Hockney at 80: The Met Pays Tribute to a Visionary Gay Artist

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will honor artist David Hockney on his 80th birthday with a retrospective kicking off November 27th.

The exhibition features some of the artist’s most memorable masterpieces created from 1960 through the present day. Hockney was born in Britain (West Yorkshire) and attended both the Bradford School of Arts and Royal College of Art in London. The artist had his first one-man show in 1963 and went on to worked in a wide range of media — including painting, drawing, photography and video. He is openly gay and has explored same-sex attractions in works such as We Two Boys Together Clinging and Domestic Scene, Los Angeles. Among Hockney’s honors are a Foreign Honorary Membership to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lorenzo de’Medici Lifetime Career Award (for the Florence Bienniale in Italy in 2003. He was also offered a knighthood in 1990, which he declined, though he accepted an Order of Merit in 2012). Today, many of Hockney’s works are usually kept in Salt Mill near his home in Bradford. Noted writer Christopher Isherwood collected a significant number of Hockney’s pieces, and after Isherwood’s death, those works were donated to galleries around the world. Many will be reunited at The Met’s exhibition, which will run through February 25. metmuseum.org