No Southwest Florida museum has any of David Hockney’s artworks in its permanent collection. They are very expensive. His painting “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” sold at Christie’s New York in 2018 for $90 million, a record for a living artist. But one of his photographic drawings is on loan to the Sarasota Art Museum as part of the “Something Borrowed, Something New” exhibition.
Hockney was famous for painting what he loved. Said Sarasota Art Museum’s Associate Curator of Exhibitions Lacie Barbour, “His unapologetic depictions of friends, lovers, swimming pools, and country roads normalized forms of joy and intimacy that had once occupied the margins of society and art history.”
Hockney was part of one such marginalized community.
Dianne Bras-Feliciano, the curator of modern art at the Baker Museum, noted that early in his career, Hockney “became a trailblazing queer artist at a time when being gay was criminalized.”
Hockney remained an active force in art circles throughout his seven-decade career.
MORE INFORMATION:
Sarasota Art Museum Associate Curator of Exhibitions Lacie Barbour called Hockney (English, 1937-2026) one of the defining artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.
“David Hockney’s impact has profoundly shaped the course of contemporary art,” she said in an email. “A leading figure of the pop art movement, Hockney’s prolific output over his seven-decade career encompassed painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, and collage, demonstrating his limitless curiosity and passion for portraying everyday life. Instantly recognizable, his mastery of color and inventive perspectives draw viewers into monumental yet tender portraits and lush landscapes.”
Hockney, Barbour added, embraced emerging technologies over the course of his seven-decade career “from early experiments with fax machines, photocopiers, and Polaroid cameras, to iPad paintings and immersive digital installations” — all in aid of his drive to repeatedly reinvent his visual lexicon across various media.
The work currently on view at Sarasota Art Museum is “Inside It Opens Up As Well.” States the gallery label accompanying the work, ““Exploring the nature of perception and visual representation while rejecting linear perspective, Hockney has questioned how space, time, and movement can be rendered in two dimensions. Using photography to construct ‘impossible’ visual spaces, Hockney developed composite images built from multiple vantage points, reflecting the shifting nature of human vision. By the 2010s, Hockney advanced his approach through photomontage, which he refers to as ‘photographic drawings,’ merging hundreds of images using photogrammetric software.”
“Inside It Opens Up As Well” exemplifies this approach.
“A panoramic view of the artist’s Los Angeles studio, the work combines multiple ‘photographic drawings’ capturing multiple perspectives,” the gallery label states. “Digitally manipulated color, light, and shadow disrupt conventional realism, producing an image that is both hyperreal and subtly disorienting. Within the scene are 12 of Hockney’s famous hexagonal paintings (2017). Hockney also appears with arms outstretched, gazing into a painting inscribed, ‘outside it opens up – perspective is tunnel vision,’ a statement that encapsulates his lifelong pursuit of alternative ways of seeing.”
“Hockney leaves behind a lasting legacy, known for his deep investigation and dedication to painting and a constant exploration of its possibilities,” Barbour added.
For more on “Something Borrowed, Something New,” hear/read “'Something Borrowed, Something New' at Sarasota Art Museum features 85 works from 10 private collections.”
Baker Museum connection
Although not lucky enough to have been gifted a Hockney painting or other artwork, the Baker Museum in Naples did have occasion to exhibit his four-panel lithograph “Caribbean Tea Time” during its 2023-24 exhibition “The Art of Food.”
Featuring more than 100 works in a variety of media from the renowned collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his family foundation, “The Art of Food” showcased some of the most prominent artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Hockney earned his place within the pantheon of the past century’s most important artists, said Bras-Feliciano, by helping redefine what painting could be for more than six decades. One of painting’s most passionate defenders, he returned throughout his career to portraiture, she said, painting friends, loved ones, and his companion animals.
“He knew the importance of companion animals as family members,” Bras-Feliciano said.
His swimming pool paintings
Hockney was formally trained as a painter at the Bradford School of Art. By his early 20s, he was making professional sales and starring in major exhibitions.
He came out when he was 23 years old — seven years before homosexuality was decriminalized in the U.K.
A few years later, Hockney emigrated to California, where he inspired pop culture throughout the 1960s and ‘70s.
Many of Hockney’s best-known paintings feature Los Angeles swimming pools. The New York Times described him as “the quintessential artist of Southern California’s nouveau riche leisure life.”
Hockney’s landscape, “Nichols Canyon,” depicting the route leading from his Hollywood Hills home on Montcalm Avenue to his studio on Santa Monica Boulevard, became Hockney’s fourth most expensive painting in 2020 when it sold for $41.07 million.
Self-effacing, he once described his paintings as “homosexual propaganda” because his early works openly depicted domestic gay life at a time when few other artists dared to do so. Of his five most expensive works, the top three are portraits of gay men.
One of those is "Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott," considered by some to be the most important work in his famous double portraits series. It sold at Christie’s in 2019 for $49.52 million.
The other is "Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy," the first of his double portrait series. It sold at Christie's in 2025 for $44.34 million.
Hockney died one week shy of his 89th birthday. Active throughout his seven-decade career, his death came less than a year after the close of a major retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
