David Hockney, a treasured British artist whose work of shimmering swimming pools and vibrant iPad drawings turned icons of latest artwork, has died, his publicist mentioned Friday. He was 88.
Over a seven-decade profession, Hockney explored and reimagined classical portraiture, panorama portray and pop artwork, working in portray, collage, images and digital drawing.
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 bushes of France’s Normandy area. One of the crucial in style and critically lauded British artists of his technology, his works offered for report costs at public sale.
FILE: British artist David Hockney stands beside his portray entitled ‘Studio Inside #14’ throughout the launch of his new exhibition ‘Work and Pictures’ on the Annely Juda Fantastic Artwork Gallery on Could 14, 2015, in London, England.
Dan Kitwood/Getty Photos
Historian Simon Schama mentioned it’s no thriller why his work is so enduringly interesting.
“His work is admired — cherished will not be 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, mentioned he died at his residence in London on Thursday, lower than a month in need of his 89th birthday. She didn’t give a reason for demise.
He’s survived by his longtime associate Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima; his great-nephew and studio assistant, Richard Hockney; his brothers Philip and John; and quite a few nieces, nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews.
Hockney was an icon of the swinging 60s
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, lots of them making a dreamlike world of patterned mild bouncing off water and home windows, and human types rendered in flattened, simplified shapes in matte acrylic paint.
“I’m excited day by day,” he advised the Los Angeles Occasions in 1979. “London has plenty of dreary components however I by no means discover something dreary in Los Angeles.”
Hockney was born July 9, 1937, in Bradford, a big industrial metropolis whose chief export was woollen textiles. He spent his first 20 years there earlier than going to London’s Royal Faculty of Artwork. He made an impression even earlier than his commencement, and artwork supplier John Kasmin took him into his secure of artists in 1961.
British painter David Hockney poses on the Orangerie museum in Paris, on October 7, 2021, in entrance of his portray “A 12 months in Normandy”, a 91-meter-long paintings painted throughout the lockdown in 2020.
THOMAS COEX/AFP by way of Getty Photos
His creative influences ranged extensively, together with Renaissance portraits, 18th-century English artist William Hogarth’s satirical drawings, Nineteenth-century English painter J.M.W. Turner’s landscapes, Pablo Picasso’s experiments in Cubism and Twentieth-century American pop artwork.
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He shared with different pop artists an curiosity within the polished floor of contemporary life. And, like Andy Warhol together with his Brillo packing containers and Campbell’s soup cans, Hockney sometimes included promoting labels, corresponding to a British Typhoo Tea field utilized in his 1961 Tea Portray in an Illusionistic Type.
He noticed success early in his profession
He advised The New York Occasions in 1964 that he loved the burgeoning pop artwork scene in New York however wasn’t positive he was a part of it.
“I’m simply an peculiar artist,” he mentioned. “I do admire American pop — in actual fact evidently the whole lot fresh-looking and important in England lately has been coming from the U.S.”
Nonetheless, he mentioned in 1995 that he nonetheless thought-about himself “very a lot an artist within the English custom.”
Hockney, who was out as a homosexual man lengthy earlier than it was frequent, explored erotic themes, giving youthful male our bodies the identical tender scrutiny that artists had been giving the feminine nude for hundreds of years.
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 Trendy Artwork in New York.
“The second I first offered footage to earn a residing, I felt wealthy. I’ve been wealthy ever since,” he advised The Related Press in 1995. “I didn’t have a lot cash however I did what I needed. … You’re a wealthy man should you do the belongings you wish to do.”
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 report for a residing artist.
Whereas lots of his best-known work had American scenes, he additionally tackled British topics. He immortalized his dad and mom in a number of portraits and his buddies Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell in Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, a 1971 portrait voted considered one of Britain’s best work in a 2005 BBC ballot.
Hockney’s work went past drawing and portray
Like many conventional artists, he thought-about drawing a elementary ability and lamented that it wasn’t taught as rigorously because it as soon as was.
“Human beings are probably the most attention-grabbing issues we see, in order that they’re the toughest to attract,” he mentioned in a 1996 AP interview.
Hockney additionally embraced different media, together with printmaking, picture collage and video. He contributed costume and set designs for the theatre and opera, together with a celebrated manufacturing of Tristan und Isolde first staged in 1987 on the Los Angeles Opera.
FILE: Peter Wright exhibits his poster to artist and competitors decide David Hockney throughout an artwork exhibition and competitors, Kings and Queens by Kids, on the Nationwide Gallery in London in January 1978.
Picture by © Hulton-Deutsch Assortment/CORBIS/Corbis by way of Getty Photos
When he took up images, he fused genres, assembling particular person photographs into elaborate collages like Pearblossom Freeway, 11-18th April, 1986, constructed up of particular person views of a desert freeway intersection.
“My photographer buddies mentioned it was a portray,” Hockney advised the AP in 2001. “I mentioned it’s {a photograph}; I used a digital camera.”
Later, he started to attract on iPads, which turned his favorite software.
Within the early 2000s, he regarded afresh on the fields and forests of Yorkshire in a sequence of panorama work that mixed daring color 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 one million folks, and moved to the Pompidou Heart in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York.
Hockney used the English panorama for inspiration in his design for a stained-glass window put in at Westminster Abbey in 2018 to rejoice the lengthy reign of Queen Elizabeth II.
His work modified how we see the world
In 2019, he moved to Normandy, the place throughout the 2020 coronavirus lockdown he produced joyous iPad drawings of springtime for his buddies. 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.
Curator Norman Rosenthal, who helped put collectively the exhibition, known as Hockney “the Picasso of our instances.”
“After I say that, folks snort at me, as Picasso was the archetypal artist of the Twentieth century,” Rosenthal advised the Impartial newspaper. “However David Hockney can also be an extremely in style artist whose work adjustments how we see issues.”
David Hockney standing in entrance of his “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” portray on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York, USA, 20 November 2017.
Johannes Schmitt-Tegge/Getty Photos
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.
The announcement of his demise from his publicist famous that Hockney was “a dedicated life-long and defiant smoker, expressing the pleasure in life it introduced him. … He smoked as much as the tip.”
FILE: Artist David Hockney smokes a cigarette throughout a break from a tour of the brand new Nottingham Modern artwork house which is holding a significant retrospective of his work on November 30, 2009 in Nottingham, England.
Picture by Christopher Furlong/Getty Photos
Hockney had a minor stroke in 2012 and was more and more deaf in later years — one thing he mentioned improved his visible notion.
“If you happen to lose one sense, you acquire different senses, and I really feel I might see house clearer,” he advised the AP in 2017.
He by no means stopped working.
“It’s my work that retains me younger,” Hockney advised the Solar newspaper in 2017. “I’ve been an expert painter for 60 years. Sixty years of getting up day by day and doing precisely what I wish to do.”