Image: © David Hockney, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) 1972
Summer term 2023: 18 April 2023 – 23 May 2023 (6 weeks)
Members: £50. Non-members: £60
Concessions: £10 (call the office 020 8340 3343)
(Six-week short course)
This course about David Hockney takes a personal perspective on his life and work, as experienced by Peter Webb, who wrote a biography ‘Portrait of David Hockney’.
I first met David Hockney in the Autumn of 1969. I was in my first job after Cambridge University, teaching Art History at Coventry College of Art. I had seen Hockney’s first exhibition after the Royal College at the Kasmin Gallery in Bond Street and I had then followed his career with great interest. I wrote to him inviting him to give a lecture on his work. He spoke brilliantly for well over an hour to a packed audience of students until the caretaker arrived to end proceedings. I kept in touch with him when I moved to Hornsey College of Art in London and often watched him at work on a painting or attended his tea parties. He made an original etching for the Collectors’ Edition of my book ‘The Erotic Arts’ of 1975, and later drew my portrait. In 1989 he agreed to my publishing the first book on his life and work.
The course will be illustrated with slides, and student interaction is encouraged.
- Early life and education: Royal College of Art 1960-63: Pop Art
- First visits to America: New York 1961: “Rake’s Progress” and California 1964: swimming pools
- Move to America: Californian landscapes; double-portraits: “Mr & Mrs Clark & Percy” 1971; photography 1970s-90s: Polaroids and Joiners
- Stage designs: Stravinsky, Puccini, Mozart, Wagner etc 1980s and 1990s
- Yorkshire landscapes, 1998-2007; new technology, from 2010
- Normandy and new technology, from 2019
