LONDON (AP) — Artist David Hockney, whose paintings of pools shimmering in the Los Angeles sunshine became icons of 20th-century art, died Thursday, his publicist said. He was 88.
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. He became one of the U.K.’s most treasured artists, his works selling for record prices at auction.
Historian Simon Schama said that “the popularity and durability of David Hockney’s art, through all his shape-shifts and restlessly inventive experiments, are really no mystery.”
“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, says he died a few weeks short of his 89th birthday.
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’s early life and influences
Hockney was born July 9, 1937, in Bradford, a large industrial city whose chief export was woolen 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, from Renaissance portraitists to 19th-century English landscape painter J.M.W. Turner, Pablo Picasso’s experiments in Cubism and 20th-century American pop art.
Visiting the United States in 1963-64, Hockney gained notice with his update on “A Rake’s Progress,” 18th-century artist William Hogarth’s series of paintings telling the story of a wealthy cad’s escapades and eventual downfall. The New York Times said in 1964 that Hockney “brings Hogarth up-to-date with a vengeance and furnishes a good example of how younger artists like to marry text and picture with benefit to each.”
‘Just an ordinary artist’
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 told The New York Times in 1964 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 still considered himself “very much an artist in the English tradition,” he said in 1995.
Even his move to California had a historic precedent, he noted, since earlier generations of English artists had sought out the brilliant light of Italy.
As an openly gay man, Hockney explored erotic themes, giving youthful male bodies the same tender scrutiny that artists had been giving the female nude for centuries. Friends and lovers frequently posed as models, and some images were based on photos in men’s bodybuilding magazines.
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 AP 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.”
That freedom brought Hockney acclaim and wealth, with his works fetching record-breaking sums. 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. In February 2020 another pool painting, “The Splash,” from 1966, sold at Sotheby’s for 23.1 million pounds ($30 million).
While paintings of pools were a Hockney trademark, he also literally painted a pool when he decorated the bottom of the swimming pool at the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles.
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