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 stated 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 serious 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 vital common and critically lauded British artists of his era, his works offered for report costs at public sale.
FILE: British artist David Hockney stands beside his portray entitled ‘Studio Inside #14’ through the launch of his new exhibition ‘Work and Pictures’ on the Annely Juda Tremendous Artwork Gallery on Might 14, 2015, in London, England.
Dan Kitwood/Getty Pictures
Historian Simon Schama stated it’s no thriller why his work is so enduringly interesting.
“His work is admired — liked isn’t too robust a phrase — by the hundreds of thousands 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, stated 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 well known determine within the swinging British and American artwork scenes of the Nineteen 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 mild bouncing off water and home windows, and human types rendered in flattened, simplified shapes in matte acrylic paint.
“I’m excited each day,” he instructed the Los Angeles Occasions in 1979. “London has a lot 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 vendor 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 through the lockdown in 2020.
THOMAS COEX/AFP by way of Getty Pictures
His creative influences ranged broadly, 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 bins and Campbell’s soup cans, Hockney often included promoting labels, corresponding to a British Typhoo Tea field utilized in his 1961 Tea Portray in an Illusionistic Model.
He noticed success early in his profession
He instructed 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 unusual artist,” he stated. “I do admire American pop — actually it appears that evidently every part fresh-looking and important in England as of late has been coming from the U.S.”
Nonetheless, he stated 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 Fashionable Artwork in New York.
“The second I first offered photos to earn a dwelling, 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 wished. … You’re a wealthy man in case you do the stuff 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 dwelling artist.
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 and his mates Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell in Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, a 1971 portrait voted considered one of Britain’s biggest work in a 2005 BBC ballot.
Hockney’s work went past drawing and portray
Like many conventional artists, he thought-about drawing a basic ability and lamented that it wasn’t taught as rigorously because it as soon as was.
“Human beings are essentially the most fascinating issues we see, so that they’re the toughest to attract,” he stated in a 1996 AP interview.
Hockney additionally embraced different media, together with printmaking, photograph 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 reveals his poster to artist and competitors decide David Hockney throughout an artwork exhibition and competitors, Kings and Queens by Youngsters, on the Nationwide Gallery in London in January 1978.
Photograph by © Hulton-Deutsch Assortment/CORBIS/Corbis by way of Getty Pictures
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 mates stated it was a portray,” Hockney instructed the AP in 2001. “I stated it’s {a photograph}; I used a digital camera.”
Later, he started to attract on iPads, which turned his favorite device.
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 1,000,000 individuals, 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 through the 2020 coronavirus lockdown he produced joyous iPad drawings of springtime for his mates. His message — “Do bear in mind they will’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, referred to as Hockney “the Picasso of our occasions.”
“Once I say that, individuals snort at me, as Picasso was the archetypal artist of the Twentieth century,” Rosenthal instructed the Unbiased newspaper. “However David Hockney can be an extremely common 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 Pictures
An unrepentant cigarette smoker who railed towards 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 Up to date artwork area which is holding a serious retrospective of his work on November 30, 2009 in Nottingham, England.
Photograph by Christopher Furlong/Getty Pictures
Hockney had a minor stroke in 2012 and was more and more deaf in later years — one thing he stated improved his visible notion.
“Should you lose one sense, you acquire different senses, and I really feel I might see area 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 knowledgeable painter for 60 years. Sixty years of getting up each day and doing precisely what I wish to do.”