Giant of British art David Hockney dies aged 88 after decades inspired by southern California

Artist David Hockney, whose paintings of pools shimmering in the Los Angeles sunshine became icons of 20th-century art, has died at the age of 88, his publicist has announced.

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 UK's most treasured artists, his works selling for record prices at auction.

King Charles paid tribute to his "dear friend", describing Hockney as an "inspiration to so many".

"David was one of life's true originals; one who wore his genius as lightly as those beloved yellow Crocs of his that helped brighten Palace occasions," the King said.

"I trust they will see him tread safely into the hereafter as we mourn a man whose irrepressible charm, talent and constant innovation will be most sorely missed, but whose dazzling creativity lives on in galleries and museums around the world."

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.

Hockney's early life and influences

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, 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, 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".

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".

'I'm just an ordinary artist'

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.

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.

'You're a rich man if you do the things you want to do'

Early works such as 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.

"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 $US90.3 million ($128 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 British pounds ($43 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.

While many of his best-known paintings had American scenes, he also tackled British subjects. He immortalised his parents in several portraits. Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, a 1971 dual portrait of two of his English friends and their cat, was ranked No. 5 in a 2005 BBC Radio-National Gallery (London) online poll of the greatest paintings in Britain. It was the only work by a living painter in the top 10.

Health problems later in life

Like many traditional artists, he considering drawing a fundamental skill and lamented that it wasn't taught as rigorously as it used to be.

He added that the best drawings were made when there was empathy between the artist and subject.

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.

Hockney had a minor stroke in 2012 and was increasingly deaf in later years, which he said improved his visual perception.

"If you lose one sense, you gain other senses, and I feel I could see space clearer," he said in 2017.

He never stopped working.

"It's my work that keeps me young," Hockney said in 2017. 

AP/ABC