David Hockney, artist renowned for his pool scenes, dies aged 88
Jill Lawless
Artist David Hockney, who became icons of 20th century art with his pool paintings sparkling in the Los Angeles sun, died at the age of 88.
Hockney was born in the north of England but spent most of his life in Southern California, making sunny suburban landscapes a key motif.
Later in life he returned to Europe and found renewed inspiration in the wooded hills of his native Yorkshire and the fields and trees of the Normandy region of France. His works were sold for record prices at auctions, making him one of the most valuable artists in England.
Historian Simon Schama said that “the popularity and endurance of David Hockney’s art, with all its shape-shifting and ceaseless creative experimentation, is actually no secret.”
“His work is admired by millions around the world—loved is not too strong a word—who flock to see it because it requires an expectation of pleasure,” Schama wrote in an essay accompanying the 2025 Hockney exhibition in Paris.
Hockney’s publicist, Erica Bolton, said Hockney died a few weeks shy of his 89th birthday.
With his distinctive round glasses and bleached blonde hair, Hockney was a well-known figure in the vibrant British and American art scenes of the 1960s before he was even 30 years old. His paintings were equally different; many created a dreamlike world of patterned light reflecting off water and windows, and human forms rendered in flattened, simplified shapes with matte acrylic paint.
“I get excited every day,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1979. “London has a lot of dreary parts, but I never find anything dreary in Los Angeles.”
Hockney was born on 9 July 1937 in Bradford, a major industrial city whose main export was woolen textiles. He spent his first twenty years there before going to the Royal College of Art, London. He made an impact even before graduation, and art dealer John Kasmin hired him as an artist in 1961.
His artistic influences ranged widely, from Renaissance portraitists to 19th-century English landscape painter JMW Turner, Pablo Picasso’s experiments with Cubism, and 20th-century American pop art.
He shared with other pop artists his interest in the polished surface of modern life. Hockney occasionally used advertising labels, as Andy Warhol did with Brillo cans and Campbell’s soup cans; such as the British Typhoo Tea box used in the 1961 “Tea Painting in Illusionist Style”.
Nevertheless, he said in 1995 that he still considered himself “an artist in the British tradition”.
Even his move to California had historical precedent, he noted, as earlier generations of British artists sought the bright light of Italy.
As an openly gay man, Hockney explored erotic themes and gave young male bodies the same sensitive scrutiny that artists had accorded nude women for centuries. Friends and lovers often posed as models, and some images were based on photographs in men’s bodybuilding magazines.
Early works such as “We Two Boys Clinging Together” and “Two Men in a Shower” celebrated same-sex relationships at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain.
Hockney’s works continued to generate record-breaking sums. In 2018, his 1972 painting “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” was sold at Christie’s for $90.3 million, breaking a record for a living artist at the time. In February 2020, another pool painting from 1966 called “The Splash” sold for 23.1 million pounds ($30 million) at Sotheby’s.
While pool paintings are Hockney’s trademark, he also literally painted a pool painting when he adorned the bottom of the swimming pool at the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles.
Always an innovator, Hockney embraced drawing, painting, printmaking, photo collage and video throughout his seven-decade career.
When he began photography, he merged genres, assembling individual photographs into elaborate collages such as “Pearblossom Highway, April 11-18, 1986,” composed of individual images of a desert highway interchange.
“My photographer friends said it was a painting,” Hockney told the AP in 2001. “I said it was a photograph; I used a camera.”
The insight he gained from his photographic work led him to research and write a book in 2001 called “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.” He argued that artists over the centuries used lenses and other optical devices to help them draw much more frequently than most historians believe.
In the early 2000s he revisited the fields and woods of Yorkshire in a series of exuberant landscape paintings that combined bold colors with the care given to the texture of snow on a hillside or a flower in a hawthorn hedge. In 2017, they were featured in an exhibition at Tate Britain in London that was visited by half a million people and moved to the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Hockney, Queen Elizabeth II. He used the English landscape as inspiration for the design of a stained glass window in Westminster Abbey to celebrate Elizabeth’s long reign. Completed in 2018, The Queen’s Window depicts a landscape of blooming hawthorn trees in shades of blue, green, yellow, orange, pink and red.
By then Hockney was considered Britain’s greatest living artist and a national treasure. In 1997, the queen named him a Companion of Honor, an “exclusive” award limited to 65 people.
Hockney, an unrepentant smoker who opposes government anti-smoking rules, complained that a poster for his 2025 exhibition was banned from the Paris Metro because it showed him holding a cigarette.
Hockney suffered a minor stroke in 2012 and became increasingly deaf in the following years; He said it improved his visual perception.
“If you lose one sense, you gain other senses, and I feel like I can see the field more clearly,” he told the AP in 2017.
He never stopped working.
“My job is what keeps me young,” Hockney told the Sun newspaper in 2017. “I’ve been a professional painter for 60 years. I’ve been getting up every day for sixty years and doing exactly what I want to do.”
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