Self Portrait IV

2008–2018

Record prices: from $7.9 million to $28.5 million

“Beverly Hills Housewife” (1966–1967), a 12-foot-long acrylic of the collector Betty Freeman by her pool in a long hot-pink dress, sells at Christie’s in New York in 2008 for $7.9 million, then a record price for a Hockney; in 2016 his landscape “Woldgate Woods” makes £9.4 million. In 2018 the record is broken twice at the same Sotheby’s auction: “Piscine de Medianoche (Paper Pool 30)” sells for $11.74 million and then “Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica” for $28.5 million.

2012 · Premio

Order of Merit

2012

Britain’s most influential artist in a poll

In 2012 Hockney is voted Britain’s most influential artist in a poll of 1,000 British artists commissioned by The Other Art Fair. That year Peter Blake also puts him in a new version of the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album cover among the British figures he most admires, and BBC Radio 4 includes him in its list of “The New Elizabethans”.

21 January – 9 April 2012

“A Bigger Picture” at the Royal Academy

London’s Royal Academy presents “A Bigger Picture”, more than 150 works, many taking up entire walls, devoted to the landscapes and tree tunnels of his native Yorkshire: oil paintings, watercolours and iPad drawings printed on paper. The show draws more than 600,000 visitors in under three months and then moves to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (15 May – 30 September) and to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (27 October 2012 – 3 February 2013).

March 2013

The death of his assistant Dominic Elliott

In March 2013 Hockney’s 23-year-old assistant, Dominic Elliott, dies after ingesting drain cleaner at Hockney’s Bridlington studio; he had earlier taken drugs and alcohol. Hockney’s partner drove him to Scarborough General Hospital, where he later died, and an inquest returned a verdict of death by misadventure.

26 October 2013 – 30 January 2014

“A Bigger Exhibition” at the de Young Museum

Hockney’s largest solo exhibition, with 397 works in more than 18,000 square feet, is curated by Gregory Evans. It includes the only public showing of “The Great Wall”, developed during research for “Secret Knowledge”, and works from 1999 to 2013 in a variety of media, from camera lucida drawings to watercolours, oil paintings and digital works.