At long last, after delays due to a worker’s strike, the triple bill of Parade, Les mamelles de Tirésias, and L’enfant et les sortileges opens in New York at the Metropolitan Opera. All aspects of the production are applauded in the press; in the New York Times, Donal Henehan writes that Hockney’s “dazzling poster-art and witty costumes provided not only color, but also dramatic continuity to the whole night.” The Met commissions Hockney and director John Dexter [NESTED]to work together again, on a staging of Igor Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring), Le rossignol (The Nightingale), and Oedipus Rex that debuts at the end of the year.

In May, touring China at the prompting of the editor Nikos Stangos at Thames & Hudson, Hockney takes photographs and makes watercolors—two mediums that accommodate a swift pace of travel. Alongside descriptions by the English writer and poet Stephen Spender, his travel companion along with Gregory Evans, Hockney’s images are published in [NESTED]the book China Diary (1982). From observing Chinese artists at work, his appreciation for loose, fast brushwork grows, as does his openness to relying on memory to represent an experience.

In the summer, Hockney organizes an exhibition for the series The Artist’s Eye at the National Gallery in London. As his contribution, he re-conceives his 1977 painting Looking at Pictures on a Screen, which shows the curator Henry Geldzahler looking [NESTED]at reproductions of artworks by Vermeer, Piero della Francesca, Van Gogh, and Degas; this time, the original artworks and original reproductions are installed in the gallery. The scenario invites viewers to consider what differences exist between versions, and to embrace the ease of distribution that mechanical reproduction enables.

Back in Los Angeles in the fall, Hockney works with the publisher Gemini G.E.L. and releases a print portfolio mostly of images of Celia Birtwell. 

At home in Bradford for Christmas, he paints, across three canvases, Hollywood Hills House, based on his recollection of how it feels to move through his L.A. home—past opera models, a picture of Laurel and Hardy painted by his father, and a postcard of a Renaissance painting.