By the point 600 drones redrew A Larger Splash and Portrait of an Artist over the evening sky in Bradford this 12 months, David Hockney felt much less like a painter and extra like shared muscle reminiscence. We acknowledge him earlier than we identify him. The peroxide fringe that began with a Clairol advert within the sixties. The spherical, black glasses that turned his face right into a type of emblem. The cardigans that seldom match the shirt, the ties that ignore concord.
Most of us met him first by photos fairly than biography. Pool work printed on pupil posters. Double portraits on museum tote luggage. Later, the record-breaking Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), the Tate retrospective that clogged Instagram feeds, the iPad drawings from Yorkshire which have now offered for thousands and thousands and fed into this 12 months’s Fondation Louis Vuitton survey. All through all of it, his garments remained in keeping with the work. Early studio footage present a thin child in stripes in a cramped London print store. In California, he slips into rumpled fits, goofy ties and sweater vests, at all times just a little off-key in essentially the most exact means.
Vogue has been mirroring him again for many years. Burberry constructed collections on his palette. He sits in Vainness Honest’s Worldwide Finest Dressed Corridor of Fame not as a sophisticated mascot, however as proof that consistency can turn out to be its personal type of glamour. The purpose isn’t polish, however a lifelong dedication to seeing shade correctly, then sporting it as plainly as attainable.
