Remembering the Creativity and Humor of David Hockney

In 2017 the Getty Museum organized two focused exhibitions to celebrate David Hockney’s 80th birthday, together entitled Happy Birthday, Mr. Hockney.

One gallery showed self-portraits created by the artist over 65 years, from when he was a 17-year-old art student at Bradford School of Art to iPad drawings made in 2012. The second gallery featured a selection of Hockney’s photo collages from the 1980s, including numerous Polaroid composites and his iconic Pearblossom Hwy., 11–18th April 1986, #2.

Hockney passed away on June 11, 2026 at the age of 88. His work was highly influential, from Pop Art in the 1960s to paintings, drawings, and photographs that reflected the sunny leisure of Los Angeles, portraits of friends, and landscapes in his native England. He never stopped making art, consistently embracing new technologies. Here, curators Julian Brooks and Virginia Heckert discuss their memories of working with Hockney a decade ago and reflect on his legacy.

Virginia Heckert: I think it was particularly fun for Julian as a Brit and me as a native Angeleno to work on these intimately scaled installations of this prodigious—and prodigiously charming—artist, who thought of himself as an “English Los Angeleno."

Julian Brooks: Yes, I look back on it all very fondly, and Hockney and his team were a pleasure to work with.

He seemed to have this effortless creativity, often combined with a really playful humor. I remember that when Hockney walked into the exhibition gallery with the decades of self-portraits arrayed on the walls he commented, “It’s like seeing my life flash before me.” The self-portraits demonstrated such a range of techniques, some more traditional—such as pencil and paper—and some wildly innovative ones using the most recent technology, for example, the Xerox machine. These included a 1986 photocopy on two sheets of paper made by photocopying his striped shirt and manipulating and recopying the images. At the time he had installed four photocopy machines in his studio!

VH: Hockney began making photo collages in 1982 that were a novel use of the Polaroid SX-70 camera. While most people used the camera to produce instantaneous prints, he turned the idea of a single “decisive” moment on its head, creating multiple views of a subject that he then assembled into grids.

Jerry Diving, Sunday Feb. 28th 1982 is a perfect example. Rather than capturing his studio assistant Jerry Sohn diving into the pool in a single frame, Hockney extended that dive into seven frames—almost like a stop-action movie—starting with Jerry springing from the diving board on the far right and ending with a splash as he enters the water on the far left. I remember asking Jerry how many times he repeated the dive; he said at least eight times! Watch my interview with Jerry here.

I love that Jerry also commented on the beauty of the individual prints that comprise the composite—drawing my eye to the yellow lawn chair and the corner of Hockney’s home in the Hollywood Hills. As you peruse the 21 prints assembled in a grid of three rows of seven, you can’t help but feel that you are whiling away a leisurely, warm afternoon.

JB: Hockney was always very open and friendly. One of the self-portraits was made on five different canvases, focusing on distinctive parts of his appearance. For a 2006 exhibition he substituted one of them, but when I spoke to him about how he wanted it for the Getty display, he said: “I don’t know why I did that. It looks much better the first way.” So we showed it like that.

VH: Pearblossom Hwy., 11–18th April 1986, #2 is always a crowd-pleaser when on view, which, due to conservation concerns, has been about every ten years: 1998, 2008, and 2017. I was walking across the Getty campus about a week after Hockney died when a colleague asked when it would next be on view. Presenting a photographic work the size of a large painting that is made up of almost 800 Photomat-developed prints takes a lot of planning, but it was something we had already begun to think about a few months ago. I look forward to seeing our visitors stand before Pearblossom Hwy. again, taking in every detail. The time required to look carefully will be a fitting tribute to the extended period of time (eight days!) that it took Hockney to create the collage.

JB: Every time I walked in the gallery I remember being astonished by how big the four iPad self-portraits were. So unforgiving. He said he loved playing with scale, zooming in and out.

He was also famed for his love of smoking. He said to me “Well, everyone’s going to die anyway.” I remember there was a moment when he lit a cigarette on stage in the Getty auditorium.

VH: Yes, it was during a panel discussion moderated by Lawrence Weschler that you can view on YouTube now. When Hockney came onstage about 45 minutes into the program, Weschler set an ash tray on a small table and called out for a security officer to come from behind the scenes—fire extinguisher in hand—in case he was needed. Hockney smiled, began talking, and in a relaxed manner over the course of the next seven or eight minutes reached first into one pocket for a pack of cigarettes, then into the other for a lighter, held the cigarette in his hand, and eventually lit up. No fire extinguisher needed!

JB: He also smoked during the opening reception, sitting by the fountain on the plaza. I remember taking a photograph of the ashtray. It feels particularly poignant now. The world seems a different, lesser, place without him.