David Hockney has enjoyed international fame ever since the early 1960s. He began his artistic training in 1953 to 1957 at the Bradford College of Art and continued studying at the Royal College of Art in London from 1959 to 1962. He exhibited his first works and won prizes even before graduating from the Royal College. Hockney participated in the exhibition of the 'London Group 1960' in 1960 and was presented for the first time with the 'Young Contemporaries' at the R.B.A. Galleries in London. He was awarded the Royal College Drawing Prize in the year he graduated. Hockney is not only an ingenious painter, but an equally talented graphic artist. He also designed several stage sets for the theatre. Hockney began working on his first engraved cycle 'A Rake's Progress' in 1961 - it was published in 1963. Hockney travelled to New York, Berlin and Egypt after finishing his studies, in order to find ideas for his illustrations. His friend, Henry Geldzahler, the curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, encouraged him to move to Los Angeles in 1964. Hockney was offered a teaching post at the University of Iowa in the summer of the same year. His first one-man exhibition in the USA was successfully opened in the same year at the Alan Gallery in New York. He had other teaching posts until 1967 at the University of Colorado in Boulder, in Los Angeles and in Berkeley. He made his first stage sets and costumes for Alfred Jarry's play 'Ubu Roi', which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London, in 1966. Hockney accepted a post as a guest professor at the Kunsthochschule in Hamburg in 1969. His international fame increased with his invitations to exhibit at the documenta 4 and 6 in Kassel in 1968 and 1977. He made numerous stage stets for ballets and operas by Mozart, Strawinsky, Wagner and Strauss from the mid 1970s to the 1990s. In 1982 Hockney began making Polaroid collages in a Cubist manner. He also began making colour-copy prints, abstract computer graphics and fax drawings at the end of the 1980s. Hockney is often associated with Pop-Art, but he refuses to accept this labelling of his art. The unreal, pale colours of his paintings and the cool, artificial acrylic surfaces give his works something surreal, which could best be described as 'stylised Realism'.