The relationship between art and life has been of overriding importance in the work of David Hockney, who has enjoyed perhaps greater popularity than any other British artist this century.

Here Marco Livingstone traces those connections from the beginnings of the artist’s career in the early 1960s through to the more recent works that have contributed to Hockney’s international reputation. These include his photocollages and highly acclaimed stage designs for the opera, not to mention his embrace of technology – namely the fax drawings and colour laser prints – which show the continuing preoccupation with invention and artifice that has made the artist’s work at once popular and enduring.