David Hockney, the British artist who turned sun-drenched Los Angeles into some of the most popular paintings of his era, died Thursday at his home in London at age 88. His longtime embrace of new technology, from photo collages to iPad drawings, helped define
David Hockney spent decades turning ordinary scenes into something luminous and unmistakably his: a pool flashing under the California sun, palm trees standing like punctuation marks, and the bright, confident faces of friends and lovers. Thursday, in London, he died at 88.
His death was confirmed in a statement by his publicist, Erica Bolton.
To many people, Los Angeles will always be filtered through Hockney’s images. “Los Angeles will always be thought of by many people worldwide through the images that David created. ” said Stephanie Barron. senior curator and head of the modern art department at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. which holds more than 150 works by Hockney in its permanent collection. Barron said one of his greatest gifts was the way he looked at the world “with wonder and joy in whatever medium he decided to work in.” She added that he “was fearless in his embrace of technology. ” and that the curiosity ran through his career and “continued to the end.”.
Barron, who knew Hockney for 50 years, said LACMA staged more exhibitions of his work during that time than any other artist. “David considered LACMA and the Tate his two museums,” she said.
The artist once called himself “an English Los Angeleno. ” a phrase that captured a life split between his British roots and the city that rewired his imagination. Hockney arrived in Los Angeles in 1964 and, soon after, began celebrating its landscapes and lifestyle in colorful, wildly popular paintings. He later expanded into intricate photo collages, portrait suites, painted and filmed images of Yorkshire landscapes, iPad drawings, and more.
He first visited Los Angeles in 1964. drawn by its light and leisure and hopeful it offered a less repressive atmosphere for homosexuality. He moved officially to L.A. in 1976. In 1978. he rented a multicolored home and studio complex nestled in the Hollywood Hills—an address where art world luminaries could end up at the dining room table. a guest might appear by the pool. and a model might be waiting on the bright blue porch. In the studio, it was possible to find something even more intimate: a model for his newest opera set.
Christopher Isherwood and his partner, artist Don Bachardy, were among the favored guests in that orbit of people and ideas. And for Hockney, Hollywood was more than scenery. Doug E. Roberts. a close friend and fellow artist. described it as a place Hockney loved—the people and the place—and said that Hockney liked to say he was raised in England and Hollywood because of the time he spent at the movies.
In the 1960s. Los Angeles was “an enigma. ” Roberts said. “a unique city different from his native London or even from New York City where he had his first encounter with ‘America.’” The blend of film. humor. and pop culture ran through Hockney’s work and personality: his interest ranged from Elvis Presley to the Hubble Space Telescope. and his sense of humor helped set him apart. Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes once called him “the Cole Porter of modern art.”.
Hockney also never hid his identity. He was open about being gay even when homosexuality was outlawed in Britain. That openness shaped both his public life and some of his most enduring work. His early love affair with artist Peter Schlesinger. a younger man he met when teaching a summer drawing class at UCLA in 1966. inspired Hockney’s monumental 1972 painting “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). ” a centerpiece of Jack Hazan’s 1974 film “A Bigger Splash.” In 2018. the painting’s auction at Christie’s drew a record $90 million for a living artist.
For all the experimentation, Hockney remained a dedicated student of art history. He paid homage in his work to Picasso and Cubism, as well as Monet, Matisse, Van Gogh and Cézanne. His love of opera often meant it was playing loudly in the studio. and he enjoyed taking visitors on curated car trips through the Hollywood Hills or Malibu while listening to Wagner. He designed sets for major companies in Los Angeles. Chicago. New York. London and elsewhere over the years. and some of his set models were later shown in museums.
Even as his subject matter shifted—from Los Angeles to Yorkshire—his method kept evolving. The David Hockney Foundation owns more than 8,000 of his works, including about 200 sketchbooks, more than 230 self-portraits, opera designs and portraits of family and friends.
His professional life was unusually crowded with firsts and bold bets. The artist’s Pop Art paintings in the early ‘60s at London’s Royal College of Art helped make him a permanent presence in public view. The spotlight only intensified when he turned to technology and optical tools as if they were just another kind of brush.
Hockney was the kind of artist who treated photography as part of his main job, not a detour. He once told The Times: “The Polaroids started oddly enough when I’d just finished a long period of work in the theater. which is of course playing with perspective and illusion.” He added that people said. “You are a painter. and photography is a sideline. ” but “nothing is a sideline for me.”.
That included long stretches of work built on cameras and canvases, as well as fax machines and photocopiers. In 1999. he went several times to a show of portraits by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres at London’s National Gallery and became taken with the photographic quality of Ingres’ 19th century drawings. He was certain the French artist had used something optical to achieve that quality. and he bought himself a camera lucida—described as a small device that works like a prism. He then applied Ingres’ methods, as he imagined them, to his own portraits of friends and family. In 2001, he published “Secret Knowledge,” exploring his theories on early artistic uses of optical devices.
His drawings accompanied nearly every step of his career. right down to the practical details: his inside jacket pockets were tailored to accommodate large drawing tools. sketchbooks. pencils. and later an iPad. In 2010. the first of several Hockney iPad drawings graced the cover of the New Yorker. and many of his iPad works have been featured in exhibitions since then.
In the later years. the Yorkshire landscapes he had returned to again and again became central to how he kept working. Hockney went home to England for Christmas for 30 years. often visiting his mother in the coastal town of Bridlington. which sat not far from Bradford. As a teenager in the 1950s, he would ride his bicycle to work in the fields.
In 1997, when his good friend Jonathan Silver was dying, Hockney stayed in Yorkshire for four months. Hockney later said Silver suggested he paint Yorkshire again—something he hadn’t done since he was a student. By 2005. he was painting the countryside en plein air. setting his easel—sometimes multiple easels—outdoors in the midst of what he was painting. As the paintings grew larger, he added more canvases, resulting in paintings of nine or more canvases.
Later, he equipped a Jeep with nine small, carefully mounted high-definition cameras to film Yorkshire’s rolling hills, trees and skies, then showed the films on multiple screens for friends and, later, in exhibitions.
Based in Bridlington in the family home, with a huge studio a few miles away, Hockney continued painting Yorkshire in every season, a project he knew would take him a long time. As he would quip, “As we say in Hollywood, I’m on location.”
He returned to Los Angeles full-time in 2013. He said in 2018, “Most people die of boredom,” adding, “I’m not bored yet. I’m still curious. I’m still excited by pictures. I say that when I’m in the studio, I feel like I’m 30, but when I leave it, I know I’m 80. So, naturally, I stay in the studio.”
As his hearing worsened, he left his home less, bringing the world to him instead—inviting painting, photography and film subjects to perform for his camera or sit for portraits in his studio.
At 82. he also set up a studio in France. in a country he felt was more hospitable to smokers like himself. and rented a large home in Normandy. He told reporters he wanted to be closer to the Bayeux Tapestry, his favorite artwork. He said he wanted to create work inspired by the tapestry and hinted it might be his swansong. “It is going to be marvelous,” he told The Art Newspaper. “I can’t think of anything better than to watch the arrival of spring in Normandy in 2019. Van Gogh would have loved it.”.
Recognition followed him across continents. His solo shows drew enormous crowds to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as early as 1988. In 2017. a major retrospective keyed to his 80th birthday was presented at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Paris’ Centre Pompidou. and London’s Tate Modern. Chronicling his arrival as an important artist in the “ravishing” Met retrospective, The New Yorker writer Andrea K. Scott called it “a revelation.” She wrote. “a retort to all the eye-rollers. ” including herself. who dismissed his work “as. at best. a guilty pleasure.”.
The arc of his life began far from California. Hockney was born the fourth of five children to a working-class family in Bradford, England, on July 9, 1937. He said he started “making marks on paper” at 8 and received private painting lessons before moving on to Bradford School of Art in 1953. His father. Kenneth. was a pacifist and a conscientious objector in World War II. which made the family somewhat outcast in its small hometown. His mother. Laura. was a devout Methodist who kept a detailed diary that later proved priceless to Hockney’s biographer. Christopher Simon Sykes. Sykes noted that when Laura learned that Hockney was gay she wrote. “I commend my boy to God and leave it to Him to decide.”.
After his first flat, the practical discipline behind the art was never far from view. Sykes. in his 2014 book “Hockney: The Biography. ” pointed out that Hockney’s first flat had a chest of drawers near the bed on which he had painted. in large capital letters. the words “get up and work immediately.”.
He attended the Royal College of Art in London from 1959 until his graduation in 1962, receiving the school’s Gold Medal. Before and after, he kept building a career defined by output and reinvention.
Hockney received the Order of Merit in 2012, presented to him by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace.
In the spring of his later years, even the most recent exhibitions carried that same sense of ongoing motion. His work “Gregory in the Pool (Paper Pool 4)” was part of his solo exhibition “David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed” at the Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Springs in 2024-2025.
Taken as a whole. the story of Hockney’s work doesn’t sit still: the bright Los Angeles he arrived to in 1964 eventually fed into photo collages. portrait experiments. and new ways of drawing and filming. Meanwhile. his technical curiosity kept pulling him in other directions—optical devices. iPad sketches. and multi-screen Yorkshire films—while his identity and his relationships remained woven into the art he made and the audiences who kept finding their way back.
Hockney had a phrase he used when signing letters: “love life.” It reads, even now, like an instruction. And for decades, he followed it across swimming pools, studios, opera sets, and optical experiments—until Thursday, when the light finally went out at 88.
David Hockney Los Angeles art LACMA British artist iPad drawings photo collages Yorkshire landscapes opera sets Order of Merit