David Hockney, Who Restored the Human Form to Art, Dies at 88
David Hockney, the British artist whose bold, colorful paintings and pioneering photo collages helped restore figurative art to prominence and made him one of the most recognizable and beloved artists of the modern era, has died at age 88. He passed away peacefully on June 11 at his home in London, his publicist Erica Bolton confirmed, one month short of his 89th birthday.
Hockney’s career spanned seven decades, from his emergence as a leading figure in the 1960s pop art movement to his embrace of digital art on the iPad in his later years. His signature works — sun-drenched California swimming pools, intimate portraits of friends, and vibrant Yorkshire landscapes — celebrated the beauty of everyday life with an unmistakable visual language that made serious painting look effortless.
“David Hockney’s enduring legacy reflects his underlying enthusiasm for life, his outstanding sense of humor, his immense generosity, and his investigative curiosity encapsulated by his signature phrase, ‘Love life,’” Bolton said in a statement.
The Bradford Boy Who Changed Modern Art
Born on July 9, 1937, in Bradford, West Yorkshire, Hockney showed artistic talent from an early age. He studied at Bradford College of Art before attending the Royal College of Art in London, where he graduated with a Gold Medal in 1962 alongside contemporaries such as R.B. Kitaj and Frank Bowling. It was at the RCA that Hockney created openly homoerotic works like We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961) — a radical statement at a time when homosexuality was still criminalized in the United Kingdom.
According to The Guardian, Hockney’s move to Los Angeles in 1964 proved transformative. The light, landscape, and culture of Southern California inspired his most famous works, including A Bigger Splash (1967), which depicts a California swimming pool with a lone diving board and an explosive white splash. “I spent longer on the splash than on any other thing in the painting,” Hockney told NPR. “I spent about a week painting it because it’s painted with small brushes.”
A Career of Constant Reinvention
Hockney was a master of multiple media — oil painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, photo collages (which he called “joiners”), fax art, opera set design, and digital art. In the 1980s, he pioneered photo collages that explored multiple perspectives inspired by cubism. In 2010, he began creating art on the iPhone and iPad using the Brushes app, producing vibrant digital landscapes that became a major part of his later career.
His 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold for $90.3 million at Christie’s New York in 2018, setting a record at the time for the most expensive artwork ever sold by a living artist. Responding to the sale, Hockney simply said: “Paint the things you love.”
As NPR reported, Hockney’s 2017 retrospective at Tate Britain became the most popular show in the gallery’s history, attracting nearly 500,000 visitors. An even larger iteration followed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York the following year.
Revolutionary LGBTQ+ Representation
Hockney’s depictions of gay domestic life were groundbreaking. He created works celebrating same-sex relationships at a time when such scenes were virtually unseen in mainstream art. Dominic James Bilton of the Queer British Art Network told the BBC that Hockney “pioneered queer British art before it was fashionable to do so, before contemporary society built upon it.”
Tributes from Across the World
Prime Minister Keir Starmer described Hockney as “one of Britain’s most celebrated artists,” adding that “his vivid, instantly recognisable work influenced generations of artists.” Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy called him “a true titan of British art” whose “boundless creativity and restless spirit leave behind a powerful legacy.”
Tate Britain Director Alex Farquharson said: “David was an endlessly inventive artist, with a unique vision of the world. He was always completely and courageously himself, both in his work and in life. He taught us about the joy of looking, seeing things the rest of us failed to notice.”
Art historian Richard Morris noted that Hockney’s “huge achievement was to make serious painting look effortless. He carried forward one of the most sustained investigations into vision, space and representation by any post-war artist. British art has lost a giant.”
A Life of Joyful Observation
Throughout his life, Hockney maintained an infectious enthusiasm for his craft. “I want my art to be joyful,” he told the BBC’s culture editor Katie Razzall in 2025. “Colour is a joyful thing.” He once told NPR: “I can look at a little puddle on a road in Yorkshire and just of the rain falling on it and think it’s marvelous. I see the world as very beautiful.”
He refused a knighthood in 1990 but accepted the Order of Merit in 2012, believing it to be the personal gift of Queen Elizabeth II. He also received France’s Légion d’Honneur. In 2019, Time magazine named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
What’s Next
Hockney is survived by his long-time partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima and two brothers, Philip and John. Tate Britain has confirmed it will proceed with two planned exhibitions for 2027 — a major survey at Tate Britain and a multimedia installation at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall — working closely with Hockney’s team to realize the projects he was preparing before his death.
As BBC News reported, Hockney was working to the very end. Drawing and painting, he said, was “all I want to do now.” His final exhibition, Hockney 25 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2025, featured nearly 500 works spanning his entire career — a fitting testament to an artist who spent a lifetime teaching us to celebrate the beauty of being alive.
“Love life,” Hockney wrote on a museum wall at his 2017 Pompidou retrospective. It was, perhaps, the truest summary of his art.