Biography
David Hockney was one of the most important British artists of the 20th century, a painter who was at the forefront of the country's Pop Art movement during the 1960s. He worked in many media across his lifetime, encompassing landscapes, portraits and photomontages (which he referred to as 'joiners'). The style and mood of his work often varied as well. Perhaps his most widely acknowledged period, however, came in the late 1960s, when his years spent living in California resulted in works with a brightly colored but deliberately sterile feel, including a series of swimming pool paintings of which "A Bigger Splash" (1967) was the most famous. Born the fourth of five children in Bradford in the north of England, Hockney appeared in 1960's seminal Young Contemporaries exhibition while a student at the Royal College of Art, although his style at the time had as much in common at the time with the work of Francis Bacon as it did his fellow exhibitor and early Pop Artist Peter Blake. From the late 1970s on, Hockney moved into set and costume designs for highly renowned opera producers including Glyndebourne and the Metropolitan Opera in New York; some of these projects were also televised. He participated in several documentary films over his career, including Peter Whitehead's examination of the mid-'60s Swinging London set, "Tonite Let's All Make Love In London" (1967), the biographical "A Bigger Splash" (1973), which details Hockney's life during and after his breakup with long-time partner Peter Schlesinger, and Teller's examination of the nature of genius and obsession, "Tim's Vermeer" (2014).
