David Hockney, a treasured British artist whose paintings of shimmering pools and colourful iPad drawings became icons of contemporary art, has died, his publicist said Friday. He was 88.
Over a seven-decade career, Hockney explored and reimagined classical portraiture, landscape painting and pop art, working in painting, collage, photography and digital drawing.
Hockney was born in the north of England but lived much of his life in Southern California, making its sun-drenched suburban views a major motif.
Later in life, he returned to Europe, finding renewed inspiration in the wooded hills of his native county of Yorkshire and the fields and trees of France’s Normandy region. One of the most popular and critically lauded British artists of his generation, his works sold for record prices at auction.
Historian Simon Schama said it’s no mystery why his work is so enduringly appealing.
“His work is admired — loved is not too strong a word — by the millions who, worldwide, flock to see it because it presupposes an expectation of pleasure,” Schama wrote in an essay accompanying a 2025 Hockney exhibition in Paris.
Hockney’s publicist, Erica Bolton, said he died at his home in London on Thursday, less than a month short of his 89th birthday. She did not give a cause of death.
He is survived by his longtime partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima; his great-nephew and studio assistant, Richard Hockney; his brothers Philip and John; and numerous nieces, nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews.
Hockney was an icon of the swinging 60s
With his trademark round glasses and bleached-blond hair, Hockney was a well-known figure in the swinging British and American art scenes of the 1960s, even before he reached the age of 30.
His paintings were just as distinctive, many of them creating a dreamlike world of patterned light bouncing off water and windows, and human forms rendered in flattened, simplified shapes in matte acrylic paint.
“I’m excited every day,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1979. “London has lots of dreary parts but I never find anything dreary in Los Angeles.”
Hockney was born July 9, 1937, in Bradford, a large industrial city whose chief export was woollen textiles. He spent his first two decades there before going to London’s Royal College of Art. He made an impact even before his graduation, and art dealer John Kasmin took him into his stable of artists in 1961.
His artistic influences ranged widely, including Renaissance portraits, 18th-century English artist William Hogarth’s satirical drawings, 19th-century English painter J.M.W. Turner’s landscapes, Pablo Picasso’s experiments in Cubism and 20th-century American pop art.
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He shared with other pop artists an interest in the polished surface of modern life. And, like Andy Warhol with his Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans, Hockney occasionally incorporated advertising labels, such as a British Typhoo Tea box used in his 1961 Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style.
He saw success early in his career
He told The New York Times in 1964 that he enjoyed the burgeoning pop art scene in New York but wasn’t sure he was part of it.
“I’m just an ordinary artist,” he said. “I do admire American pop — in fact it seems that everything fresh-looking and vital in England these days has been coming from the U.S.”
Nonetheless, he said in 1995 that he still considered himself “very much an artist in the English tradition.”
Hockney, who was out as a gay man long before it was common, explored erotic themes, giving youthful male bodies the same tender scrutiny that artists had been giving the female nude for centuries.
Early works like We Two Boys Together Clinging and Two Men in a Shower celebrated gay relationships when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain.
Early in his career, two of his drawings were bought for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
“The moment I first sold pictures to earn a living, I felt rich. I’ve been rich ever since,” he told The Associated Press in 1995. “I didn’t have much money but I did what I wanted. … You are a rich man if you do the things you want to do.”
In 2018, his 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at a Christie’s auction for $90.3 million, at the time a record for a living artist.
While many of his best-known paintings had American scenes, he also tackled British subjects. He immortalized his parents in several portraits and his friends Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell in Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, a 1971 portrait voted one of Britain’s greatest paintings in a 2005 BBC poll.
Hockney’s work went beyond drawing and painting
Like many traditional artists, he considered drawing a fundamental skill and lamented that it wasn’t taught as rigorously as it once was.
“Human beings are the most interesting things we see, so they’re the hardest to draw,” he said in a 1996 AP interview.
Hockney also embraced other media, including printmaking, photo collage and video. He contributed costume and set designs for the theatre and opera, including a celebrated production of Tristan und Isolde first staged in 1987 at the Los Angeles Opera.
When he took up photography, he fused genres, assembling individual photos into elaborate collages like Pearblossom Highway, 11-18th April, 1986, built up of individual views of a desert highway intersection.
“My photographer friends said it was a painting,” Hockney told the AP in 2001. “I said it’s a photograph; I used a camera.”
Later, he began to draw on iPads, which became his favourite tool.
In the early 2000s, he looked afresh at the fields and forests of Yorkshire in a series of landscape paintings that combined bold colour with minute attention to the texture 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 a million people, and moved to the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Hockney used the English landscape for inspiration in his design for a stained-glass window installed at Westminster Abbey in 2018 to celebrate the long reign of Queen Elizabeth II.
His work changed how we see the world
In 2019, he moved to Normandy, where during the 2020 coronavirus lockdown he produced joyous iPad drawings of springtime for his friends. His message — “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring” — was emblazoned in neon across the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris when it hosted a huge Hockney exhibition that opened in April 2025.
Curator Norman Rosenthal, who helped put together the exhibition, called Hockney “the Picasso of our times.”
“When I say that, people laugh at me, as Picasso was the archetypal artist of the 20th century,” Rosenthal told the Independent newspaper. “But David Hockney is also an incredibly popular artist whose work changes how we see things.”
An unrepentant cigarette smoker who railed against government anti-smoking rules, Hockney complained when a poster for the 2025 exhibition was banned from the Paris Metro because it showed him holding a cigarette.
The announcement of his death from his publicist noted that Hockney was “a committed life-long and defiant smoker, expressing the pleasure in life it brought him. … He smoked up to the end.”
Hockney had a minor stroke in 2012 and was increasingly deaf in later years — something he said improved his visual perception.
“If you lose one sense, you gain other senses, and I feel I could see space clearer,” he told the AP in 2017.
He never stopped working.
“It’s my work that keeps me young,” Hockney told the Sun newspaper in 2017. “I’ve been a professional painter for 60 years. Sixty years of getting up every day and doing exactly what I want to do.”
