82 Portraits and 1 Still-Life

A yellow chair, a blue backdrop and a succession of visitors: David Hockney built 82 Portraits and 1 Still-Life from a deliberately narrow set of studio conditions. The portraits were uncommissioned. Friends, relatives, artists, curators, employees and acquaintances accepted his invitation to sit, usually for two or three days. Most of the paintings were made in his Hollywood Hills studio between 2013 and 2016. Together they form a portrait of the people around him, assembled through many separate encounters. ^[1]

The pleasure of the series lies in the space between its repeated arrangement and its varied inhabitants. A long leg reaches across the foreground; a hand rests heavily on a knee; someone leans towards the painter while another settles back. Clothing introduces its own shapes and colours. The chair supplies a familiar measure, making each change of scale, bearing and gesture easier to notice. Hockney regarded the paintings as one body of work, so their relationships matter alongside each individual likeness. ^[2]

Returning to portrait painting in 2013

The project followed Hockney’s sustained work on the Yorkshire landscape. Back in Los Angeles, he returned to painting people with a portrait of his studio assistant and close collaborator Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima. Dated 11, 12 and 13 July 2013, it shows J-P bent forward with his head in his hands. The National Gallery of Victoria’s account places it after the death of another studio assistant, Dominic Elliott, in Yorkshire. Hockney said that the pose expressed something they shared, and came to regard the painting as a form of self-portrait. This specific beginning gives the series a serious emotional register without supplying a single explanation for every subsequent face. ^[5]

More invitations followed. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao described a gradual absorption in portraiture, beginning with the studio manager and extending through Hockney’s different circles. The sequence grew out of repeated work, rather than an initial commission to represent a fixed roster of important people. Its centre remained the studio: a place into which visitors arrived, found a position and became the focus of sustained looking. ^[6]

That distinction helps explain the mixture of familiarity and discovery. Hockney already knew many of his subjects through daily life or longstanding friendship, yet a sitting placed the relationship under different conditions. Conversation, movement and the usual shared occupations gave way to the concentration required to paint a person. The resulting picture records an encounter with someone known, while allowing that person’s appearance to become newly demanding.

Invitations within a particular social world

The cast includes the artist John Baldessari, the dealer Larry Gagosian, the architect Frank Gehry and the comedian Barry Humphries, alongside Hockney’s siblings, home and studio staff, and the children of friends. Such variety should not be confused with a representative sample of society. This is a particular network, shaped by Hockney’s work, friendships, family and life in Los Angeles. The same exhibition could place an internationally recognised name beside someone whose significance was chiefly personal. ^[7]

Ai Kusumoto, curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo’s 2023 Hockney exhibition, made this personal basis central to her account of his portraiture. Famous subjects entered his work through relationships, she explained, rather than fame being the organising principle. That reading is especially useful here: a recognised name may attract attention, but it cannot replace looking at how the person occupies the chair. The sitter’s standing outside the studio does not dictate the amount of canvas available inside it. ^[8]

The invitations also reached across generations. Celia Birtwell visited in 2015 with her husband Andy Palmer and her granddaughter, both of whom were painted. Margaret Hockney came to Los Angeles with her friend Pauline Ling, who also joined the series. These connections turn the group into something more interwoven than a collection of isolated celebrities: one portrait can lead to another through a visit, a friendship or a family tie. ^{[9] [10]}

The chair, platform and colour field

The acrylic paintings use canvases measuring 48 by 36 inches, approximately 121.9 by 91.4 centimetres. A yellow upholstered chair and blue setting recur, although Hockney adjusted the background colour in relation to what the sitter wore. The apparent simplicity is therefore an active arrangement. A shirt or pair of trousers affects the surrounding blue; the colour behind a figure helps determine how that figure comes forward. ^[1]

The chair stood on a platform. This small stage removes most of the domestic or professional surroundings through which a conventional portrait might explain its subject. There is no office to identify a curator, no studio equipment to identify an artist. Instead, the seated figure carries much of the information, and the repeated support makes the differences more legible. Ca’ Pesaro’s exhibition introduction emphasised the range that emerges within this restricted seated format and two-colour ground. ^[2]

The rule has useful exceptions. Augustus and Perry Barringer, 16th, 17th June 2014 is a double portrait; the NGV identified the boys as nephews of Hockney’s friend Ian Falconer. Matthew Sperling’s contemporary Apollo review noted that the canvas turns horizontally and the figures are cropped above the knees. The shared dimensions could accommodate a different orientation and two people. This departure makes the prevailing format of an upright, full-length single portrait more apparent. ^{[5] [11]}

How a sitting became a painting

Hockney asked for a commitment of three days, describing the process as a “20-hour exposure”. The phrase borrows the language of photography while stretching the moment into an extended exchange. It names a working framework, not an identical measurement of every sitter’s attendance. The dates in the titles retain differences: Baldessari’s portrait records 13 and 16 December 2013, while Dr. Leon Banks records 12, 13 and 15 November. The work could occupy two days or three, and the days need not be consecutive. ^[7]

The procedure began with establishing a position that the sitter could sustain. Ca’ Pesaro’s account describes assistants marking the feet on the platform so that the pose could be recovered. Hockney drew the figure directly in charcoal before developing the painting, working through the composition with close attention to face and hands. The marks on the floor and the initial drawing performed different jobs: one helped a real person return after a break; the other organised that person within the rectangle. ^[12]

Hockney worked standing, in direct visual relation to his seated subject. Stephanie Barron, LACMA’s curator of modern art and another sitter, recalled his confident, silent concentration and the speed with which he established her pose and clothes. Her account gives the long sitting an internal rhythm: major relationships could emerge quickly, while observation continued over several days. ^{[5] [7]}

Edith Devaney, the exhibition’s curator and one of its sitters, recalled the intensity of the charcoal stage. Hockney’s gaze moved repeatedly between her and the canvas as he established head, body and chair. Her account makes the underlying drawing essential to the finished colour. Before a stripe, a shadow or a patch of flesh could be elaborated, the pose had to hold together as a whole. This direct drawing links the project to the sustained observational practice explored in Hockney’s drawings. ^[13]

The choice of acrylic mattered to the rhythm. Its comparatively rapid drying allowed Hockney to advance the image within a short sequence of sittings. Yet he also needed time to work into a face. Devaney reported that after the first few paintings he changed to a brand with more gel, which remained wet longer and allowed finer adjustments. A material change helped reconcile the brisk schedule with carefully developed passages of paint. ^{[12] [13]}

Work continued beyond the sitter’s presence. J-P photographed stages of the paintings, and Hockney could examine and test changes on an iPad before returning to the canvas. Digital tools assisted decisions about acrylic paint, extending his scrutiny of the developing image into the intervals between sittings. The finished work joined those decisions to renewed observation of the person. ^[12]

Reading the whole seated body

Baldessari’s portrait offers a particularly clear example of bodily scale. Devaney drew attention to his long legs and large hands, which convey his exceptional height even while he sits. The chair cannot contain that impression of length. Hands, knees and feet become structural elements in the picture, connecting the face to the lower edge of the canvas. Recognition operates through proportion and occupation of space as well as facial features. ^[14]

Rufus Hale provides a different encounter. The eleven-year-old son of Tacita Dean visited with his mother, and Hockney decided to paint him. Rufus later explained that his waistcoat, tie and dress shoes were his usual clothes, not an outfit chosen for a grand occasion. That first-person detail is a useful check on interpretation. Formal clothing can look like a deliberate performance for the portrait, yet the sitter’s account describes everyday habit. Appearance invites inference; it does not settle the story behind it. ^[15]

Margaret Hockney’s portrait draws attention back to the exchange of looks. Devaney interpreted her gaze as an expression of pleasure in spending time with her brother, stressing that Margaret looked at him as he looked at her. That is the curator’s reading of a relationship she knew, rather than a diagnosis that can be extracted from paint alone. It nevertheless offers a productive way to approach the series: the person in the chair is also an observer, watching the painter carry out his work. ^[10]

Posture contributes another vocabulary. In her 2016 review, Emily Spicer described Gregory Evans leaning back with crossed arms and spread legs, contrasting his ease with sitters who appeared more conscious of the occasion. The arrangement lets us compare forward and backward movement, open and folded limbs, hands collected in the lap or held apart. These are visible differences with pictorial consequences. They create diagonals, compress the torso or open space around it; they need not become fixed verdicts on character. ^[16]

Repetition sharpens colour and attention

The series rewards two kinds of looking. Seen across a room, it establishes a rhythm of rectangles, bright grounds and seated bodies. Moving closer interrupts that rhythm with the particular arrangement of a hand, the weight of a shoe or the changing edge of a face. The repeated chair allows the eye to retain one picture while approaching the next. A small change becomes substantial because the surrounding terms remain familiar.

Sperling described a development within the sequence itself. The first J-P painting includes a patterned rug and visible floorboards; by early October 2013 Hockney had simplified the setting into adjoining blue and turquoise planes. The stable appearance of the later group was arrived at through painting. The backgrounds grew flatter as the figure’s posture and clothing carried more of the variation. Sperling also noted the contrast between swift passages and more carefully worked faces and hands. Uniform format does not mean uniform handling. ^[11]

Colour therefore works at several scales. It separates a body from its setting, establishes the relationship between clothing and skin, and connects one canvas to its neighbours. An intensely coloured background can make the chair feel both solid and strangely weightless: its outline locates the sitter, while the broad colour around it resists the illusion of a fully furnished room. The pictures keep asking the eye to recognise a person and to notice the painted arrangement that makes recognition possible.

The interruption of Fruit on a Bench

The single still life arose when a sitter had to reschedule. Hockney used the available painting time for an arrangement of fruit and vegetables on a blue bench. The Foundation records it as part of the exhibition’s history, while the dated title, Fruit on a Bench, 6th, 7th, 8th March 2014, places it within the ongoing portrait sequence. The allotted time for looking and painting continued even when the appointment changed. ^{[1] [17] [7]}

Within the group, the still life changes the task of comparison. The viewer has become accustomed to reading a face, a pose and an outfit; now there is no gaze to meet. Colour, shape and the support beneath the objects become unusually explicit. The interruption can send attention back to the portraits, where knees, sleeves, shoes and chair legs have also been organised as forms. Its difference belongs to the series’ experience, even though its origin was a practical change of plan.

From studio sequence to public exhibition

The Royal Academy presented 82 Portraits and 1 Still-Life in London from 2 July to 2 October 2016. The group also appeared within the NGV’s broader exhibition David Hockney: Current, held in Melbourne from 11 November 2016 to 13 March 2017. ^{[18] [5] [19]}

Ca’ Pesaro in Venice showed the series from 24 June to 22 October 2017, followed by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao from 10 November 2017 to 25 February 2018. LACMA’s presentation ran from 15 April to 29 July 2018, bringing the studio’s social world before an audience in the city where most of the paintings were made. ^{[2] [6] [7]}

Chronological hanging allowed viewers to follow Hockney’s decisions as well as meet his subjects. The colour changes and increasingly economical setting could be read across the sequence. This made the exhibition more than a set of eighty-two separate appointments with pictures: it gave the viewer a path through an extended period of work. Individual attention and the cumulative effect of the group remained in tension. ^[11]

Critical responses differed over what that repetition achieved. Laura Cumming found colour more compelling than psychological insight. Emily Spicer, by contrast, found the pared-back portraits sustained her interest in their subjects. Those responses identify a real point of engagement: the same emphasis on surface, clothing and posture can feel either revealing or withholding. The series leaves room to test both reactions through slow comparison. ^{[20] [16]}

A continuing portrait practice

Celia Birtwell supplies a direct connection with an earlier phase. She had appeared with Ossie Clark in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, painted in 1970–71, and continued to sit for Hockney across the decades. Here the grand domestic setting and relationship between two adults give way to a concentrated individual encounter. The subject recurs while the terms of representation change. ^[9]

The same long view extends across Hockney’s portraits, including his repeated studies of his parents, Gregory Evans and Maurice Payne. The National Portrait Gallery emphasised how familiarity allowed him to revisit people through different media and changing appearances. Works such as My Parents belong within that history of renewed attention, though each has its own composition and circumstances. ^[21]

The Los Angeles series also preceded another concentrated return to painted portraiture in Normandy. The National Portrait Gallery’s 2023 exhibition included more than thirty new portraits made from life in 2021–22, showing friends and visitors to that studio. The shared interest was still a person encountered over time, yet the later paintings formed a separate project. 82 Portraits and 1 Still-Life remains distinctive for the scale of its repeated invitation: an extended social world entering one prevailing studio arrangement, with each visitor changing what it could make visible. ^[22]