David Hockney, iconic British artist recognized for his colourful landscapes and pool scenes, dies at 88

LONDON (AP) — David Hockney, a treasured British artist whose work of shimmering swimming pools and colourful 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, pictures 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 significant motif.

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Later in life he returned to Europe, discovering renewed inspiration within the wooded hills of his native county of Yorkshire and the fields and timber of France’s Normandy area. One of the most well-liked and critically lauded British artists of his era, his works bought for file costs at public sale.

Historian Simon Schama stated it is no thriller why his work is so enduringly interesting.

“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.

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Hockney’s publicist, Erica Bolton, stated he died at his residence in London on Thursday, lower than a month wanting his 89th birthday. She didn’t give a explanation for demise.

He is survived by his longtime companion 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

With his trademark spherical glasses and bleached-blond hair, Hockney was a widely 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 every day,” he advised the Los Angeles Times in 1979. “London has lots of dreary parts but I never find anything dreary in Los Angeles.”

WATCH: David Hockney continues prodigious picture-making profession by adopting new tech

Hockney was born July 9, 1937, in Bradford, a big industrial metropolis whose chief export was woolen textiles. He spent his first twenty years there earlier than going to London’s Royal College of Art. He made an influence even earlier than his commencement, and artwork seller John Kasmin took him into his secure of artists in 1961.

His inventive 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.

He shared with different pop artists an curiosity within the polished floor of contemporary life. And, like Andy Warhol together with his Brillo packing containers and Campbell’s soup cans, Hockney often included promoting labels, similar to a British Typhoo Tea field utilized in his 1961 “Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style.”

He noticed success early in his profession

He advised The New York Times 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 just an ordinary artist,” he stated. “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.”

WATCH: David Hockney thinks it is best to take an extended take a look at life

Nonetheless, he stated in 1995 that he nonetheless thought of himself “very much an artist in the English tradition.”

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 Together Clinging” and “Two Men in a Shower” 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 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 advised 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 portray “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” bought at a Christie’s public sale for $90.3 million, on the time a file for a residing artist.

While 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 buddies Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell in “Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy,” a 1971 portrait voted one among Britain’s biggest work in a 2005 BBC ballot.

Hockney’s work went past drawing and portray

Like many conventional artists, he contemplating drawing a elementary ability and lamented that it wasn’t taught as rigorously because it was.

“Human beings are the most interesting things we see, so they’re the hardest to draw,” he stated in a 1996 AP interview.

Hockney additionally embraced different media, together with printmaking, picture collage and video. He contributed costume and set designs for the theater and opera, together with a celebrated manufacturing of “Tristan und Isolde” first staged in 1987 on the Los Angeles Opera.

When he took up pictures, he fused genres, assembling particular person pictures into elaborate collages like “Pearblossom Highway, 11-18th April, 1986,” constructed up of particular person views of a desert freeway intersection.

“My photographer friends said it was a painting,” Hockney advised the AP in 2001. “I said it’s a photograph; I used a camera.”

Later he started to attract on iPads, which turned his favourite device.

In the early 2000s, he regarded afresh on the fields and forests of Yorkshire in a sequence of panorama work that mixed daring shade 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 one million individuals and moved to the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art 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.

He labored proper up till his demise

In 2019, he moved to Normandy, the place throughout the 2020 coronavirus lockdown he produced joyous iPad drawings of springtime for his buddies. His message — “Do remember they can’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.

Art critic Estelle Lovatt stated Hockney “changed how we see the world.”

“He was one of the first artists to use a fax machine,” she advised the AP. “He was one of the first artists to use the Polaroid camera to make collages. He was one of the first artists to use really, really vibrant colors.”

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 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 more and more deaf in later years — one thing he stated improved his visible notion.

“If you lose one sense, you gain other senses, and I feel I could see space clearer,” he advised the AP in 2017.

He by no means stopped working.

“It’s my work that keeps me young,” Hockney advised 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.”

Associated Press journalist Mustakim Hasnath contributed to this report.