This morning, word came that we’d lost one of the world’s greatest artists, David Hockney, a painter whose clear vision and hypervivid colors—coral, green, cerulean, fiery orange—made life a little bit more beautiful. He was a Yorkshire boy who fell in love with America and settled in Los Angeles—there’s an argument to be made that he became the all-time great painter of that city. He lived in splendor high up above Nichols Canyon, in the ranch house he bought in 1981, off Mulholland Drive. That legendary street wound its way through his landscapes, the Santa Monica Mountains biblical in their scale, the sky enormous, the vegetation of the Hollywood Hills spilling out over the canvas.
As Mark Rozzo’s obituary for Vanity Fair states, Hockney’s death is “the most impactful passing of an artist since Warhol’s in 1987.” While driving my daughter to school today, I listened to WNYC devote an entire block of programming to Hockney. I turned the volume up.
Before heading to the office, I grabbed my copy of True to Life, Lawrence Weschler’s book-length study of Hockney based on 25 years of interviews and conversations. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
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NATE FREEMAN,
CORRESPONDENT, ARTS & CULTURE
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David Hockney is one of the few artists—along with Picasso, Dalí, Warhol, and Kahlo—who could be said to be iconic in the real, literal sense: instantly recognizable, indelibly familiar, culturally omnipresent.
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