‘Hyper-stylised, ultra-cool visions’: 10 ways David Hockney changed art

‘Kaleidoscopic’ … Pearblossom Hwy, from 1986, showing his merging of painting and photography. Photograph: The J Paul Getty Museum/The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA View image in fullscreen ‘Kaleidoscopic’ … Pearblossom Hwy, from 1986, showing his merging of painting and photography. Photograph: The J Paul Getty Museum/The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA ‘Hyper-stylised, ultra-cool visions’: 10 ways David Hockney changed art He pushed landscape painting into the stratosphere, demolished one-point perspective, invented the Los Angeles look, embraced iPads, created dazzling stage sets for theatre and opera … He was the ultimate synthesist David Hockney didn’t just appear out of nowhere like some fully formed artistic wunderkind. His work was a synthesis of so much that came before and was happening around him. He took the ideas of minimalism and abstraction, fused them with the traditions of portraiture, and filtered it all through the innovations in pop and conceptualism that were going on in the 1960s. He was heavily indebted to a lot of other artists, but he synthesised all those influences into something so simple, immediate, digestible and approachable that it became something new. He was a working-class hero Working-class boys from Bradford didn’t go to art school. It just wasn’t the done thing. That was for other people. But Hockney was born to subvert expectations. He told the Guardian in 2015: “When I went to art school, a neighbour said, ‘Some of the people in the art school just don’t work at all. Lazy buggers.’ And I said, ‘Oh I am going to work, don’t worry.’” And he did, incessantly, unstoppably, right to the very end. He changed how we look at perspective Hockney saw traditional perspective – with all lines leading to a single, distant vanishing point – as not just reductive and boring, but totally unrealistic. We don’t world as frozen and static, he thought, our vision is dynamic, constantly shifting. Reverse perspective was his solution: he shifted the vanishing point, putting it behind the viewer, or splitting it off in multiple directions. The result is sometimes dizzying, strange and disconcerting, but much closer to the truth of how we world. He bridged the gap between photography and painting Photography was central to Hockney’s practice for decades. In more recent years, he incorporated photos directly into his paintings, but his best work with the medium was his collages, where he took multiple snaps of the same thing from multiple angles (often with a Polaroid), creating kaleidoscopic visions of the world around him.