David Hockney, our most popular and hardworking living artist, returns to the easel

The first volume of Christopher Simon Sykes’s biography of David Hockney ended in the summer of 1975. The 38-year-old painter had just returned to Paris, where he was then living, ‘energised’ by the widespread acclaim that greeted his designs for the Glyndebourne production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. Energy was something Hockney would need in the years ahead when the time he always wanted to devote to painting was frequently interrupted by side-projects such as stage design or an investigation into earlier painters’ use of the camera lucida, sudden passions for new technology, and the increasing demands of celebrity. A constant theme of this second volume is Hockney’s desire to get back to the easel, and it closes with A Bigger Picture, the enormously popular exhibition of his paintings of the Yorkshire landscape at the Royal Academy in 2012.

Sykes has written that the aim of his biography has been ‘to conjure up the man that [Hockney] is, and in doing so to put his paintings and drawings in the context of his extraordinary life’. In this he has largely succeeded, having been a friend of the artist since 2005 and admirer of the work since the mid-1960s.

This friendship has not stood in the way of some frank accounts of Hockney’s less admirable behaviour, much of it a result of the kind of egotism that characterises the dedicated artist. Sykes also describes many instances of Hockney’s generosity, and his loyalty to his friends, often in the face of severe provocation.

If the emotional core of the first volume was Hockney’s relationship with Peter Schlesinger (recreated in Jack Hazan’s notorious film A Bigger Splash), this account of the second half of the artist’s life is coloured by the loss of friends and family to illness and age.