What We Lose When We Lose Hockney

But I think there is something else at work. Hockney wasn’t simply a great artist with a great body of work behind him. He remained an artist in motion. Even in his late eighties, he was still experimenting, still learning, still finding new ways to see the world.

I didn't know him. I never met him. My relationship with Hockney was the strange, second-hand intimacy of someone who has spent much of their life inside his market. As many of us did, I studied him first at school, where he felt far off and unconnectable. Then, through Christie's and later through MyArtBroker, I found myself standing in front of so many of his works, mesmerised, writing about them, listening to collectors and genuine specialists talk about them, watching how people respond to them. It isn't the relationship a curator or a biographer has. But it's a real one. You learn a lot about an artist by watching what people do when they decide they can't part with something, or when they finally can.

That, really, is the vantage point this piece is written from. Not the wall, but the market around the wall, and what the market tells you about an artist is its own kind of biography. Hockney's market is one of the deepest and most liquid in the field of prints and editions. He is a permanent fixture in the MAB100, the index we use to track directional movement across the blue chip print market, and for good reason. Across six decades he produced a dozen different collectable bodies of work, and each one trades on its own terms. Few artists give a market that much to hold on to.

The discovery of The Arrival of Spring and The Weather Series was a moment for me. They felt alive in a way that a great deal of work simply doesn't.

The Weather Series, 1973. Hockney is in his mid-thirties, already famous, already the painter of the pools. He could have spent the next decade painting California light for an audience that wanted nothing else. Instead he's in a print studio in Los Angeles, fresh from a trip to Japan, making lithographs and screenprints of rain and snow and mist. Weather, of all things, filtered through Hiroshige and the language of the Japanese woodblock. In Rain, the ink itself seems to dissolve down the sheet. It's playful and rigorous at the same time, and it has nothing to prove. That restlessness was there from the start.

The series runs to six images, and the market treats them as anything but equal. Rain and Snow tend to carry the set, and a complete portfolio of all six commands a clear premium over any single sheet, because intact sets so rarely come up. This is the first lesson the Hockney market teaches you, and The Weather Series teaches it cleanly: scarcity and the hierarchy between the images do most of the pricing work here, well before condition or colour come into it.

Then jump nearly 50 years to The Arrival of Spring: an artist in his eighties, in lockdown in Normandy, drawing the same stretch of countryside day after day on an iPad, a device most of his peers wouldn't touch, and producing some of the most quietly joyful images of his entire career.

Hockney never seemed particularly interested in staying still for any of it. He was fanatical about reinvention, forever finding new ways to look at the world. Paint, Polaroid, photocopier, fax machine, iPhone, iPad: he treated each new tool as something to test rather than something to fear. The print record reads like a list of those tests. The etchings of A Rake's Progress and the Illustrations for Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm. The Cubist-inflected experiments of Moving Focus. The Wallace Stevens riff of The Blue Guitar, the Paper Pools. And, decades on, the iPad and iPhone drawings, the Untitled works that began as something close to a private joke and ended up on collectors' walls. Each one is a distinct series with its own market, which is exactly why his work suits the way we organise it, series by series.

What I find most remarkable, from where I sit, is that the new work found its audience. That almost never happens.

Late-career experiments are usually a footnote the market politely ignores while it goes on trading the early masterpieces. They tend to take years, often until well after an artist's death, to register with any real depth, because the market is slow to grant authority to anything that isn't already canonical. Hockney's collectors followed him in real time. The iPad works had a lightly suspicious reception at first, and then they were simply demanded. People who came to him through a swimming pool in 1967 ended up living with a Yorkshire roadside, or a Normandy hedgerow, drawn on a screen. He kept reinventing himself and somehow kept persuading the rest of us to come along. I'm not sure he even had to try.

This matters commercially, not just romantically. An artist whose new work is absorbed by the market while he's still making it builds an unusually broad and self-renewing base of demand. It's part of why the Hockney market runs as deep as it does, and part of why it tends to settle after a correction rather than fall away, because there is always another series and another way in for a new collector.

Even in his eighties, there was always the feeling that he was engaged with what was happening around him. He embraced technology when others dismissed it, moving between mediums without worrying whether people would approve. He seemed genuinely curious about what was possible. That's incredibly rare for anyone of that age.