David Hockney: Seven Decades of Production (1937- Present): An Outline of the Iconic Artist's Achievements

  • Portrait of David Hockney seated outdoors with a photocollage of the same scene on his lap.
    Play Within a Play Within a Play and Me with a Cigarette, 2025.
    Acrylic and collage on canvas. 121.9x182.9 cm.
    ©David Hockney. Image reproduced for educational purposes only.
    David Hockney is one of the most cutting-edge figures of the modern and contemporary art world. Over the span of seven decades, the remarkable scale of Hockney’s oeuvre has charted his journey from the rural, post-war landscape of West Yorkshire to Los Angeles and, since 2019, the tranquil blossoms of springtime in Normandy, a critical site in the heritage of his Impressionist predecessors: Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro.
     
    His tech-forward production reflects an expanded notion of art that spreads across multiple media, including photography, installation, printmaking and digital art. In the history of art there are few examples that can compete with Hockney’s prolificacy, with the sole exception of Pablo Picasso whose Christian Zervos’ catalogue raisonée famously exceeds thirty volumes. Last year, a monumental retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, featuring 400 of the Bradford-born painter and draftsman’s artworks, offered institutional recognition to the rocketing prices of iPhone and iPad works in the art market which have drawn up a frenzy amongst astute collectors.
     
    By Simal Rafique
    Published 5th February 2026
     
    Have a question about David Hockney's artworks? 
    GET IN TOUCH

  • In this article: 

    1. Early artistic training
    2. Move to Los Angeles and stylistic change
    3. Use of photography
    4. Return to traditional media
    5. Digital art practice
    6. David Hockney timeline
    7. Frequently asked questions
  • How did David Hockney’s early artistic training shape his career? David Hockney’s Formative Years: From Bradford to British Pop Art,...

    We Two Boys Together Clinging, 1961.

    Oil on canvas. 121.9 x 152.4 cm.

    ©David Hockney, Image reproduced for educational purposes only.

    How did David Hockney’s early artistic training shape his career?

    David Hockney’s Formative Years: From Bradford to British Pop Art, 1937-1964

     

    David Hockney was born in 1937 in Bradford, West Yorkshire to working-class parents Kenneth and Laura Hockney. Aged sixteen, Hockney attended the local Bradford College of Art, where his early work recalled the gritty realism of the Euston Road School painters. Next, Hockney enrolled at the prestigious Royal College of Art from 1959 to 1962, an important institution for British artists. His peers and near contemporaries in London included key figures in British Pop Art such as Peter Blake, R. B. Kitaj, Bridget Riley and Patrick Caulfield. Many of these artists came to prominence in the ‘Young Contemporaries’ exhibition of 1961.
     
    Figurative works from this period, such as We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), contain powerful and raw expressions of Hockney’s identity as a young gay man in the Swinging ‘Sixties, despite homosexuality being illegal in England and Wales until 1967. The influence of Jean Dubuffet’s faux naïf aesthetic, which valorized the art of children, the untrained, and the insane, is visible in these scruffy representations of queer intimacy. For his final thesis at the Royal College, Hockney’s refusal to paint a female model from life resulted in Life Painting for a Diploma (1964): a quirky study of an illustration found in Young Physique (a sporty men’s magazine), grafted next to an academic study of a skeleton. For his prodigious efforts, the young Hockney was awarded a gold medal.

  • How did David Hockney’s style change after he moved to Los Angeles?

    Los Angeles, Pop Art, and the Swimming Pool Paintings, 1964-1967

     
    Hockney obtained greater artistic freedom in Los Angeles after moving in 1964, a year after his first visit to the United States. Captivated by John Rechy’s homoerotic novel ‘City of Night’ (1963), iconic landscapes of modernist homes, palm trees, and nude bodies emerging from swimming pools compose the subject matter of Hockney’s experimentation with the saccharine colours of Pop Art. Stylistically, Hockney’s paintings during this time are defined by what he calls an ‘obsessive naturalism’.
     
    Consider Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) of 1972 for instance, where the side profile of a handsome blonde garbed in a red blazer hovers over an amphibious swimmer below in a scene of erotic tension. Dazzling ripples of white and blue paint hypnotise Peter Schlesinger, Hockney’s lover at the time, who is apparently unaware of the artist and ‘our’ gaze. In fact, the fictitious scene is a painted amalgamation of a luxurious Saint-Tropez villa and a selection of Pentax photographs of Hockney’s lover-cum-model posing in Kensington Gardens, an aide memoire later used as source material. Is this not an iconic West Coast response to the discourse of ‘camp’ pioneered by New York artists Jaspar Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and later Andy Warhol? 

  • Hockney's Most Iconic Artworks

  • "Over the years I have drawn many portraits and I know how much time it takes to draw the way Ingres did. I was awestruck. ‘How had he done them?’ I asked myself."
    - David Hockney

    How did David Hockney's use of photography influence his artistic practice?

    Photographic Collages and the Camera Lucida

     

    In February 1982, Hockney began producing his photographic collages (also known as "joiners") by adhering Polaroid shots taken from multiple angles and vantage points. For approximately five years, he tirelessly snapped close-ups ranging from intimate portraits of his aging mother to his bedroom at sunrise. The outcome is a far cry from earlier statements likening the act of looking through a camera to sharing ‘the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops’ - an expression of his frustration with the inherently ‘static’ aesthetic of the photographic medium. Works like Nude, 17th June (1984) pulse with restless energy, revealing Hockney's familiarity with the avant-garde — the Futurists and the Cubists, à la Picasso and Braque. The panoramic joiners from his road trips to American sites like the Grand Canyon echo Ed Ruscha's archival photobooks of gas stations and LA apartments.

  • In the late 1990s, Hockney ran experiments with the camera lucida, determined to prove that the French painter Ingres had also exploited the optical device (invented in 1806). The resulting portraits from this period demonstrate a continuity in Hockney’s investment in photographic processes. What is perhaps most intriguing and peculiar about the artist’s observations is his comparison between Ingres’ preparatory sketches and Warhol’s compositions, which contain a conspicuously 'traced’ or indexical appearance, suggesting the obvious use of a projector. The following year, Hockney set out to chart the compatibility of his thesis with the canon of art history from 1300 to 1889 in a meticulous project entitled The Great Wall, 31st March 2000. These findings are published in ‘Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters’, where Hockney researched optics (lenses and mirrors) to argue that Old Masters created direct projections of images since the early fifteenth century to capture accurate likenesses in portraiture. Prompted by close observation in the National Gallery in London, Hockney challenged the art historical consensus that only specific artists like Canaletto and Vermeer used optics two or three centuries later.
  • Painting of the artist's dog sleeping.

    Dog Painting 17, 1995.
    Oil on canvas. 33 x 55.25cm.
    ©David Hockney. Image reproduced for educational purposes only.

    Why did David Hockney return to traditional media in the 1990s and 2000s?

    Yorkshire Landscapes and the Dog Days 

     

    The ‘nineties oversaw a major return to the traditional medium of painting in Hockney’s oeuvre, including portraits and landscapes using oil, acrylic and watercolours. These works include the Very New Paintings – bold and exuberant scenes that verge upon abstraction, as well as the ‘dog days’ portraits of Hockney’s dachshunds Stanley and Boogie. Rendered in primary colours, the pair are lovingly depicted sleeping, stretching, and curling into balls on their butter yellow beds. Unlike Warhol, Hockney's portraiture is usually restricted to friends, lovers and family over commissioned works; although, later in his life, there are the exceptions of celebrity sitters such as Frank Gehry, John Baldessari and Harry Styles.
     
    During his Yorkshire sojourn, Hockney was distraught by the loss of his close friend Jonathan Silver, dedicating a spectacular landscape of Salts Mill as a sentimental tribute to the man who transformed the abandoned industrial site. Crucially, Hockney’s mother also shifted to the coastal town of Bridlington during this decade. But in 1998 Hockney returns to Los Angeles, where he resumes topographical studies of his native Yorkshire from memory. The much-loved horizons of Garrowby Hill symbolise the slow fracturing of memory: a winding road recedes down the tallest point of the Yorkshire Wolds into an aerial overview of blocks of apple-green fields and cyan pastures in the distance. Hockney’s figurative style dissolves into a mosaic of colour block abstraction. The panorama A Bigger Grand Canyon is another notable achievement, composed of 60 canvases and a nostalgic rendering of his American roadtrip joiners.
  • "Recently I said to the Royal Academy: "Look, if Turner or Constable had had the means to paint a picture to cover that wall, they would have done, so I'm going to do it."" 
    - David Hockney
    In 2005 Hockney moved back to Bridlington and commenced another ambitious campaign of plein-air sketching – this time using oils on canvas. A major John Constable retrospective at Tate Britain in 2006 clearly moves Hockney, although he continues to paint scenes that are not strictly ‘picturesque’ – the quintessential Romantic tradition in the landscape genre. Like Constable’s six-footers of the River Stour, Hockney developed his artworks from brief sketches in pencil and oil, transforming these into finished canvases in the comfort of his studio. Scale is an increasingly important feature of this project, as is seen in the Royal Academy summer exhibition of Bigger Trees Near Warter or/ou Peinture sur le motif pour le Nouvel Age Post Photographique (2007), a spectacular production of fifty canvases. Here, the sharp criss-crossing of trees evokes the desolation of Caspar David Friedrich’s melancholy compositions.
  • A Bigger Grand Canyon, 1998. Oil on sixty canvases. 207 cm × 744.2 cm.
    © David Hockney. © Fondation Louis Vuitton
  • Digital artwork depicting a road lined with trees.

    Summer Road Near Kilham, 2008.

    Computer drawings printed by Inkjet. 48 x 37". Edition of 25
    ©David Hockney. 

    HOW DID DAVID HOCKNEY’S DIGITAL ART PRACTICE DEVELOP?

    HOCKNEY’S IPHONE AND IPAD ART: DIGITAL DRAWING AND NEW CREATIVE TOOLS

     

    A year after Steve Jobs announced the release of the iPhone in 2007, Hockney rushed to use the portable device as a sort of electronic sketchbook, what he dubbed ‘an endless piece of paper’. This innovation liberated him from the physical demands of painting by deducting tedious drying times and enabling him to pursue endless revisions, thereby erasing compositional errors. The release of the iPad in early 2010 also aroused Hockney’s curiosity because of its larger screen. Working on various software with either his fingers or a stylus, Hockney regards the Apple gadgets as mere tools in his production, like a paintbrush or a pencil, enabling him to create a comprehensive archive of his observations in nature. 
     
    There is a connection with the iPads and Hockney’s prior engagement with photocopiers, fax machines and photoshop. In his studio Hockney has often embarked upon obsessive scrutiny of different media and styles, with many chapters of intense production lasting over months and sometimes years. Whereas earlier in 2008, Hockney was cynical about time constraints – bemoaning the 30-second lag between his hand and the appearance of colour on his computer screen – the sophistication of “painting” on iPhones and iPads demands immediacy and user satisfaction. Equally useful is the ability to present these on plasma screens or prints of varying scales. 

  •  "I love new mediums… I think mediums can turn you on, they can excite you: they always let you do something in a different way, even if you take the same subject." 

    - David Hockney

    For the Royal Academy’s 2012 exhibition David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, fifty-one iPad drawings and a large oil painting decorated the prestigious walls of Burlington House in January. Printed on paper, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 series rejoices in the gradual changing of seasons in the East Riding of Yorkshire, registering daily the fleeting lights and fecundity of the English climate from December to June. The woodlands are at first solitary, desolate. The transformation from heavy snowfall to muddy footpaths and drizzle; and finally daffodils, blossom trees and violets galore symbolises hope and renewal. The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 navigates a similar metamorphoses in nature during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, where Hockney, now in his ‘eighties, was living in a rural farmhouse in Normandy.

  • Hockney’s Lasting Influence on Contemporary Art & the Global Art Market

    Recent exhibitions & Auction Results
    In 2025, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris launched a monumental retrospective of David Hockney's artworks, featuring over 400 artworks from public and private collections across the globe that have rarely been viewed together. This institutional recognition has buoyed up the fast-growing primary and secondary markets for Hockney's iPads (see more here). At the Sotheby’s London auction of October 2025, David Hockney's iPad series Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, 2011 surpassed market expectations with some spectacular hammer prices. In particular, 19th February 2011 scored the highest lot at an astonishing £762,000; followed by 28th April 2011 at £698,500; and 2nd June 2011 for £635,000. For more details, we publish a Price History Database covering auction and private sales results for the Arrival of Spring series.Through his innovative use of emerging technologies, Hockney has secured an unparalleled and enduring place in the art world, evolving from a modernist painter into a truly contemporary artist.

  • Some Digital Works

  • Frequently asked questions & Hockney timeline:

     

    What are David Hockney's most famous works? 

    Hockney's most celebrated works include A Bigger Splash (1967), Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972), Mr. and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-71) and The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 iPad drawing series.
     

    What are David Hockney’s top 10 Auction Results? 

    In November 2018, Christie's New York broke a world auction record for living artists with Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which sold for $90,312,496. This result is followed by the double-portrait of Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott (1969) at $37,661,250, and Nichols Canyon (1980) at $41,067,500.  For a full top 10 list, please take a look here. 
     

    How did David Hockney use technology in his art?

    Hockney has consistently embraced new technologies throughout his career. In the 1980s, he created photographic collages using Polaroids. In 2009, he began creating digital drawings on iPhone, and in 2010, he began using an iPad for larger-scale works. He has also experimented with photocopiers, fax machines, and Photoshop, viewing these devices as tools comparable to paintbrushes.

  • This timeline provides an overview of David Hockney’s life and career, highlighting his major artworks, exhibitions, technological innovations, and his impact on modern and contemporary art from 1937 to 2025.

     

    Life and Career of David Hockney
    1973 Born on July 9, 1937 in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. He is the fourth child of working-class parents Kenneth and Laura Hockney.
    1953–1957 Studies at Bradford School of Art, where he begins developing his artistic practice. 
    1959–1962 Attends the Royal College of Art, London. Gains early recognition despite challenging traditional academic rules. Early depictions of queer intimacy, inspired by Art Brut. His move to London introduces him to artists like Peter Blake and R. B. Kitaj. Hockney is also featured in ‘Young Contemporaries’ exhibition in 1961. Creates etchings of William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress.
    1964-1967

    Moves to California and establishes a studio in Santa Monica. He is inspired by the city's light, architecture and modern lifestyle, marking a major shift in his oeuvre. He takes a summer teaching position at the University of Iowa, before returning to LA after a road trip to the Grand Canyon.

    Creates his most famous swimming pool paintings, including A Bigger Splash (1967) — one of his best-known works. Hockney is awarded First Prize at the John Moores Exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool for Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool.
    1968–1971

    Experiments with photography and photo collages, challenging traditional perspective.
    1971 Completion of Mr. and Mrs Clark and Percy, a naturalistic double portrait of designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell.
    1974

    Designs stage sets and costumes for opera, beginning a long relationship with theatrical design.
    1979 Returns to Yorkshire to spend time with his family after the death of his father in February.
    1981 Works for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Stravinsky Festival in Paris and the Grand Théatre in Nancy.
    1982 An exhibition of the joiners at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
    1983-84 Visits Japan. Becomes fascinated by Chinese scrolls, creating his vast canvas A Visit with Christopher and Don, Santa Monica Canyon.
    1986 Begins using an office photocopier to produce layered prints, not unlike lithographs.
    1987 Salts Mill in Saltaire transformed into an arts space for Hockney’s fiftieth birthday.
    1990 Painted Santa Monica mountains with oil paints. Experiments with computer software drawings on an Apple Macintosh.
    1991 Works on opera designs at the Royal Opera House at Covent garden.
    1992 Begins his Very New Paintings in Malibu, a colourful and exuberant selection of abstract paintings.
    1993 The Very New Paintings are shown in New York and Saltaire, Yorkshire. Hockney publishes 'That’s the Way I See It', an autobiographical sequel that explores his career and personal life, covering the loss of friends and family during the AIDS crisis. Hockney paints his dachshunds Stanley and Boogie, continuing these works over the next few years.
    1995 A major exhibition in Hamburg attracts thousands of visitors, before shifting to venues in LA and London.
    1996 Produces countless portraits of friends and family members in oil.
    1997 Sojourns in Yorkshire to spend time with his close friend Jonathan Silvers, who ran Salts Mill, is battling cancer. Hockney paints a spectacular landscape of Salts Mill as a tribute to Silver.
    1998 Returns to Los Angeles. Hockney continues to paint his native Yorkshire from memory. These include Garrowby Hill. He also paints the panoramic landscape A Bigger Grand Canyon, which is composed of 60 canvases.
    1999-2001 Hockney is intrigued by the camera obscura and Ingres’ preparatory sketches, determined to prove the latter’s use of the camera lucida. Creates The Great Wall timeline of portraits from 1150 to 1889. 'Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters' is published. Spends more time in Yorkshire, painting expressive landscapes inspired by his childhood surroundings.
    2003 Establishes David Hockney gallery at Salts Mill: a multi-purpose arts venue.
    2004 Participates in the Whitney Biennale. Paints watercolours of France, Spain and Lake Como. In Bridlington, he tours Yorkshire with his studio assistant and partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima.
    2005-2006 Continues painting Yorkshire, confidently using oils on canvas again. Inspired by a John Constable retrospective at Tate Britain.
    2007 Exhibits monumental landscape works like Bigger Trees Near Warter or/ou Peinture sur le motif pour le Nouvel Age Post Photographique, made from fifty canvases.
    2008-9 Begins his creation of digital artworks, using computers and iPhone applications.
    2010 Purchases his first iPad, using the larger screen for Yosemite drawings.
    2011 Produces 100 plein air iPad drawings of East Yorkshire. In the summer, he returns to the US to draw Yosemite again, for larger scale. 
    2012 Awarded The Order of Merit by HM Queen Elizabeth II, a prestigious accomplishment in the Arts. 'David Hockney: A Bigger Picture' opens at the Royal Academy, moves to Museum Ludwig in Cologne and then the Museo Guggenheim in Bilbao.
    2013 Creates The Arrival of Spring in 2013 (twenty thirteen).
    2016 82 Portraits and 1 Still Life opens at the Royal Academy in London, before travelling to Ca’ Pesaro in Venice and the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao.
    2017 Major retrospective David Hockney opens at Tate Britain, one of the gallery's most popular exhibitions.
     2018 Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sells at Christie’s New York for a record-breaking price of $90 million, making Hockney the most expensive living artist at the time.
     2020 National Portrait Gallery opens 'David Hockney: Drawing from Life'. In Normandy, during the Covid-19 pandemic in March, he begins sharing his iPad works with friends and family. One of these, Do Remember They Can’t Cancel the Spring, includes an image of a daffodil; others are illustrations of fruits from around him. 10 illustrations and an animation is shared publicly via the BBC. Hockney is determined to produce ‘220 in 2020.’
     2021 Hockney’s art is projected on billboards in major cities London, LA, Tokyo and Seoul in a 90-second video format, Remember you cannot look at the sun or death for very long, after the courtly French writer La Rochefoucauld. The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 opens at the Royal Academy of Arts in late May. 'Hockney - Van Gogh: the Joy of Nature' opens at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, after the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. A Year in Normandie, inspired by a visit to the Bayeux Tapestry, was exhibited at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris.
     2022 'Hockney - Matisse. Un Paradis retrouvé' is shown at the Musée Matisse in Nice, France.
     2023 The immersive installation 'David Hockney: Bigger and Closer (not smaller and further away)' opens in London. Another solo-exhibition is launched in Tokyo. 'David Hockney: Drawing from Life' is revised at the National Portrait Gallery with Normandy works.
     2024 Sotheby’s record-breaking figure of $698 000 for Arrival of Spring, 28th April 2011.
     2025 Opening of a monumental retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, featuring 400 artworks. Sotheby’s record-breaking figure of $762,000 for Arrival of Spring, 19th February 2011.
  • David Hockney, 25th July - 7th August 2021, Rain on the Pond, 2021.
    iPad painting printed on Paper. 39.25 x 111 in.
    © David Hockney.