David Hamilton
David Hamilton
Contents
[hide
hide]]
• 1 Early Life
Life
• 3 Con
Controv
troversy
ersy
○ 3.1 Sele
Selected
cted
Bibliography
• 4 Bo
Book
okss
• 5 Por
Portfo
tfolios
lios
• 6 Fi
Film
lmss
○ 6.1 References
○ 6.2 External
links
Early Life
Hamilton grew up in London. His schooling was interrupted by World War II. As an evacuee, he spent some
time in the countryside of Dorset, which inspired his work until today. [1] After the war, Hamilton returned to
London and finished school before moving to France where he has lived ever since.
His photographs were in demand by other magazines such as Réalités, Twen and Photo. By the end of the
1960s, Hamilton's work had a recognizable style. His further success included many dozens of photographic
books with combined sales well into the millions, five feature films, countless magazine publishings and
museum and gallery exhibitions.[2] In December 1977, Images Gallery in New York City showed his
photographs, at the same time that Bilitis was released. He also maintained an apartment in New York.
His soft focus style also came back into fashion at Vogue, ELLE and other high-class fashion magazines from
around 2003. Long ago, Hamilton was married to Mona Kristensen, who was a model in many of his early
photobooks and made her screen debut in Bilitis. More recently, he was married to Gertrude Hamilton, who co-
designed his book The Age of Innocence ,[3] but they have since divorced amicably and she lives in New York
working as a painter.
Hamilton divides his time between St Tropez and Paris. Since 2005 h e has been enjoying a revival in
popularity. In 2006 two new books were released: David Hamilton , a collection of captioned photographs,
and Erotic Tales, which contains Hamilton's fictional short stories.
Controversy
As much of Hamilton's work depicts early-teen girls, often nude, h e has been the subject of some controversy
and even child pornography allegations, similar to that which the work o f Sally Mann and Jock Sturges have
attracted. In the late 1990s, some people protested bookstores that stocked Hamilton's photography books but
their efforts came to nothing. This negative attention originated mostly from North America and Britain. As The
Guardian wrote, "Hamilton's photographs have long been at the forefront of the "is it art or pornography?"
debate.[4]
Glenn Holland, spokesman for the 78-year-old photographer, who lives in St. Tropez, said: "We are deeply
saddened and disappointed by this, as David is one of the most successful art photographers the world has
ever known. His books have sold millions".[4]
Selected Bibliography
Books
Dreams of a Young Girl (1971)
Sisters (1972)
Bilitis (1977)
Souvenirs (1978)
Venice (1989)
Flowers (1990)
Portfolios
Souvenirs (1974)
Films
Bilitis (1977)
References
1. ^ Twenty Five Years of an Artist ; Aurum Press, 1993.
2. ^ http://www.hamilton-archives.com/
4. ^ a b
"Hamilton's naked girl shots ruled 'indecent'". guardian.co.uk. Retrieved 2010-11-21.
External links
David Hamilton at the Internet Movie Database
David Hockney
We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961)
Nationality English
David Hockney, OM, CH, RA, (born 9 July 1937) is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage
designer and photographer, who is based in Bridlington, Yorkshire and Kensington, London.[1]
An important contributor to the Pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most
influential British artists of the twentieth century. [2][3]
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Life
• 2 Works
○ 2.1 The
"joiners"
○ 2.2 Later
works
• 3 The Hockney-Falco
thesis
• 4 Public life
• 5 In popular culture
• 6 See also
• 7 References
• 8 External links
[edit]Life
This biographical section of an article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by
adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly
sourced must be removed immediately , especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (April 2011)
Hockney was born in Bradford, England on 9 July 1937 to Laura and Kenneth Hockney and was
educated first at Wellington Primary School then Bradford Grammar School, Bradford College of Art and
the Royal College of Art in London, where he met R. B. Kitaj. While he was there Hockney said he felt at
home, he took pride and success in his work here. While a student at the Royal College of Art, Hockney
was featured in the exhibition Young Contemporaries – alongside Peter Blake – that announced the
arrival of British Pop art. He was associated with the movement, but his early works also
display expressionist elements, not dissimilar to certain works by Francis Bacon. Sometimes, as in We
Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), named after a poem by Walt Whitman, these works make reference
to his love for men. From 1963, Hockney was represented by the art d ealer John Kasmin. In 1963
Hockney visited New York, making contact with Andy Warhol. A subsequent visit to California, where he
lived for many years, inspired Hockney to make a series of paintings of swimming pools in Los Angeles,
using the comparatively new acrylic medium and rendered in a highly realistic style using vibrant colours.
In 1967, his painting, Peter Getting Out Of Nick's Pool , won the John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker
Art Gallery in Liverpool. He made prints, portraits of friends, and stage designs for the Royal Court
Theatre, Glyndebourne, La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.
Hockney's older sister, Margaret, who lives in Yorkshire, is an artist of still life photos.
Hockney was born with synesthesia; he sees synesthetic colours to musical stimuli. In general, this does
not show up in his painting or photography artwork too much. However, it is a common underlying
principle in his construction of stage sets for various ballets and operas, where he bases the background
colours and lighting upon his own seen colours while listening to the music of the theatre piece he is
working on.
[edit]Works
[edit]The "joiners"
David Hockney has also worked with photography, or, more precisely, photocollage. Using varying
numbers of small Polaroid snaps or photolab-prints of a single subject Hockney arranged a patchwork to
make a composite image. One of his first photomontages was of his mother. Because these photographs
are taken from different perspectives and at slightly different times, the result is work that has an affinity
with Cubism, which was one of Hockney's major aims – discussing the way human vision works. Some of
these pieces arelandscapes such as Pearblossom Highway #2 ,[2][4] others being portraits, e.g. Kasmin
1982,[5] and My Mother, Bolton Abbey, 1982 .[6]
Hockney created these photomontage works mostly between 1970 and 1986. He referred to them as
"joiners".[7] He began this style of art by taking Polaroid photographs of one subject and arranging them
into a grid layout. The subject would actually move while being photographed so that the piece would
show the movements of the subject seen from the photographer's perspective. In later works Hockney
changed his technique and moved the camera around the subject instead.
Hockney's creation of the "joiners" occurred accidentally. He noticed in the late sixties that photographers
were using cameras with wide-angle lenses to take pictures. He did not like such photographs because
they always came out somewhat distorted. He was working on a painting of a living room and terrace in
Los Angeles. He took Polaroid shots of the living room and glued them together, not intending for them to
be a composition on their own. Upon looking at the final composition, he realized it created a narrative, as
if the viewer was moving through the room. He began to work more and more with photography after this
discovery and even stopped painting for a period of time to exclusively pursue this new style of
photography. Frustrated with the limitations of photography and its 'one eyed' approach,[8] he later
returned to painting.
[edit]Later works
A Bigger Splash , 1967, Tate Collection, London.
In 1974, Hockney was the subject of Jack Hazan's film, A Bigger Splash (named after one of Hockney's
swimming pool paintings from 1967).
In 1977 David Hockney authored a book of etchings called The Blue Guitar: Etchings By David Hockney
Who Was Inspired By Wallace Stevens Who Was Inspired By Pablo Picasso. The etchings were inspired
by and represented the themes of Stevens' poem, "The Man With The Blue Guitar", which accompanied
the art. It was published as a portfolio and as a book in spring 1997 by Petersburg Press.[9]
Hockney was commissioned to design the cover and a series of p ages for the December 1985 issue of
the French edition of Vogue. Consistent with his interest in cubism and admiration for Pablo Picasso,
Hockney chose to paint Celia Birtwell (who appears in several of his works) from different views, as if the
eye had scanned her face diagonally.
In December 1985, Hockney was commissioned to draw with the Quantel Paintbox, a computer program
that allowed the artist to sketch directly onto the screen. Using this program was similar to drawing on
the PET film for prints, with which he'd had much experience. The resulting work was featured in a BBC
series profiling a number of artists.
His artwork was used on the front cover of the 1989 British Telecom telephone directory for Bradford.
A Bigger Grand Canyon , 1998, National Gallery of Australia.
His A Bigger Grand Canyon , a series of 60 paintings that combined to produce one enormous picture,
was bought by the National Gallery of Australia for $4.6 million.
On 21 June 2006, his painting of The Splash fetched £2.6 million – a record for a Hockney painting.[10]
In October 2006 the National Portrait Gallery in London organized one of the largest ever displays of
Hockney's portraiture work, including 150 of his paintings, drawings, prints, sketchbooks and
photocollages from over five decades. The collection ranged from his earliest self-portraits to work
completed in 2005.[11] Hockney himself assisted in displaying the works, and the exhibition, which ran until
January 2007, proved to be one of the most successful in the gallery's history.
In June 2007, Hockney's largest painting, Bigger Trees Near Warter , which measures 15x40', was hung
in the Royal Academy's largest gallery in their annual Summer Exhibition.[12] This work "is a monumental-
scale view of a coppice in Hockney's native Yorkshire, between Bridlingtonand York. It was painted on 50
individual canvases, mostly working in situ, over five weeks last winter."[13] In 2008, he donated this work
to theTate Gallery in London, saying: "I thought if I'm going to give something to the Tate I want to give
them something really good. It's going to be here for a while. I don't want to give things I'm not too proud
of...I thought this was a good painting because it's of England...it seems like a good thing to do". [14]
Since 2009, Hockney has painted hundreds of portraits, still lifes and landscapes using
the Brushes iPhone[15] and iPad[16] application, often sending them to his friends.[16] His show Fleurs
fraîches (Fresh Flowers) was held at La Fondation Pierre Bergé in Paris. A Fresh-Flowers exhibit opened
in 2011 at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, featuring over 100 of Hockney's drawings on 25 iPads
and 20 iPods.[17]
The Royal Academy are showing an exhibition of Hockney's work called 'A Bigger Picture' from 21
January 2012 to 9 April 2012. The exhibition includes over 150 works by the artist, many of which take
entire walls in the gallery's brightly lit rooms. A Bigger Picture is dedicated to landscapes and works
include oil paintings and watercolors inspired by Hockney's native Yorkshire. Around 50 drawings were
created on an iPad[18] and then printed on paper for the exhibition.
Many of Hockney's works are now housed in Salts Mill, in Saltaire, near his home town of Bradford.
In the 2001 television programme and book, Secret Knowledge, Hockney posited that the Old
Masters used camera obscura techniques, utilized with a concave mirror, which allowed the image of the
subject to be projected onto the surface of the painting. Hockney argues that this technique migrated
gradually to Italy and most of Europe, and is the reason for the photographic style of painting we see in
the Renaissance and later periods of art.
[edit]Public life
A conscientious objector , Hockney worked as a medical orderly in hospitals as his National Service 1957–
59.[citation needed ]
He was made a Companion of Honour in 1997 and is also a Royal Academician.[citation needed ]
Hockney was offered a knighthood in 1990 but he declined the offer before accepting an Order of Merit in
January 2012.[19][20] He was awarded The Royal Photographic Society's Progress medal in 1988[21] and
Centenary medal in 2003.[22]
Hockney serves on the advisory board of the po litical magazine Standpoint ,[23] and contributed original
sketches for its launch edition, in June 2008.[24]
In October 2010 he and 100 other leading artists signed an open letter to the Secretary of State for
Culture, Media and Sport, Jeremy Hunt protesting against cutbacks in the arts.[26]
[edit]See also
A Walk Around the Hotel Courtyard, Acatlan
2. ^ a b
J. Paul Getty Museum. David Hockney . Retrieved 13 September 2008.
3. ^ "David Hockney A Bigger Picture". Royal Academy of Arts. Retrieved 18 January 2012.
9. ^ Amazon.com: The Blue Guitar: Etchings By David Hockney Who Was I nspired By Wallace Stevens Who
11. ^ Meredith Etherington-Smith (15 August 2006). "A David Hockney Moment". ARTINFO. Retrieved 17 April
2008.
12. ^ Bigger Trees near Warter as seen in the Royal Academy, June 2007
13. ^ Charlotte Higgins, Hockney's big gift to the Tate: a 40ft landscape of Yorkshire's winter trees, The
14. ^ Simon Crerar "David Hockney donates Bigger Trees Near Warter to Tate", The Times, 7 April 2008.
15. ^ Lawrence Weschler, "David Hockney's iPhone Passion, The New York Review of Books, 22 October
2009
16. ^ a b
Gayford, Martin. "David Hockney’s IPad Doodles Resemble High-Tech Stained Glass" Bloomberg, 26
April 2010.
17. ^ Katz, Brigit (21 November 2011). "Freshly pressed". The Varsity . Retrieved 21 November 2011.
18. ^ Stuff-Review, "Why we love tech: David Hockney’s ‘A Bigger Picture’ is contemporary art done on an
iPad"
19. ^ "David Hockney appointed to Order of Merit". BBC Magazine. BBC News. Retrieved 1 January 2012.
20. ^ Appointments to the Order of Merit, 1 January 2012 – the official website of The British Monarchy
21. ^ http://www.rps.org/annual-awards/Progress-Medal
22. ^ http://www.rps.org/annual-awards/Centenary-Medal
23. ^ Standpoint staff (2009). "Standpoint Advisory Board". Social Affairs Unit Magazines.
24. ^ Standpoint staff (2008). "David Hockney – Exclusive sketches for his new Tate masterpiece". Social
25. ^ BBC press office (2009). "Radio 4's Today announces this year's guest editors". BBC.
26. ^ Peter Walker, "Turner prize winners lead protest against arts cutbacks," The Guardian, 1 October 2010.
[edit]External links