David Hockney, an English painter, photographer, stage designer, printmaker, and draftsman who long made Southern California his muse and his home, and the fleeting beauty of life’s smallest moments the grand theme of his shape-shifting art, died June 11 at his home in London. He was 88.
His publicist Erica Bolton confirmed the death in a statement.
Mr. Hockney’s art, which earned him international renown and a colossal fortune, encompassed paintings of azure swimming pools and the artist’s gay friends; kaleidoscopic portraits collaged together from dozens of cocktail-napkin-size Polaroids; room-size installations using computer-controlled theatrical light fixtures; and, in later years, garish landscapes “drawn” with fingers on an iPad.
Throughout these stylistic reinventions, over a career that seemed at times to memorialize the unmemorable, there was one constant: impermanence. “I loved the idea of painting this thing that lasts for two seconds,” Mr. Hockney once said, reflecting on The Splash, one of a series of paintings of water displaced by a recreational diver who is nowhere to be seen. “It takes me two weeks to paint this event that lasts for two seconds.”
In 2018, at Christie’s auction house in Manhattan, his Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) sold for $90.3 million, a world record price for a living artist, topping the previous record of $58.4 million reached by American Jeff Koons in 2013 for his stainless steel sculpture Balloon Dog (Orange).
Mr. Hockney, a working-class lad from what was at the time England’s grimy industrial north, became a top pupil at London’s Royal College of Art. In 1963, his first solo exhibition sold out at a trendy London gallery. He soon traveled to California, long the center of his hedonistic fantasies fueled by muscle magazines.
Like his pop-artist friend Andy Warhol — whom he vaguely resembled with his peroxide-blond hair — he was strongly influenced by technological advances in color photography, color ads in magazines, and early color TV. He deconstructed traditional ideas of perspective, proportion, and color balance with his often vivid pinks, blues, greens, yellows, and purples.
Man in Shower in Beverly Hills (1964) indulged his fascination not only with the male figure but also with water in motion. A Bigger Splash (1967), perhaps his best-known painting, captured the broken surface of a pool, the diving board protruding from the foreground. Today the work hangs in the prestigious Tate Britain museum when it is not on tour.
Beverly Hills Housewife (1967), depicting philanthropist and art collector Betty Freeman standing on her patio, fetched $7.9 million at a Christie’s auction in New York in 2009. Mr. Hockney’s previous highest price, in 2006, had been $5.4 million for The Splash, painted in 1966.
“What David did was reinvent the way we saw the world,” Lindy Dufferin, the widow of one of his early patrons, told British Vogue in 2017. “Up until then a splash had passed without us noticing; the pool and the people around it would interest us, not the splash. So, as is typical of David, he made a deep philosophical point — that everything is ephemeral and passing — in a humorous way.”
Mr. Hockney’s artistic restlessness led him to remake himself and his work over the years, with portraiture and still lifes from the decorous to the vibrant, such as his 16-foot-long May Blossom on the Roman Road (2009) with its foliage and swarming insects. Some of his later and best-selling works were landscapes depicting the American West and the forests of his native Yorkshire.
Woldgate Woods (2006) sold at Sotheby’s in New York in 2016 for a record auction price of $11.7 million. In 2017, his composite painting 15 Canvas Study of the Grand Canyon (1998), with its deep, earthy sunset colors, sold at Sotheby’s in London for $7.88 million. As his age and celebrity grew, so did his prices. In May 2018, at a Sotheby’s auction in New York, his 1990 work Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica went under the hammer for $28.5 million — more than twice the estimate and a record for a Hockney.
His prevailing fascination was with taking the mundane — household objects such as ashtrays and lamp shapes and passing moments like a shower — and emancipating them from the workaday as commentaries on what and how we see.
“He is one of only a handful of 20th-century British artists who added anything to the image bank of the world’s imagination,” Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones wrote in 2004. “He was British art’s first pop star. But this was not because he made easy images. His paintings unequivocally praised gay sex — for example, Two Men in a Shower (1963). They were so innocent they disarmed everyone.”
Visionary or lightweight?
David Hockney was born in Bradford on July 9, 1937, the fourth of five children of what he called eccentric, “radical working class” parents.
His mother, who was deeply religious and devoutly vegetarian, encouraged her son’s doodling as long as he didn’t do it on the wallpaper. His father, he told the Guardian, “was constantly writing to Stalin — every week. He used to tell us how important these letters were. We didn’t think so. We didn’t think Stalin would be waiting for them.”
A conscientious objector during World War II, the elder Hockney became a social pariah, losing his job as an accounting clerk.
Bradford, Mr. Hockney recalled, was perpetually cold and overcast, and made drearier still by wartime rationing in the 1940s and postwar deprivation in the ’50s. He escaped through movies and became enchanted with the concept of sun-dappled California.
“I knew even as a child that it was sunny in Los Angeles because even though Laurel and Hardy wore overcoats, they cast long shadows,” he once told the New York Times. “There were no long shadows in Bradford. I noticed that. I thought, ‘Boy, it must be very sunny there.’ ”
Mr. Hockney displayed a precocious talent for cartooning and poster-making and won second place in a national newspaper competition to design an advertisement for a watch. He entered the Bradford College of Art at 16 on a scholarship and graduated in 1957. Also a registered conscientious objector, he worked as a hospital orderly to complete two-year national service.
From 1959 to 1962, he studied at the Royal College of Art, where his works earned the school’s gold medal. The next year, art dealer John Kasmin gave him his debut solo exhibition, “Pictures With People In.”
At the college, Mr. Hockney also met the Ohio-born artist R.B. Kitaj. Incorporating Kitaj’s literary leanings, he used fragments of poems and quotations from Walt Whitman in his work. Paintings such as We Two Boys Clinging Together (1961) were among his earliest artistic nods to his homosexuality.
A chain-smoking playboy, the artist became a hero to some in the LGBTQ community for being openly, indulgently gay at a time when homosexuality was still criminalized in England. Jack Hazan’s 1973 semidocumentary film A Bigger Splash shows Mr. Hockney reeling after the trauma of a breakup. Mr. Hockney was also the subject of Randall Wright’s well-received 2014 documentary Hockney.
After his initial success in London, Mr. Hockney made his first trip to New York, where one friend introduced him to the city’s museums and galleries and another took him to its gay hot spots. Mr. Hockney soon embarked for California, beckoned by magazine images of beaches, suntanned pecs, and six-pack abs.
He set up a studio in Hollywood Hills, teaching at several universities in the state, while also maintaining a home in the posh London district of Kensington as well as a seaside house in Bridlington, East Yorkshire.
In 1975, Mr. Hockney began designing stage sets for theater, ballet, and opera, starting with a noted production of Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress at the Glyndebourne Festival in East Sussex, England.
Over the decades, Mr. Hockney was viewed alternately with admiration and skepticism, as a visionary who played with convention and as a lightweight drawn to the frivolous.
Commenting on a major Hockney retrospective in 2017 at Tate Britain, the British art writer Michael Glover observed in the Independent: “Is Hockney really deserving of this ridiculous amount of attention on the grounds of merit alone? Certainly not. He can be wonderful — some of those early prints were wonderful. He can be awful — as he so often was in the 1980s, when he played at being Picasso or doggedly painted his dogs. He can also be no better than pretty good. Many of his portraits look tossed off.”
But Chris Stephens, formerly lead curator of modern British art at Tate Britain and co-curator of the Hockney retrospective, called him “brilliant at capturing people’s psychological aspect, their psychological demeanor.”
One of Mr. Hockney’s best-received works was a time-lapse installation titled Snails Space with Vari-Lites, “Painting as Performance,” created in 1995-1996 and donated to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington in 2003 by philanthropist Nan Tucker McEvoy, who chaired the museum’s governing board.
The work features a nine-minute light show in which high-intensity, computerized spotlights cast a rainbow of colors from ever-changing angles upon a 3D landscape that is more stage set than painting. Describing the Snails Space exhibition, the museum declared it “both a summary of Hockney’s career and a poignant example of his belief that art should ‘overcome the sterility of despair.’ ”
From 2004 to 2013, Mr. Hockney decamped for Yorkshire, looking for new inspiration in the trees and the turning of the seasons — and also because of what he considered puritanical antismoking ordinances in America.
His return led to the financial windfall of Woldgate Woods. But it also brought tragedy, including a stroke in 2012 and the death the next year at his home studio of a 23-year-old assistant who drank drain cleaner after taking cocaine and ecstasy pills. The death was declared “a result of misadventure” and no charges were brought against Mr. Hockney, who was away at the time and later returned to Los Angeles.
In 2018, Mr. Hockney, at age 81, achieved a longtime ambition that earned him no money and cost him a lot of time. His first stained-glass window, designed on his iPad and titled The Queen’s Window, was unveiled in London’s historic Westminster Abbey to commemorate Queen Elizabeth II’s reign.
In sharp contrast to the Abbey’s traditional staid, religious-themed stained-glass windows, Mr. Hockney used his distinctive color palette of yellow, red, blue, pink, orange, and green to reflect the queen’s love of the countryside. He visibly held back tears as the window was revealed. The Barley Studio of York, England, using centuries-old techniques, painstakingly created the window in pieces in coordination with Mr. Hockney and his iPad creation.
In 2019 Mr. Hockney began working in Normandy, producing ink drawings and paintings including A Year in Normandie, a massive panoramic iPad painting inspired by the nearby Bayeux Tapestry and his fascination with Chinese scrolls. He relocated to London in 2023.
The director of Tate Britain, Alex Farquharson, said in a social media post that the gallery would work to realize two major projects Mr. Hockney was preparing for 2027: an exhibition featuring seven decades of his work and a multimedia installation at the Tate Modern showcasing his designs for opera sets.
Survivors include his longtime partner, Jean-Pierre “JP” Gonçalves de Lima; and two brothers.
Stephens, the former curator at Tate Britain and also a Hockney biographer, told the Times of London in 2017 that Mr. Hockney was happiest basking in the libertine joys of California. “He says, ‘Well I only have to go out for three things: the doctor, the dentist, and the marijuana supply.’ Which is not true, actually, because the guy who washes his car brings that round.”
