David Hockney & Martin Gayford – A History of Pictures

A compact edition of Hockney and Gayford’s brilliantly original book, with updated material and brand-new pieces of art

Informed and energized by a lifetime of painting, drawing, and making images with cameras, David Hockney, in collaboration with art critic Martin Gayford, explores how and why pictures have been made across the millennia. Juxtaposing a rich variety of images—a still from a Disney cartoon with a Japanese woodblock print by Hiroshige, a scene from an Eisenstein film with a Velazquez paint­ing—the authors cross the normal boundaries between high culture and popular entertainment, and argue that film, photography, paint­ing, and drawing are deeply interconnected. Featuring a revised final chapter with some of Hockney’s latest works, this new, compact edition of A History of Pictures remains a significant contribution to the discussion of how artists represent reality.

David Hockney is one of the world’s most popular painters and the author of the bestselling Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (2001). Martin Gayford is an art critic and the author of many books, including Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud (2013) and Rendez-vous with Art, with Philippe de Montebello (2014).