David Hockney - Lives of the Artists by James Cahill (Hardback)

Part of the 'Lives of the Artists' series: highly readable short biographies of the world's greatest artists

Emerging from the north of England in the 1960s, David Hockney made quite a splash in Swinging London as a portraitist, and went on to make a even bigger splash in Los Angeles when he moved there in the 1970s.

His figurative paintings of the 1970s and 1980s captured the zeitgeist of West Coast living, while he also explored new avenues by constructing mosaics out of polaroids.

By the beginning of the millennium, he returned to his Yorkshire roots, embarking on a new period of painting.