Multivolume works devoted to the lives of titans in their fields have their value, but sometimes a reader is after a quick fix. James Cahill's David Hockney is an exemplary book of this sort--less of a "What makes him tick?" than a highly informative "What did he make when and where, and with what?"
London arts writer Cahill hits and expands on the major plot points in painter David Hockney's life story: born in 1937, the artist was raised in working-class Yorkshire, attended London's Royal College of Art, fell in love with California and achieved international success by his mid-30s. Personal stuff, like Hockney's boyfriends and hearing loss, gets some ink, as do matters like how Hockney's status as a maker of unfashionable figurative art played out in Swinging London and beyond. Cahill reports on Hockney's visual experiments and innovations (reverse perspective, photo-collage, iPhone drawings) and distills his artistic methods. Of California Art Collector (1964), the author says, "The work was painted in acrylics--a new discovery which allowed [Hockney] to create a smooth, uniform and thin surface that perfectly suits the picture's ambience of suburban calm."
While the book contains no reproductions of the artist's work, Cahill's precise and spruce descriptions of what Hockney captured on canvas are the next best thing to seeing it. Part of Laurence King's valuable Lives of the Artists series, the brisk and basic David Hockney would also be suitable for a YA readership despite its sometimes salty content, or perhaps because of it. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer