David Hockney: Drawing from Life review at National Portrait Gallery

Exhibition showcases recent portraits of friends and visitors to Hockney's Normandy home

Celia, Carennac, August 1971 by David Hockney
Celia, Carennac, August 1971: Hockney’s 'imperial phase'
(Image credit: Richard Schmidt/The David Hockney Foundation)

David Hockney is "justifiably proud of his drawing skills", said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Like most artists of his generation, he underwent "years of enforced practice" drawing nude models, a discipline which "left him with a confidence and fluency in capturing immediate reality with pencil, pen or brush that today's young artists can only dream about". 

This exhibition of his drawings originally opened at the National Portrait Gallery in early 2020, but was forced to close after just 20 days owing to the pandemic. Following the gallery's three-year refurbishment, it has now reopened, bolstered with 30 new portraits realised since the end of lockdown. Featuring everything from his very earliest 1950s self-portraits to pictures created on his iPad, it charts Hockney's innovations and experiments in the form, focusing principally on five sitters: the fashion designer Celia Birtwell; Gregory Evans, his friend and sometime lover; the master printmaker Maurice Payne; his mother, Laura; and the artist himself. The show "provides the perfect opportunity to assess whether Britain's favourite artist has lived up to his formidable gifts as a draughtsman". 

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