Part 1. The 1980s: A Life in Pictures
Hockney Reproduction
A Journey in Friendship Bonded in Art
Manship Artists Residency
Gloucester Massachusetts
September 11 – October 18, 2026
Hockney Reproduction is an exhibition opening in September at Manship Artists Residency. It has been decades in the making. This is the first in a series of essays by Bing McGilvray to be published here in the coming months on the artwork of David Hockney. Bing will elaborate on how each piece in the show represents a different phase in Hockney’s oeuvre. He will also discuss his long friendship with the renowned artist, which continues to this day.
David Hockney by David Hockney, 1976.
Book cover images are reproduced for reference; rights belong to respective owners. Unless otherwise noted, all artwork © David Hockney.
March 17, 2026
By Bing McGilvray
Reproduction has been a vital part of David Hockney’s artistic output from the beginning. He first saw paintings not in museums but as reproductions hanging on the walls and in books, not necessarily in color. Color reproduction in books was not common. But when he did see a picture in color, he understood that the higher the quality, hi-res as we say today, the greater the graphic impact.
David Hockney turns 89 this year. He has enjoyed an extraordinary life, not only as a painter but as an author, art historian, photographer, printer, set designer, and scholar. Drawing and painting were tantamount, first priority, but David’s underlying interest has always been pictures themselves. In addition to creating memorable masterpieces he has researched everything about images, their primal power, beauty, mystery, how they are made, and the ever-changing trends and technologies that advanced their impact and ubiquity. Isn’t every picture a reproduction? A portrait, a still life, a landscape, even an abstraction? It is an inexhaustible topic to explore. In fact, reproduction is how we all got here. That is as essential as it gets.
Admirer looking at Pacific Surf. 40-page fax, measuring 101 x 336 inches. Sent in 1990 to Salts Mill in Bradford, England, Hockney’s childhood hometown.
CONCEPTION
Early in 2025, Rebecca Reynolds, director of Manship Artists Residency, and I were having a chat about what kind of show I might like to have as a Manship Artist. Long ago, in my rebellious youth, I was a cartoonist but now my work is primarily digital, made on and for the screen, not for exhibition. However, I did have a large collection of posters, prints and other items that would make a great show all created by my old friend David Hockney. At that instant, HOCKNEY REPRODUCTION was conceived. We were extremely excited.
Then the work began. Last June I took up residence at Manship to go through all the work I have saved: dozens of posters, prints, shelves of books and catalogues, fax collages, photos, newspapers, and magazines, and lots of ephemera. Our project was in its incubation period, and I began to visualize how the exhibition would look.
During frequent FaceTimes with David, I explained my ambitious plans. He was only curious at first but soon came around to sharing the excitement we felt.
In concept, HOCKNEY REPRODUCTION is an exhibition any museum would love to do. Room after room could be filled exploring this theme. Perhaps in time that will happen. I would be first in line to see it. But Manship is not The Met. This exhibition will be a personal journey, primarily illustrated by my own extensive archives. During the six-week run, Manship will offer a robust schedule of speakers, panel discussions, movies, and interactive events. We will put on a show that, although small in scale, will be vast in scope.
IN THE BEGINING
Let us go back to how I met David. In 1978, I had recently moved to Los Angeles to work at the headquarters of a record store chain that soon after went bankrupt. I was broke and unemployed, but I loved the city so much I decided to stay. One day I wandered into a West Hollywood bookstore and saw a large stack of books, Hockney by Hockney. It was a revelation to me. This guy could draw! The paintings were vibrantly colorful! Immediately I felt a visceral connection. This was the reason I went to art school, I thought. With my BFA from UMass Amherst, why had I never heard of him? And he lived right here in LA! I bought the book. Canned soup and ramen noodles could sustain me. This was more important than food. Then I set out to meet the artist. You might say I stalked him—sending letters to his gallery and, after locating his studio, slipping them under the door. Curiosity got the best of him and eventually he called and invited me to visit.
As it turned out, David’s studio was a short walk from my tiny apartment. The studio was essentially a converted garage. Outside, it was indistinct from the other one-story structures in a funky section of Hollywood. Inside, pure magic. David was much more boyish than he appeared on the book cover. Over a cup of tea, we talked about art, but he kept looking over my shoulder at his newest painting pinned on the wall, a dazzling and enormous 7’ x 20’ street scene, Santa Monica Blvd. He suddenly leapt up and instructed his assistant Jerry to cover the entire work with a new canvas of the same dimensions. Then, with a piece of charcoal, he made a wavy line from one end to the other.
“Do you know what that is?” he asked.
“Uh, no.”
“That’s Mulholland Drive.”
So it became. The epic painting is now owned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
On my way home, I knew my life had changed forever. What I did not know was—so had David’s. After drawing that line, his work was never quite the same again. That one long, wiggly wave marked a seismic shift in how David viewed the world and opened a multitude of new ways of depicting it. Having just moved to a new home atop the Hollywood Hills, David no longer saw LA as a massive grid of streets and freeways. The 15-minute drive from the studio up to his house in Hollywood Hills wound its way through stunning vistas, bursting year-round with wild vegetation, fabulous flora, and soaring palm trees. His brushstrokes became freer. Now David used his arm to paint quick, bold, expressive swaths of color. The freedom was exhilarating.
REPRODUCTION REVOLUTION
Simultaneously, several technological breakthroughs happened in rapid succession and coincided with David’s newfound freedom. For years he had been critically considering photography’s relation to art. Why were so many artists becoming increasingly interested in photography, himself included? He often referenced photos to paint, including Santa Monica Blvd but not Mulholland Drive. This was a clue but only in the back of his mind. Although he kept many albums of his own photos, he never took them too seriously. But the Pompidou Center in Paris had been pestering him to do a show of his photographs, which made him think about his problems with photography more closely. David commenced experimenting, collaging photos together, “joiners” he called them.
Moving on, he started combining individual Polaroids, then “snaps” processed at the local One Hour Photomat. The finished collages kept expanding, growing bigger. David knew he was on to something. These experiments culminated in Pearblossom Highway, composed with over 800 individual photos, and his book Cameraworks published in 1984.
THE DAWN OF THE DIGITAL
David then abandoned chemical photography. Several other new technologies captured his attention. Digital photography first, then the advent of home/office copiers, followed soon by the fax machine. By now David had a new studio next to his home in the hills. He embraced the technology and worked furiously, like a mad scientist, making discoveries daily. He no longer had to go elsewhere to make prints, as evidenced by his series Home Made Prints, printed on a photocopier. He used the joiner technique to make collaged digital portraits of everyone who entered the studio; movie stars like Dennis Hopper or Ivan who washed his car. People were always a perfect subject matter, but everything was fodder for his experimentations, photos, paintings, drawings, and any object available.
David continued to paint of course. He had specially-sized canvases made that could be placed directly on the color copier. Push a few buttons and enlarge the picture as big as you wished. For David, BIGGER is always better. Or he could feed that copy into the fax machine and send it anywhere in the world. He could enlarge a single image into a multipage, wall size artwork. David faxed entire shows to Brazil, Japan, and England. His friends could receive them as daily gifts. In 1988, I was working as the art director at Tower Records in Boston. The fax machine was in the boss's office. “What’s all this?” he asked. After I explained, he loved the idea. The Boston Globe ran a story about receiving Hockney faxes that we would assemble into huge pictures. ABC Nightly News came and taped a segment.
Hockney guest-edited the Dec ‘85/Jan ‘86 issue of French Vogue with a 35-page spread lavishly demonstrating how his recent discoveries in photography and reproduction had begun to influence his painting. Comparisons to the early cubists were undeniable.
HOCKNEY PAINTS THE STAGE
Incredibly, throughout all the techno explorations, David continued to design sets for operas, one after the other. He would constantly fly back and forth to NYC to work with director John Dexter at the Metropolitan Opera. First came a French triple bill of Eric Satie’s Parade, Francis Poulenc’s Les Mammels de Tirésias and Maurice Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges. Soon after came a Stravinsky triple bill featuring Le Sacre du Printemps, Le Rossinol, and Oedipus Rex.
In November 1983, a spectacular exhibition, Hockney Paints the Stage, opened at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In addition to the Met operas, the show featured paintings, sketches, costumes, and production photos from his earlier operas, including Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress where David based his designs on Hogarth’s marvelously cross hatched engravings, and Mozart’s The Magic Flute. For each opera David created room sized installations, scaled down reproductions where visitors could walk through each set. Hockney worked ferociously on this show and was adding finishing brushstrokes on opening day. Hockney Paints the Stage was a smash and traveled on to other cities, including Toronto, San Francisco, and London to name a few. All his operas are continuously revived, and always to rave reviews. Like few others, David Hockney knows how to put on a show.
At the end of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, David created stage designs for three more operas in succession; Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Puccini’s Turandot, and Richard Strauss’ Die Frau onhe Schatten. Now directing them himself, for companies in Chicago, San Francisco, and London, he constructed scale models of the stage that filled half his studio, complete with lighting that changed to the music. Employing yet another new tech tool, several Hi-8 compact video camcorders were used to record the entire opera on tape before ever entering the opera house for rehearsal.
MOVING FOCUS
The courtyard of the Hotel Acatlán featured on the cover of David Hockney: A Retrospective catalogue. 1988.
David did a lot of traveling. He enjoyed visiting big cities for his various projects and exhibitions but also loved to hop in his car as a sightseer, paricularly throughout the American West. In 1981 he went with poet Stephen Spender to China which was documented in their book China Diary. He was fascinated that ancient Chinese scrolls offered ways of telling pictorial narratives and depicting landscapes, which were antithetical to the Eurocentric tradition. The art of the east did not use shadows! The Chinese scrolls seemed to have a “moving focus.” This was another clue to add to his developing thesis.
Later on a return trip to LA from Mexico City, David and the master printer Ken Tyler stayed at the off-the-beaten-track Hotel Acatlán. David found the little courtyard so charming that they remained for a week. From this visit came his Moving Focus series of prints that employed multiple perspectives and banished the vanishing point, exactly as his photo collages and the early cubists had done. His theory about the use of optics in western art was taking shape.
Towards the end of the 80s, Hockney bought a house in Malibu on “doggie beach” to get away from the city, work alone, and enjoy his new best friends, two dachshunds Stanley and Boodgie. He had a tiny studio where he continued to paint and send faxes to friends from The Hollywood Sea Picture Supply Company. I think every dachshund owner must own a copy of David’s Dog Days, full of paintings and drawings of his adored canine companions.
In 1988, the Metropolitan Museum of Art held the first major David Hockney Retrospective. David’s rising star had ascended into the art world firmament. Although he rightly savored the moment, David had little use for looking back. He was just getting started. For him, the best was always yet to come. On to the 1990s.
