David Hockney - Moving Focus

by Helen Little

Overview

Curator Helen Little’s David Hockney: Moving Focus is a unique overview of the artist’s prolific range and activity.

David Hockney has been delighting and challenging audiences for 60 years, and celebrated artworks from across his career are at the center of Tate’s outstanding collection. This book features over 100 of these paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs, helping the reader to understand the artist’s changing sources of inspiration and, crucially, where his work is going.

Beginning in the 1950s, when he made his first steps to becoming a modern artist, the publication charts Hockney’s groundbreaking images of the early 1960s through to his famous depictions of the Los Angeles cityscape. It also looks at Hockney’s much-loved portraits from the 1970s and his discovery of a new way of dealing with time, space, and perspective he called “moving focus,” as well as more recent landscapes and digital images that demonstrate his lifelong preoccupation with pictorial space and how we look at and experience the world around us.

As well as providing a unique overview of Hockney’s prolific range and activity, this book features new texts and responses to his work by established and emerging voices from the worlds of art, design, literature, and performance. Breathing new life into the nexus of Tate’s collection, David Hockney: Moving Focus speaks to the artist’s refusal to conform during periods of uncertainty and polarization as he traversed the boundaries of class, sexuality, and high art, and how his work still surprises, unsettles, and addresses younger generations of viewers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781849767729
Publisher:	Tate Publishing & Enterprises, L.L.C.
Publication date:	01/11/2022
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	10.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

Helen Little is an independent curator and researcher with a special interest in 20th-century and contemporary British art, architecture, and design. She was previously assistant curator of modern and contemporary British art at Tate Britain, where she specialized in British art from 1945 and realized major exhibitions and displays from this period.

Table of Contents

Foreword 11

The Road to the Studio: David Hockney and the Tate Helen Little 13

David Hockney and Queer History in the 1960s Gregory Salter 27

The Past was Another Country David Oxtoby 38

A 6 Looking for His 9 Russell Tovey 42

The Third Love Painting Eddie Peake 46

Subject and Object Allen Jones 54

A Cat Can Look at a king, in the American Style Jann Haworth 58

Weshall Overcome Owen Jones 64

From London to La Ed Ruscha 76

Physique Pictorial Walter Pfeiffer 80

Man in Shower in Beverly Hills Christina Quarles 84

A Bigger Splash Frank Gehry 92

Thoughts from the Dull Village Andrew McMillan 96

A Boy's Dream Marieke Lucas Rijneveld 104

Playing and Listening Wayne Sleep 132

Every Picture Tells a Story Richard Morphet 136

Moving Focus David Hockney 140

The Artist's Mother Catherine Cusset 172

Alondon Audience Bruno Ravella 178

The Wave Christine Streuli 188

A Bigger Trees Ali Smith 196

In the Studio Rineke Dijkstra 200

Chronology 208

Notes 214

List of works 216

Index 220