David Hockney, one of the 20th century’s most famous artists best-known for his depictions of the sunny glitz of 1960s Los Angeles, has died at age 88. His publicist, Erica Bolton confirmed he “passed away peacefully” at home in London on Thursday, just one month away from his 89th birthday.
Hockney is one of contemporary art’s most influential and immediately recognizable figures in his signature cap, round glasses, and colorful, often checkered attire. Above all, he stands apart as one of the few artists in the last century to have captured the imaginations of both a wider public, as well as the art world’s tougher-to-crack critics and gatekeepers.
Yet he remained unconcerned with the contemporary art trends. He continued painting the subjects he loved right up until the near end of his life, which included people and places he encountered over the course of years spent living in London, Los Angeles, East Yorkshire, and Normandy, to name a few.
Born in Yorkshire on July 9, 1937, Hockney began making a name for himself as a Pop artist in the late 1950s and early ’60s. He was also a rare artist for his time to be openly gay, and reference that aspect of his life in his paintings as early as the 1950’s, despite homosexually being illegal in England until 1967.
Many associate Hockney with his sun-drenched figurative paintings of Los Angeles swimming pools. The most famous of these is A Bigger Splash (1967), which shows a yellow diving board jutting out into a clear blue pool whose tranquility has been disrupted by someone who has just dove into the pool. Some of them have commanded many millions at auction, like 1972’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), showing a man looking into the pool as another man swims underwater to the edge. It sold at Christie’s for $90.3 million in 2018, and at the time, it was the most expensive auctioned artwork by a living artist.
Other works from the era also include depictions of the wealthy people who occupied these homes, like the 1968 canvas American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman), showing Fred in a suit and Marcia in a pink bathrobe; at the center are two sculptures they own (one outside and one in their glass house).
But Hockney was not confined to paint on canvas. He also painted with iPads—en plein air, like the Impressionists—he designed operas that were total, immersive artworks, made etchings, lithographs, photographs, and stained-glass windows.
Just nine months ago, his largest exhibition ever closed at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. The over 400-object show included his iPad paintings, as well as many portraits, which famously were only of people he knew, and some earlier works. When he was stuck in Normandy during lockdown, he turned to the technically innovative iPad, to make “luminous compositions in juxtaposed flat tints, but with pop accents, to capture the effects of light and climatic changes,” wrote Sarah Belmont for ARTnews.
In that show, one recent self-portrait shows him at work in a garden. On his jacket lapel, is a sticker that reads “End Bossiness Soon,” an official stance that Hockney liked to repeat in interviews, particularly in defense of his love for smoking. “I smoke for my mental health,” he famously told the BBC in 2004.
He is survived by his partner Jean-Pierre Goncalves de Lima, two brothers, Phillip and John, and their children and grandchildren.
