David Hockney Tribute

David Hockney, who died last week, was a giant of British art. In this special episode, Alastair and James pay tribute to the late, great artist. Photo Credit: Jean-Pierre Goncalves De Lima Artworks in this episode include: David Hockney, We Two Boys Together Clinging, 1961 David Hockney, The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 David Hockney, Mother, Bradford. 19 Feb 1979, 1979 David Hockney, J-P Gonçalves de Lima, 11th, 12th, 13th July 2013, 2013 David Hockney, The Big Hawthorn, 2008 David Hockney, Winter Timber, 2009 David Hockney, Beverly Hills Housewife, 1966-67 David Hockney, A Bigger Splash, 1967 David Hockney, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, 1970-71 David Hockney, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968 Piero della Francesca, The Baptism of Christ, c.1437-45 David Hockney, My Parents, 1977 David Hockney, My Parents and Myself, 1976 David Hockney, Pearblossom Hwy., 11-18th April 1986 (Second Version), 1986 David Hockney, A Year in Normandie, 2020-2021 David Hockney, Bigger Trees Near Warter, 2007 David Hockney, Delphiniums on My Garden Table, July 2025, 2025 For more great art content visit www.heni.com or visit the Heni Talks YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@HENITalks Hosts: Alastair Sooke and Dr James Fox Additional Research: Catherine Ingram Producer and Editor: Ben Harding Executive Producer: Emma Cahusac Chapters 00:00:00 News of Hockney's Death 00:03:06 An Artist of Joy 00:08:45 A National Treasure and Cultural Icon 00:15:06 California and Double Portraits 00:21:11 Yorkshire Landscapes 00:27:06 How to Look

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01James Fox?

  Welcome to Stories of Art. I'm James Fox.

• 0:04Alastair Sooke?

  And I'm Alistair Sook.

• 0:09James Fox?

  Many of you will have listened to special podcasts before, the ones that go out when a prime minister resigns or a political scandal erupts. Well, this special podcast is prompted by something far more important, the news that David Hockney, world-renowned artist and national treasure, has died at the age of 88. In fact, Alistair, we are right in the middle of recording a new episode, when Alistair's phone pinged with the news and he dashed off to write an obituary for The Telegraph. Now, important to say, this is going to be a different kind of episode for us. Instead of telling a grand narrative, Alistair and I are just going to have a conversation about this remarkable artist,

• 0:48James Fox?

  how we feel about him, and why we think he's important. Alistair, in your career as an art critic, is there any artists you've written about more?

• 0:59Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, the first thing I just want to say is that I think it's just tremendously sad. I don't think it was a surprise. And yes, it was interesting to look back through catalogues that have amassed on my bookshelves when I got home that night, and to look back at cuttings, pieces that I've written over the years. It made me think of that line in the famous T. S. Eliot poem about J. Alfred Prufrock, who measures out his life in coffee spoons. And I feel like, in a way, I've sort of, very modest, small way, measured out my journalistic career in David Hockney's shows, because over the years, there've been so many that I've seen and covered and written about. And I think it's important to say from the outset that, yeah, it was a really dramatic moment for us, genuinely, when the

• 1:44Alastair Sooke?

  news came through, because we were in the middle of recording, as you say, an episode about, it happened to be about Vincent van Gogh.

• 1:49James Fox?

  One of Hockney's heroes.

• 1:50Alastair Sooke?

  One of his heroes. And suddenly, this message flashes up on my phone, saying, "Hockney is dead. Can you ring me, please?", which was quite jolting. And we did thank you, everyone, for being so flexible about it, but we had to pause. And there was a lot to be done to acknowledge, as you say. This kind of great master of British art in my day job as a critic for the for the Telegraph. But yeah, I feel like I was looking back to that show he had at the Royal Academy when I was much, much younger. Can't remember when that was, a bigger picture, landscapes.

• 2:26James Fox?

  Two thousand and twelve.

• 2:26Alastair Sooke?

  Two thousand and twelve. And I was quite sniffy about that show, controversially, which got me a lot of flack at the time.

• 2:32James Fox?

  Right.

• 2:33Alastair Sooke?

  Subsequently revised at least some of those opinions, but more.

• 2:36James Fox?

  One of the best exhibitions I've ever been to.

• 2:38Alastair Sooke?

  There we go.

• 2:39James Fox?

  I I I think I can't think of an exhibition that has given me more pleasure than that great Royal Academy show.

• 2:44Alastair Sooke?

  But I think that's a refrain for a lot of people that they will feel about David Hockney. Can they think of an artist who've given them, who has given them greater pleasure? I mean, possibly Matisse, you know, and I will maybe we'll come on to this. I think there are parallels to be drawn between those two as artists. But that sense of pleasure and joy, those are the things that over the weekend have been coming out time and again in the tributes to David Hockney.

• 3:11James Fox?

  That's the thing about Hockney, isn't it? I mean, so much contemporary art, Alastair, is is off putting. You know, it's about depressing things like climate change and the migrant crisis, or it's about critical theory that go over most people's head. Whereas Hockney's art is is about beauty and hope and joy and a lust for life. It's about happiness, isn't it? I think that was so clear in the, do you remember during the twenty twenty, that first lockdown? And David was in Normandy and he was painting those pictures about spring coming to Normandy. And I don't think those iPad pictures are the greatest things he made, but they meant so much to people at a time when they were felt very starved of hope. And I think that is one of the reasons why Hockney is so, so popular.

• 3:54James Fox?

  It's one of the reasons why his exhibitions are such blockbuster shows. I mean, last year, there was a Hockney exhibition in Paris in the Fondation Louis Vuitton. I don't know if you.

• 4:03Alastair Sooke?

  I reviewed it.

• 4:03James Fox?

  Reviewed it. I think almost a million people went to that exhibition, a million people. In France. You met Hockney, didn't you?

• 4:13Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, I mean, look, again, preface this by saying there are many, many people who were exceptionally close to him, who were around and who have spoken about their recollections of David Hockney over many years. And in that context, mine is extremely small and modest. But I did cross paths with him a couple of times. And once, in some depth, last autumn, where I interviewed him in his studio in Kensington, when he was 88, and he was still 88 when he died, just a few days ago. And it was a really fantastic moment for me, journalistically, to be able to meet such an amazing figure. And there was a tremendous amount of back and forth beforehand of, would this interview happen? You know, because I think his health has been

• 4:58Alastair Sooke?

  quite precarious for some time. And we weren't quite sure what his energy reserves would be like. And I was being told, you know, we'll probably have 40 minutes, but you might just need to be flexible. And if I give you the call and it's time to come over, get ready. And I just almost didn't want to jinx it. So I was sort of not really telling people where I was going that day and had to go to a meeting. But I remember walking down, parking my bike, walking down a road in Kensington. It was the end of a day. The sunlight was sort of setting. And it felt, as I was going, I sort of felt like you kind of know, this is potentially a last major encounter that may not be repeated. And arrived, was taken into the studio. And there he was, in a bright turquoise cardigan, these kind of Coleman

• 5:41Alastair Sooke?

  yellow mustard coloured glasses and a yellow tie, I think. And he was in a wheelchair, a sort of motorised wheelchair. There were people there, his partner JP, there was a nurse, he was sitting in front of a crimson curtain. And I was worried that he would be really too frail to sustain a conversation for a long time. But actually, what I found was that we spoke for, I don't know, it must have been an hour and a half, it could have gone on longer. He said at the start, do you mind if I smoke? He then didn't touch a cigarette until the end of the conversation, which I thought was quite sort of surprising. And we were surrounded on every wall by new work. Because one of the amazing things about him in just the last few months, is that he's just been so prolific for an octogenarian.

• 6:25James Fox?

  He never stopped. I mean, he had a note by his bed that said, get up and work immediately. And that is what he did throughout his life, from start to finish, he just worked obsessively.

• 6:34Alastair Sooke?

  I think that's maybe what some people Understand, intuit from him as a figure that he was a kind of grafter in that sense. And I think as well, that idea of, um, he was very, very versed in our history. He was a very scholarly artist in a way. I mean, he could really hold his own in any discussion. I mean, I wish that we'd been able to talk to him on stories of art and, um, you know, there had been talk that maybe we could get him on. I know he would have been very keen to speak about optical lenses and Vermeer, and that was one of his favourite sort of topics, and we would have done it.

• 7:06James Fox?

  He listened to this podcast, Alistair. He listened to this podcast and we received some pretty detailed feedback on our Holbein series. And we were hoping to bring him on to the show at some point.

• 7:16Alastair Sooke?

  But no, just to finish the point I was going to make is that I, you've alluded to this idea of, um,

• 7:22Alastair Sooke?

  his relationship with, say, modern art.

• 7:24James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 7:24Alastair Sooke?

  And actually, you know, with that Royal Academy show, which was about landscapes in Yorkshire predominantly, although it had a sort of synopsis of his earlier career with some of the famous California pictures and so on in an earlier gallery.

• 7:39Alastair Sooke?

  I think people sense that fundamentally, for all of his use and excitement of technology, because he used fax machines, he made art using photocopiers, he made art using iPhones and iPads. Fundamentally, he's actually quite a traditionalist artist, figurative painter, who relished the world and trying to articulate and express visually things and phenomena that he encountered, including a lot of his close intimates, lovers and friends. And I think that's something that people have always understood about him. People who perhaps have been slightly sceptical about modern art's quote unquote pretentiousness. You know, here was this brilliant Yorkshire, Yorkshireman, Yorkshire artist who was, had feet in both camps.

• 8:22Alastair Sooke?

  He was in the vanguard of modern art, particularly in the earlier phase of his career in first London and then in America. But he also had a foot in the camp that was slightly sceptical of some of the excesses, shall we say, the esoteric excesses of modern art. And I think people really responded to that.

• 8:39James Fox?

  I met him once about 10 or 15 years ago. I can't remember the event, but I remember being starstruck. Because I think for people of our generation, Alistair. And I think for people of our parents' generation, actually, there has always been Hockney, you know, like David Attenborough.

• 8:55Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 8:55James Fox?

  Like the Queen used to be, he is just part of the furniture of British life. And I think he occupies this very unusual place in the cultural landscape. He's both critically acclaimed around the world, but also a national treasure at home, loved even by people who don't like art. And I can't think of many figures in the cultural domain who have that status. I mean, maybe someone like Alan Bennett, who was born actually only a few miles away from from Hockney, but I can't really think of anyone else. It's very special.

• 9:26Alastair Sooke?

  I think you're right to point to the fact that as well as being a wonderful artist, he was an incredible personality and this is part of his great achievement. He was aware of that. His, you know, actually, we spoke about this a little bit in the interview. I had taken along, this is a slightly random thought, but a while ago, David Hockney, I think it was that he gave a lecture in America about Picasso, late Picasso, and this lecture was published as this tiny little book.

• 9:53James Fox?

  Oh, isn't that lovely?

• 9:54Alastair Sooke?

  Which is called David Hockney, sort of Picasso. And weirdly, this copy of this book I found in my now dead grandfather's house and slightly pocketed it without telling any other members of the family. So just be careful with this, James, because it's slightly falling apart, but it's very precious to me.

• 10:08James Fox?

  Let me show that to the camera here.

• 10:10Alastair Sooke?

  Apparently quite rare, this book now, and he signed it for me in purple ink, David H. But the reason I mention it now is because Picasso was one of his great, great artistic heroes.

• 10:21James Fox?

  Yes.

• 10:22Alastair Sooke?

  Picasso was known as an unbelievable stylistic shapeshifter and David Hockney, particularly early in his life, demonstrated stylistic versatility in a way that was clearly a homage to Picasso, whose work he'd encountered at the Tate in, I think, round about 1960 odd. And Picasso had an unbelievable

• 10:41Alastair Sooke?

  Sense of his own persona.

• 10:42James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 10:43Alastair Sooke?

  Particularly after the war. And Hockney took from Picasso, he was conscious of that, that it was important for him to actually play with that persona, if you like. And that's what you had, the kind of guy who was the great campaigner for smoking in the anti-smoking years, always very amusing, a wonderful personality that you could rely on, certainly on radio programmes, TV programmes and so on. And that was another part of the secret of why he was so sort of dear to people, I think.

• 11:11James Fox?

  I mean, the other thing that, that I think makes him very comparable to Picasso is that he was endlessly creatively fertile and constantly, as you say, changing styles. And also excelling across so many different disciplines, painting, drawing, printmaking, stage design, photography, digital art. And the other thing, and I think you've mentioned this already, is this, he completely refused to obey the prevailing styles. You know, when abstraction became fashionable, he did portraits.

• 11:40Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 11:41James Fox?

  You know, when conceptualism became popular, he did landscapes. When many artists embraced pessimism and scepticism, he leaned in to pleasure and joy. I think actually the more I think about him, the more remarkable he becomes.

• 11:57Alastair Sooke?

  I, I, I think we shouldn't make him out to be too much, though, of a sort of reactionary fuddy-duddy, because he was not that. And I'm not saying that you were saying that, but yes, he was in a sense a traditionalist and he had some scepticism of some aspects of modern art. But if you think back to the very beginning of his career, so he, he grows up, working class family in Bradford, fourth of five children, he is gifted at art from the off, he ends up at the Royal College in London, this is post-war, it must have been this hugely exciting transformative moment, post-rationing in Britain. And it's on the cusp of pop art, in his early part of his career, he's associated with that pop moment. But crucially, for me, remember that he was a courageous artist at this point.

• 12:41Alastair Sooke?

  Homosexuality illegal until the late sixties. David Hockney depicting that really explicitly in work he's making in the early sixties, which to some people might be quite surprising, it has a very sort of like De Buffet-esque.

• 12:53James Fox?

  Yes, very expressionistic, isn't it?

• 12:55Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, graffiti-like, almost like it's graffiti in toilets that have been encountered. It's sort of appropriate to the subject matter. And I think as well that there's a slight sense that people have of, you know, Hockney's the great escapist, he's the great kind of giver of pleasure. But the more I've looked at his work over the years, the more I've written about it, almost every time I'm sort of seeing greater complexity, which I think future art historians will really relish teasing out. Because you can often find moments of, well, you mentioned Normandy, depicting loads of, loads of depictions of rain, no sunshine at all, rain, you know, he's not just the painter of good-looking youths kind of jumping in and out of Californian swimming pools. There are pictures of his mother, who he drew on the day of his father's funeral.

• 13:37Alastair Sooke?

  There's a picture of his partner JP with his head in his hands, inspired by, I think, a work by Vincent van Gogh, it's part of the theme of this conversation, but alluding to a very dark, personal moment that had happened in the course of their lives. So you have hints of sort of melancholy complexity. And I saw in that Paris show as well, particularly some of the late works, a sense of almost like otherworldly yearning in these quite intense, spiritually quite intense pictures. You know, when he was in Normandy, he was depicting his garden at night time. There's no sunlight there at all, it's completely different. My favourite pictures in that Royal Academy show, when I look back at it, the one that I had been slightly sniffy about, the more conventional ones.

• 14:15James Fox?

  Classic art critic.

• 14:16Alastair Sooke?

  I know, he did these, he did these enormous surreal, weird pictures of like hawthorn blossom, like cream, like sort of patisserie, eclairs all over the sort of surface of the natural world. And do you remember these stunning pictures of chopped wood?

• 14:31James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 14:31Alastair Sooke?

  Very purple, purple, intense sort of fauvist colours, he's in a woodland, and they feel like they're engaging with mortality, end of life stuff. And this was back in, whenever it was, around about 2010 or whenever, he must have painted them. So I think there are other strands to his work which are important not to forget.

• 14:50James Fox?

  Yeah, let's talk a little bit about the, the obvious strand. Because in many ways, my favourite phase in, in Hockney's career is the sort of heroic phase between the mid 60s and the late 70s. That's when, that's when he paints the famous. Pictures of California, the incredible double portraits as well. Some of which, I mean, took him months, if not a year, to paint. Incredibly meticulous works. You always ridicule me for liking highly finished things.

• 15:19Alastair Sooke?

  Oh, no, I love highly finished.

• 15:21James Fox?

  They are incredible. And these pictures, things like Beverly Hills Housewife.

• 15:24Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 15:24James Fox?

  A bigger splash, of course, is the most famous example. The American collectors, the Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy portrait. Mr. And Mrs. Clark and Percy.

• 15:34Alastair Sooke?

  So, so just on those, that list of pictures, because you've mentioned some of them. There are elements of satire in them, but there's also a sense of real engagement and freedom. He found in Los Angeles, he found an opportunity artistically, because he realised that no one had really properly depicted it visually as an artist. So he said that he was going to be the Piranesi, if you like, of Los Angeles. He relished it because it was a place of sun-drenched liberty, hedonism. You could live a different life there, I guess, compared to London and life back in Britain. You sometimes see, as I say, moments of satire in his depictions of those American collectors. But the great double portraits seem to, seems to me, evolve.

• 16:16Alastair Sooke?

  The interest in foregrounding homosexuality you see in the early work.

• 16:20James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 16:20Alastair Sooke?

  Suddenly it becomes less about sexual intoxication and less explicit, and more about companionship between people. It's sort of, if you like, normalising same-sex relationships, which I think is hugely important for changing a culture's attitudes towards something like that. That's quite a big deal.

• 16:37James Fox?

  Yeah. And those pictures offer me some of the great figurative paintings of the 20th century. I really think that's true. And I think they, they give these people and these places in the 60s and 70s, this beauty and this gravitas that you, that you get from Renaissance frescoes. And in fact, I think if Piero della Francesca.

• 16:54Alastair Sooke?

  Who he loved.

• 16:54James Fox?

  Who he loved. Or Fra Angelico had popped up in Beverly Hills in 1971 and been given a pot of acrylic paint. That's how they would have painted those scenes.

• 17:03Alastair Sooke?

  Is it that, sorry, Toad, but just with Piero della Francesca, there's the baptism, isn't there, in the National Gallery? And there's this figure in the background, I think we've sort of chatted about it, off-mic, as it were, before. But it's a man who seems to be unclothing himself to get ready to be baptized. Ties in a body of water.

• 17:17James Fox?

  Hmm.

• 17:17Alastair Sooke?

  It's Hockney, California, but however many centuries kind of before.

• 17:21James Fox?

  The culmination in many ways of those pictures, which has the Piero della Francesca in it, is the incredible portrait of his parents.

• 17:30Alastair Sooke?

  Oh, yes.

• 17:31James Fox?

  Which is in the Tate, I think it was painted in nineteen seventy seven.

• 17:33Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 17:34James Fox?

  I've always loved Hockney's parents. They were quite strange people, although he came from this very working class community in Bradford. They were Methodists, they were vegetarians, they were pacifists, they were do-gooders. His father was constantly writing to world leaders like, you know, Nikita Khrushchev and the Pope and American presidents to campaign for an end of capital punishment and global poverty. And when David announced at a young age that he wanted to become an artist, they didn't bat an eyelid and they supported him. And there's that wonderful portrait in the late nineteen seventies, which captures the difference of their personalities so incredibly perceptively. The mother, very attentive, looking out at David.

• 18:12Alastair Sooke?

  Very still.

• 18:13James Fox?

  And the father, this busybody.

• 18:15Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 18:15James Fox?

  You know, rifling through the magazine. And of course, it's the Baptism of Christ by Piero della Francesca in the background. What an incredible painting that is.

• 18:23Alastair Sooke?

  I adore the way that his father's feet are not planted wholly on the carpet. So he's almost on tiptoe, sitting on the chair, somehow suggesting that sense of energy and interest and excitement in whatever that, I think it must be an art book that he's flicking through on his lap. I found it fascinating as well. I think it was during around the time of Covid, there was a show at the National Portrait Gallery, which went through Hockney's portraits of many close people. And it contains a version, I think I'm right in saying, of this painting, which was an earlier one, where instead of the reproduction of the baptism in the mirror, it's Hockney himself.

• 19:00James Fox?

  I know.

• 19:01Alastair Sooke?

  So it contained a self portrait.

• 19:02James Fox?

  A wish between his two parents.

• 19:03Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, who he's then turned into Christ.

• 19:06James Fox?

  I know, but he never completed that one. He wasn't happy with it. But it's extraordinary, the unfinished canvas there. So, I mean, that period, the heroic period, as I say, of the sixties into the seventies is incredible. And then he moves into the eighties. I don't like the work quite as much in the eighties, but it's a period of astonishing experimentation, because this is the period in the eighties where he's. Starts making those joiners, those photographic collages, you know, Pearl Blossom Highway being the most famous one.

• 19:31Alastair Sooke?

  So I, I, I mean, look, it, it seems a strange moment to talk about this, but i- if I'm honest, I've noticed over the years that particularly amongst those who are closest to Hockney, um, you know, tending the flame, there's been a, an idea put about, which is correct, that he's extremely experimental with different mediums. Personally, I find that a little bit of a red herring about what makes him great as an artist. I'm not that interested in whether or not he was using a photocopier or a fax machine. And, and I find the Polaroid works, which are meant to be his take on Cubism, where you see a single subject, many different images taken of that subject, and then those pictures are placed together, you have a sort of like slightly fractured. I personally don't find that his greatest work, but

• 20:17Alastair Sooke?

  there are other works from the eighties that I love, and he's starting to kind of create these enormous long scrolling, you know, he's very influenced by non-Western art, I think about Chinese painting. These kind of big landscapes in America, which subsequently he then paints all these big similar landscapes in, in Yorkshire. And then eventually when he settles for a while in Normandy, much more recently, more big landscapes, you can go to the Serpentine Gallery at the moment and see all the way around, like a sort of version of the Biotapestry, which was a great reference point for him. His gardens in Normandy as they change over the course of a year. And actually it's even more poignant, because when I reviewed that show, it just felt that it's not just imagery of gardens changing over time. Clearly it was like a sort of Age of Man, you know, it began in winter,

• 20:57Alastair Sooke?

  it went through spring, summer, and then it had these moments of complexity with chopped wood into autumn and then suddenly ending in winter again. And it feels like in light of um, recent news, that's, that's where we've sort of ended up.

• 21:11James Fox?

  The other, the other period of his career that I'm so fond of is much later in his career, in the two thousands, when he starts having conquered the American art world, having painted America in the most iconic way, having. Done incredible stage designs, having done incredible things for portraiture. He turns to the British landscape tradition and he makes these phenomenal, phenomenal paintings, inspired by people like Constable and Turner and Nash and those kinds of figures. There's that one painting called Bigger Trees Near Warter.

• 21:42Alastair Sooke?

  Well, it's pretty big.

• 21:43James Fox?

  Which is 2007, which is 50 canvases, 12 metres wide, absolutely stunning.

• 21:49Alastair Sooke?

  One of my favourites there, we've sort of touched on it, but it's maybe worth describing is, you're in this woodland, the trees in the background are bare, it's winter, they're all bright blue. And in the foreground you have these felled pieces of timber, which are orange, which are placed on this kind of zigzaggy, very energetic, purple undergrowth. And those yellowy timbers are taking you through a path down to the end in the distance on the horizon where there's this kind of blue vortex, the trees have become a vortex going to another dimension. And on the right of the picture, you have this big tree stump that's bright purple and always looks to me like a really grumpy person face. And I just think this is, this for me would be in my top 10 Hockney pictures.

• 22:31James Fox?

  One of the things that we art historians love about Hockney, and you've mentioned this already, is that he is the quintessentially art historical artist. He really is. I mean, he knew more about the history of art than almost any other artist. And he was always engaged in a conversation with the history of art, whether it was Western art or whether it was non-Western art. Hockney ultimately, he wasn't really interested in ideas, was he? He was interested in pictures. He was interested in how other picture makers saw the world and represented the world.

• 23:04Alastair Sooke?

  Do you not think though, that's ideas in a sense? Because I feel like he was very interested in, he recognised, his big thing was that there's no difference between figurative art and abstract art, because all art involves mark making of some description and that is itself an abstraction when you're trying to express what's before you or an emotion or whatever it is. So in a sense, I saw him as very ideas driven in that sense.

• 23:28James Fox?

  I don't know, I think that he was so rooted in the idea of what it means to make an image. I mean, that is an inherently cognitive process. The process of having to translate a three dimensional world

• 23:40Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 23:40James Fox?

  onto a two dimensional surface, I mean, is is a involves an enormous cognitive and conceptual leap. And that is ultimately what he was rooting so much of his practice in. One of the things that I find so inspiring about Hockney is that he wasn't just a great artist. He was also an incredible commentator on the history of art.

• 24:00Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 24:00James Fox?

  He was incredibly incisive and insightful writer about the history of art. There was a book, there's a book that he did with Martin Gayford, I think, called A History of Pictures. Probably ten fifteen years ago it was published. I think of all my many art books, and I have a lot of art, not so many as you, but I have a lot of art books. That is the one I go back to again and again and again, because every page contains this remarkable insight into the history of art.

• 24:27Alastair Sooke?

  Do you do you think, I mean, just how would if we were to analyse that further, is it that he's presenting ideas with a kind of there's a lucidity perhaps, I don't know, how would you describe, what's the secret of his success as an art commentator?

• 24:40James Fox?

  I think it's it's it's a picture maker, a mark maker, reflecting on the history of art.

• 24:45Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 24:46James Fox?

  As someone who actually does it himself. There's a wonderful line in A History of Pictures, which I have bored my students with for years and years and years. Every time a student, and this happens quite a lot in history of art, every time a student writes an essay that sort of implies that the Renaissance is an improvement on the Middle Ages. I always write the line from Hockney, which says, art doesn't progress.

• 25:09Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 25:10James Fox?

  Because it doesn't progress, art doesn't get better. Art is no better now than it was when people were making paintings in caves. It just changes. And I think sometimes you need a picture maker, a mark maker, an image maker to make that point. And of course, the book that he's perhaps most famous for, perhaps most infamous for, is a book called Secret Knowledge. Remarkable book, which makes this extraordinary claim that artists really from as early as the 1430s back to Van Eyck were making use of lenses and mirrors and camera obscurers to represent the world and that this in turn underpinned the great explosion of naturalism

• 25:53James Fox?

  that we see during the Renaissance. This is just the most stunning intervention into our discipline. It was like someone throwing a hand grenade into the discipline of history of art. And it's very close to my heart because that book was published, Alastair, the same week that I started my undergraduate degree as an art historian in October 2001. And I remember this is all the lecturers were talking about. And of course, there've been criticisms of that book, but the idea that an artist could make such a major intervention into an academic discipline, I can't think of any other artist that would ever do that.

• 26:26Alastair Sooke?

  Well, we mentioned that he did send us a voice note, didn't he?

• 26:30James Fox?

  He did.

• 26:30Alastair Sooke?

  In which David had responded to one of our earlier episodes about Hans Holbein, the younger. And much of that response, which was just utterly magic to receive, I have to say. Wasn't it thrilling?

• 26:41James Fox?

  Oh.

• 26:42Alastair Sooke?

  But much of it was about the fact that we possibly had missed a trick by not addressing whether Holbein was using lenses in that fashion.

• 26:50James Fox?

  And we promised him that in a later episode, we are going to be doing an episode on Jan van Eyck later on this year, that we would address it. And in his honour, we will, won't we?

• 26:57Alastair Sooke?

  I think we absolutely must.

• 26:59James Fox?

  You know, we're talking about lenses and camera obscurers and things like that. I think looking is so important to Hockney. You know, one of his defining attributes are those little spectacles, those round spectacles that he wore throughout his life. And that is very, very fitting, because if Hockney teaches us anything, he teaches us how to look. And that is ultimately ours. That's what an artist has to do. Artists are supposed to look at the world more carefully, more closely than the rest of us, to see things that we don't see, and by making their images to make us see the world differently. And that is what Hockney did throughout his life.

• 27:32Alastair Sooke?

  I think one of the defining things, which is sort of building on that thought, that idea is that it's now quite hard to look at certain things and not in your mind actually see a Hockney.

• 27:40James Fox?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:40Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, he sort of like colonized aspects of the world, whether that's reflections on water, a swimming pool on a holiday, whatever it might be. I think that's a real sign of. Someone who's truly a genius, who can cut through and communicate in that way.

• 27:54James Fox?

  Yeah, I mean, I can't look at sprinklers on a lawn.

• 27:57Alastair Sooke?

  No.

• 27:58James Fox?

  Thinking of Hockney, some of his finest works, actually the sprinkler pieces. But it's that idea of noticing in banal, everyday things that no one else notices or admires. To find something heroic and magical and stunningly beautiful.

• 28:13Alastair Sooke?

  And actually, funnily, that's something which he was, in some quarters, kind of criticised for. Because in a way, there was this other idea, conception of Hockney myth about him, that he was the great sort of mindless hedonist, you know, depicting pleasure, nothing but pleasure. And that it was somehow a bit simplistic and carefree, not engaging with the darker complexities of the world. I mean, I was trying to suggest earlier that actually, although he does clearly depict pleasure. First of all, he depicts other things and it's more complex. And secondly, that's no bad thing necessarily. I mean, I was really struck when I saw him in his studio, very much towards the end of his life.

• 28:55Alastair Sooke?

  How much I was reminded of Henri Matisse, who had an operation for abdominal cancer. Everyone thought that he would die, had another sort of whatever it was, thirteen, well, more than a decade to live afterwards. And produced these extraordinary new works of art, the paper cutouts, which are full of joy and exuberance. And there on the walls in Hockney's studio, there was this particular still life of Delphiniums, these flowers, this great spray of flowers in this kind of jade green vase on a table, surrounded by empty chairs. We've just been talking about empty chairs in an episode on Vincent van Gogh. And I felt like it was itself, there's a good example of complexity. This was an image that combined the sense of energy and joy and high colour, almost ferociously high colour, of Matisse.

• 29:38Alastair Sooke?

  With, which you might just think was just flowers on a table, it's just a still life. But with a sense of, it's being painted at the end of an artist's life. Do these empty chairs actually stand perhaps for people who've left his life, who are no longer here? I would argue probably yes. And I think that over time, and actually, if we hopefully soon will be able to do a proper in-depth series about David Hockney, can maybe sort of. Tease out some of those bigger thoughts and ideas.

• 30:02James Fox?

  One of the other things I love about about Hockney is that though he was immensely wealthy, immensely internationally famous, he was always quite matter of fact, wasn't he? He never lost his Yorkshire accent. He never changed his way for anyone. In fact, there are some photos of relatively recent years when he went to see the King in his Crocs.

• 30:21Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 30:22James Fox?

  And I just love that. I love that sense. And you know, like many of the great British artists, Alastair, like Francis Bacon, like Lucian Freud, like Henry Moore, like L S Lowry, David Hockney turned down a knighthood.

• 30:35Alastair Sooke?

  I think that, and this is something that we have discussed before, something that just gets to the heart of him. You're talking about that personality and how infectious that was. There's a really early documentary of various pop artists by Ken Russell, isn't there, called Pop Goes the Easel, a wonderful BBC documentary. And there's footage in it where Hockney was not one of the featured artists, but he does make a cameo and there's a party towards the end. And I love it because you've got all of these, these sort of quite diligent hipster types who are sort of doing the twist in the party. And then suddenly, like this eruption, this kind of force of energy, in, from memory, quite pale clothes and pale hair, David Hockney comes pogoing in. He's like this sort of tigerish figure, just dominates. It's just charisma coming straight through the screen.

• 31:18James Fox?

  He has pogoed through the whole last 60 years though, hasn't he?

• 31:20Alastair Sooke?

  He has, through British art.

• 31:22James Fox?

  Through British art and British life. I want to say one final thing about Hockney. This podcast is going out in the midst of a four part series that we are doing on the life of Michelangelo, who I famously consider to be perhaps the greatest artist of them all. Did you know that Michelangelo died a month before his 89th birthday? And David Hockney died a month before his 89th birthday.

• 31:47Alastair Sooke?

  You just need a third artist and then you have a feature in a newspaper.

• 31:50James Fox?

  Well, Lucian Freud died aged 88 as well.

• 31:52Alastair Sooke?

  Bang, there we go.

• 31:52James Fox?

  There you go. That's your next piece. But you know, I think they're also very comparable figures. Both of them, very long careers, very celebrated in their own times, excelling across lots of different disciplines. And I know that art critics like you, Alastair, have to make your assessments right now of the current status of an artist. But art Art historians like me always get the last say. We do get the last say, and I wouldn't be surprised if in a couple of hundred years, if the world hasn't already burnt to a crisp, whether art historians of the future will be speaking about Hockney in the same breath as they do Michelangelo.

• 32:27Alastair Sooke?

  They'll definitely still be talking about him. I think Hockney had a slightly better fashion sense than Michelangelo is one thing, and that's the important part, not to be sniffed at, a big part of his persona. But yeah, it's an interesting parallel to end on.

• 32:38James Fox?

  Well, it's been lovely, Alastair, to talk to you about David Hockney, and we will do a big Hockney series at some point soon.

• 32:44Alastair Sooke?

  I look forward to it very much.

• 32:45James Fox?

  Goodbye.

• 32:46Alastair Sooke?

  Goodbye.

• 32:54James Fox?

  If you've enjoyed this episode, please do follow Stories of Art wherever you get your podcasts and maybe even leave a review.