , t1p.de/01pi

Painter and musician Ceri Giraldus Richards surrealism in the 1930s , at that time one of the most experimental young artists in Great Britain and also in Hockney's time at the RCA was definitely not from yesterday.

He set impressionistic and surrealistic "plants" in Hockney and was probably the one who impressed with paintings and drawings based on poetic literature (in the case of Richard's poetry by Dylan Thomas, Vernon Watkins and others). Hockney took this suggestion in the picture cycle around the legendary Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy soon.

Art of Ceri Giraldus Richards: t1p.de/p8xi

Impressionism , surrealistic excursions and tribute to David Hockney poets:

• "The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011" , iPad Drawing Printed on Paper, Edition 6 of 25
• "Moving Focus - an Image of Gregory", 1984
• "Henry at Table", 1976
• "The Arrival" , 1963, sheet 1 from: "A Rake's Progress" (career of a desertling), a number of etchings via Hockney first New York trip summer 1961, in which he refers to the famous cycle of the English artist William Hogarth
• "14 poems by CP Cavafy. Selected and illustrated with 12 etchings by David Hockney", 1966

60 years of Hockney - a look at his exhibition in the Tate Britain

The painter Colin Graham Frederick Hayes put oil and watercolor paint on the screen, whereby the emphasis is absolutely on "color". He was certainly not uninvolved because David Hockney's pictures could be bristled with color.

Art of Colin Hayes: T1P.de/3TB1

Farbaus from David Hockney: "A Closer Winter Tunnel, February - March" , 2006, t1p.de/899o ; "Nichols Canyon" , 1980, t1p.de/u19d

Sandra Betty Blow , not yet 35 years old at the time of Hockney, had sniffed the first abstract expressionism shortly after her college. The years before the teaching at the RCA, Blow had worked with the Italian "material artist" Alberto Burri, who also left influences of the Informel and a fundamental openness to new materials for the display in the level.

Blow had met the artists Lucian Freud , John Minton, Francis Bacon (Bacon created the "Three Studies of Lucian Freud" , which was auctioned in 2013 for $ 142.4 and remained the most expensive painting in the world in 2013) and was just right in the middle of it, with the involvement of abstract form, light, space, texture and rhythm to a groundbreaking size in the to develop abstract art

You don't need too much imagination to create the impression of flames and spray, wood and tar on oil paintings: t1p.de/b2ev on David Hockney's moving water painting.

In the development of the same described development David Hockney with his own style and profile, attentive people will often ring the ears than if Sandra Blow went straight into it ... (The author doesn't dare, the joke is just too flat, but the name is already an "association challenge").

Art by Sandra Blow: t1p.de/ldr4

Water sketches and abstract art by David Hockney: t1p.de/kazp , t1p.de/d4ip ; "Almost Like Skiing" , 1991, t1p.de/utbc ; "Third Detail (from Snails Space Series)" , 1995, t1p.de/4oyf ; "The other side" , 1990-1993, t1p.de/djec

What the teaching artists Robert A. Buhler ( T1P.de/cq12 ) and Rodney Joseph Burns ( t1p.de/nk3m ) left in David Hockney's work should be left to the reader's own discovery, but Pop Art was certainly not.

How much David Hockney had to do with Pop Art can best be emptied in the interviews with him, e.g. B. the "A Bigger Picture" in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, T1P.de/8P8T : He often lived in the center of pop culture, found Pop great, wore whiteblonde hair ( t1p.de/w2h7 , blonde have fun, and "men can gait better here" fits here); But that's it that he painted Pop Art, they will hardly hear from David Hockney's mouth.

David Hockney's masterpiece beats auction record: "Portrait of an artist (pool with two figures)"

When David Hockney, contrary to his very determined own statement, is stylistically attempted by Pop Art, this is overgrown by the respective critic.

Is such an assault allowed? In art science there are two contrary positions from which this question can be answered: the artist makes art, and the art scientist evaluates this art and classifies it in its meaning for society, even in a certain style if it fits unexpectedly.

Or: The artist creates works of art that he also makes with the name as art, the will to act artistically. If this is part of the artist's copyright , it must be part of the work created or not assigned to the work created by a certain style.