Artist David Hockney, whose work of swimming pools shimmering within the Los Angeles sunshine grew to become icons of Twentieth-century artwork, died Thursday, his publicist mentioned. He was 88.
Hockney was born within the north of England however lived a lot of his life in Southern California, making its sun-drenched suburban views a significant motif.
Later in life he returned to Europe, discovering renewed inspiration within the wooded hills of his native county of Yorkshire and the fields and timber of France’s Normandy area. He grew to become one of many UK’s most treasured artists, his works promoting for file costs at public sale.
Historian Simon Schama mentioned that “the recognition and sturdiness of David Hockney’s artwork, via all his shape-shifts and restlessly ingenious experiments, are actually no thriller.”
“His work is admired — liked is just not too robust a phrase — by the tens of millions who, worldwide, flock to see it as a result of it presupposes an expectation of delight,” Schama wrote in an essay accompanying a 2025 Hockney exhibition in Paris.
Hockney’s publicist, Erica Bolton, says he died a couple of weeks wanting his 89th birthday.
Along with his trademark spherical glasses and bleached-blond hair, Hockney was a widely known determine within the swinging British and American artwork scenes of the Sixties, even earlier than he reached the age of 30. His work had been simply as distinctive, a lot of them making a dreamlike world of patterned gentle bouncing off water and home windows, and human types rendered in flattened, simplified shapes in matte acrylic paint.
“I’m excited daily,” he instructed the Los Angeles Instances in 1979. “London has plenty of dreary elements however I by no means discover something dreary in Los Angeles.”
Hockney’s youth and influences
Hockney was born July 9, 1937, in Bradford, a big industrial metropolis whose chief export was woolen textiles. He spent his first 20 years there earlier than going to London’s Royal School of Artwork. He made an influence even earlier than his commencement, and artwork supplier John Kasmin took him into his steady of artists in 1961.
His inventive influences ranged extensively, from Renaissance portraitists to Nineteenth-century English panorama painter J.M.W. Turner, Pablo Picasso’s experiments in Cubism and Twentieth-century American pop artwork.
Visiting america in 1963-64, Hockney gained discover together with his replace on “A Rake’s Progress,” 18th-century artist William Hogarth’s sequence of work telling the story of a rich cad’s escapades and eventual downfall. The New York Instances mentioned in 1964 that Hockney “brings Hogarth up-to-date with a vengeance and furnishes a great instance of how youthful artists prefer to marry textual content and film with profit to every.”
‘Simply an odd artist’
He shared with different pop artists an curiosity within the polished floor of recent life. And, like Andy Warhol together with his Brillo containers and Campbell’s soup cans, Hockney sometimes integrated promoting labels, reminiscent of a British Typhoo Tea field utilized in his 1961 “Tea Portray in an Illusionistic Type.”
He instructed The New York Instances in 1964 he loved the burgeoning pop artwork scene in New York however wasn’t certain he was a part of it.
“I’m simply an odd artist,” he mentioned. “I do admire American pop — in truth plainly every little thing fresh-looking and important in England nowadays has been coming from the U.S.” Nonetheless, he nonetheless thought of himself “very a lot an artist within the English custom,” he mentioned in 1995.
Even his transfer to California had a historic precedent, he famous, since earlier generations of English artists had sought out the sensible gentle of Italy.
As an overtly homosexual man, Hockney explored erotic themes, giving youthful male our bodies the identical tender scrutiny that artists had been giving the feminine nude for hundreds of years. Mates and lovers continuously posed as fashions, and a few photos had been primarily based on images in males’s bodybuilding magazines.
Early works like “We Two Boys Collectively Clinging” and “Two Males in a Bathe” celebrated homosexual relationships when homosexuality was nonetheless unlawful in Britain.
Early in his profession, two of his drawings had been purchased for the Museum of Fashionable Artwork in New York.
“The second I first offered photos to earn a residing, I felt wealthy. I’ve been wealthy ever since,” he instructed The Related Press in 1995. “I didn’t have a lot cash however I did what I needed. … You’re a wealthy man if you happen to do the stuff you wish to do.”
That freedom introduced Hockney acclaim and wealth, together with his works fetching record-breaking sums. In 2018, his 1972 portray “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” offered at a Christie’s public sale for $90.3 million, on the time a file for a residing artist. In February 2020 one other pool portray, “The Splash,” from 1966, offered at Sotheby’s for 23.1 million kilos ($30 million).
Whereas work of swimming pools had been a Hockney trademark, he additionally actually painted a pool when he adorned the underside of the swimming pool on the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Lodge in Los Angeles.
Whereas a lot of his best-known work had American scenes, he additionally tackled British topics. He immortalized his mother and father in a number of portraits. “Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy,” a 1971 twin portrait of two of his English pals and their cat, was ranked No. 5 in a 2005 BBC Radio-Nationwide Gallery (London) on-line ballot of the best work in Britain. It was the one work by a residing painter within the high 10.
Like many conventional artists, he contemplating drawing a basic talent and lamented that it wasn’t taught as rigorously because it was once.
“Human beings are probably the most fascinating issues we see, in order that they’re the toughest to attract,” he mentioned in a 1996 AP interview, including that one of the best drawings are made when there’s empathy between the artist and topic.
His work went past drawing and portray
He didn’t restrict himself to drawing and portray, although. He contributed costume and set designs for theater and the opera, together with a celebrated manufacturing of “Tristan und Isolde” first staged in 1987 on the Los Angeles Opera.
At all times an innovator, Hockney embraced drawing, portray, printmaking, picture collage and video in a seven-decade profession.
When he took up pictures, he fused genres, assembling particular person images into elaborate collages like “Pearblossom Freeway, 11-18th April, 1986,” constructed up of particular person views of a desert freeway intersection.
“My photographer pals mentioned it was a portray,” Hockney instructed the AP in 2001. “I mentioned it’s {a photograph}; I used a digicam.”
The perception he gained from his picture work led him to analysis and write a 2001 e book, “Secret Information: Rediscovering the Misplaced Strategies of the Outdated Masters.” He argued that via the centuries, artists used lenses and different optical gadgets to help them in drawing far more typically than most historians consider.
Later he started to attract on iPads, which grew to become his favourite software.
Within the early 2000s he appeared afresh on the fields and forests of Yorkshire in a sequence of exuberant panorama work that mixed daring coloration with minute consideration to the feel of snow on a hillside or a blossom on a hawthorn hedge. They featured in a 2017 exhibition at Tate Britain in London that was visited by half 1,000,000 folks and moved to the Pompidou Heart in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Hockney used the English panorama for inspiration in his design for a stained-glass window at Westminster Abbey to have a good time the lengthy reign of Queen Elizabeth II. Accomplished in 2018, the Queen’s Window depicts a panorama of blossoming hawthorn timber in hues of blue, inexperienced, yellow, orange, pink and pink.
‘They will’t cancel the spring’
By this time, Hockney was extensively thought of Britain’s best residing artist, and a nationwide treasure. In 1997, the queen named him a Companion of Honour, an award restricted to 65 folks “of distinction.”
In 2019, he moved to Normandy in France, the place throughout the 2020 coronavirus lockdown he produced joyous iPad drawings of springtime for his pals. His message — “Do bear in mind they’ll’t cancel the spring” — was emblazoned in neon throughout the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris when it hosted an enormous Hockney exhibition that opened in April 2025.
The present ranged from the primary portray he ever offered — a 1955 portrait of his father — via L.A. swimming swimming pools to Yorkshire woodlands, portraits of pals, stage designs for opera and dozens of photos of the exuberant arrival of spring in Normandy.
Artwork curator Norman Rosenthal, who helped put collectively the Paris exhibition, known as Hockney “the Picasso of our occasions.”
“After I say that, folks chortle at me, as Picasso was the archetypal artist of the Twentieth century,” Rosenthal instructed the Unbiased newspaper. “However David Hockney can also be an extremely fashionable artist whose work modifications how we see issues.”
An unrepentant cigarette smoker who railed in opposition to authorities anti-smoking guidelines, Hockney complained when a poster for the 2025 exhibition was banned from the Paris Metro as a result of it confirmed him holding a cigarette.
Hockney had a minor stroke in 2012 and was more and more deaf in later years — one thing he mentioned had improved his visible notion.
“Should you lose one sense, you acquire different senses, and I really feel I might see house clearer,” he instructed the AP in 2017.
He by no means stopped working.
“It’s my work that retains me younger,” Hockney instructed the Solar newspaper in 2017. “I’ve been an expert painter for 60 years. Sixty years of getting up daily and doing precisely what I wish to do.”
