Description
The authorized life of Britain’s most beloved living painter. Christopher Simon Sykes — who knew David Hockney for decades — was given unprecedented access for this biography, and the second volume (1975–2012) covers the richest years: the double portraits, the stage designs, the move to California light, the Yorkshire homecoming, the iPad experiments of a restless innovator in his seventies.
Hockney emerges as he is: charming, chain-smoking, endlessly curious, loyal to his Yorkshire roots and his circle of friends. Sykes writes with the ease of an insider and the discipline of a biographer, and the parade of cameos — from Hollywood to the Royal Academy — never stops. The art gets the serious attention it deserves.
The definitive Hockney, by the man best placed to write it. Art lovers will devour it; even if you only know the swimming pools, you will finish understanding the restless genius behind them. Warm, vivid, and definitive.
Fame was only the beginning. Picking up David Hockney’s story in 1975, the second volume of Christopher Simon Sykes’s definitive biography — subtitled A Pilgrim’s Progress — finds the artist traveling between Notting Hill and California, reinventing himself again and again.
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nFrom the swimming-pool paintings that made him an icon, Hockney plunged into photography, stage design, and restless experimentation: the Polaroid collages, the grand opera sets, the return to Yorkshire’s wolds, and the embrace of the iPad as a drawing tool in his seventies. Through it all, Sykes shows an artist who refused to repeat himself, chasing new ways of seeing with undiminished curiosity.
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nDrawing on the same exclusive access to Hockney’s archives and papers that distinguished the first volume, this fascinating and entertaining sequel captures the triumphs, controversies, and private passions of a modern master at the height of his powers — and beyond.
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nFor readers who devoured A Rake’s Progress, A Pilgrim’s Progress completes the portrait: the pilgrim still journeying, still looking, still teaching us how to see.
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