David Hockney, artist renowned for his pool scenes, has died at 88

LONDON — Artist David Hockney, whose paintings of pools shimmering in the Los Angeles sunshine became icons of 20th-century art, died Thursday, his publicist said. He was 88.

Hockney was born in the north of England but lived much of his life in Southern California, making its sun-drenched suburban views a major motif.

Later in life he returned to Europe, finding renewed inspiration in the wooded hills of his native county of Yorkshire and the fields and trees of France’s Normandy region. He became one of the U.K.’s most treasured artists, his works selling for record prices at auction.

Historian Simon Schama said that “the popularity and durability of David Hockney’s art, through all his shape-shifts and restlessly inventive experiments, are really no mystery.”

“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.

Hockney’s publicist, Erica Bolton, says he died a few weeks short of his 89th birthday.

With his trademark round glasses and bleached-blond hair, Hockney was a well-known figure in the swinging British and American art scenes of the 1960s, even before he reached the age of 30. His paintings were just as distinctive, many of them creating a dreamlike world of patterned light bouncing off water and windows, and human forms rendered in flattened, simplified shapes in matte acrylic paint.

“I’m excited every day,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1979. “London has lots of dreary parts but I never find anything dreary in Los Angeles.”

Hockney’s early life and influences

Hockney was born July 9, 1937, in Bradford, a large industrial city whose chief export was woolen textiles. He spent his first two decades there before going to London’s Royal College of Art. He made an impact even before his graduation, and art dealer John Kasmin took him into his stable of artists in 1961.

His artistic influences ranged widely, from Renaissance portraitists to 19th-century English landscape painter J.M.W. Turner, Pablo Picasso’s experiments in Cubism and 20th-century American pop art.

Visiting the United States in 1963-64, Hockney gained notice with his update on “A Rake’s Progress,” 18th-century artist William Hogarth’s series of paintings telling the story of a wealthy cad’s escapades and eventual downfall. The New York Times said in 1964 that Hockney “brings Hogarth up-to-date with a vengeance and furnishes a good example of how younger artists like to marry text and picture with benefit to each.”

‘Just an ordinary artist’

He shared with other pop artists an interest in the polished surface of modern life. And, like Andy Warhol with his Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans, Hockney occasionally incorporated advertising labels, such as a British Typhoo Tea box used in his 1961 “Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style.”

He told The New York Times in 1964 he enjoyed the burgeoning pop art scene in New York but wasn’t sure he was part of it.

“I’m just an ordinary artist,” he said. “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.” Nonetheless, he still considered himself “very much an artist in the English tradition,” he said in 1995.

Even his move to California had a historic precedent, he noted, since earlier generations of English artists had sought out the brilliant light of Italy.

As an openly gay man, Hockney explored erotic themes, giving youthful male bodies the same tender scrutiny that artists had been giving the female nude for centuries. Friends and lovers frequently posed as models, and some images were based on photos in men’s bodybuilding magazines.

Early works like “We Two Boys Together Clinging” and “Two Men in a Shower” celebrated gay relationships when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain.

Early in his career, two of his drawings were bought 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 told 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.”

That freedom brought Hockney acclaim and wealth, with his works fetching record-breaking sums. In 2018, his 1972 painting “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” sold at a Christie’s auction for $90.3 million, at the time a record for a living artist. In February 2020 another pool painting, “The Splash,” from 1966, sold at Sotheby’s for 23.1 million pounds ($30 million).

While paintings of pools were a Hockney trademark, he also literally painted a pool when he decorated the bottom of the swimming pool at the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles.

While many of his best-known paintings had American scenes, he also tackled British subjects. He immortalized his parents in several portraits. “Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy,” a 1971 dual portrait of two of his English friends and their cat, was ranked No. 5 in a 2005 BBC Radio-National Gallery (London) online poll of the greatest paintings in Britain. It was the only work by a living painter in the top 10.

Like many traditional artists, he considering drawing a fundamental skill and lamented that it wasn’t taught as rigorously as it used to be.

“Human beings are the most interesting things we see, so they’re the hardest to draw,” he said in a 1996 AP interview, adding that the best drawings are made when there is empathy between the artist and subject.

His work went beyond drawing and painting

He didn’t limit himself to drawing and painting, though. He contributed costume and set designs for theater and the opera, including a celebrated production of “Tristan und Isolde” first staged in 1987 at the Los Angeles Opera.

Always an innovator, Hockney embraced drawing, painting, printmaking, photo collage and video in a seven-decade career.

When he took up photography, he fused genres, assembling individual photos into elaborate collages like “Pearblossom Highway, 11-18th April, 1986,” built up of individual views of a desert highway intersection.

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

The insight he gained from his photo work led him to research and write a 2001 book, “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.” He argued that through the centuries, artists used lenses and other optical devices to aid them in drawing much more often than most historians believe.

Later he began to draw on iPads, which became his favorite tool.

In the early 2000s he looked afresh at the fields and forests of Yorkshire in a series of exuberant landscape paintings that combined bold color with minute attention to the texture 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 a million people and moved to the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Hockney used the English landscape for inspiration in his design for a stained-glass window at Westminster Abbey to celebrate the long reign of Queen Elizabeth II. Completed in 2018, the Queen’s Window depicts a landscape of blossoming hawthorn trees in hues of blue, green, yellow, orange, pink and red.

‘They can’t cancel the spring’

By this time, Hockney was widely considered Britain’s greatest living artist, and a national treasure. In 1997, the queen named him a Companion of Honour, an award limited to 65 people “of distinction.”

In 2019, he moved to Normandy in France, where during the 2020 coronavirus lockdown he produced joyous iPad drawings of springtime for his friends. His message – “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring” – was emblazoned in neon across the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris when it hosted a huge Hockney exhibition that opened in April 2025.

The show ranged from the first painting he ever sold – a 1955 portrait of his father – through L.A. swimming pools to Yorkshire woodlands, portraits of friends, stage designs for opera and dozens of images of the exuberant arrival of spring in Normandy.

Art curator Norman Rosenthal, who helped put together the Paris exhibition, called Hockney “the Picasso of our times.”

“When I say that, people laugh at me, as Picasso was the archetypal artist of the 20th century,” Rosenthal told the Independent newspaper. “But David Hockney is also an incredibly popular artist whose work changes how we see things.”

An unrepentant cigarette smoker who railed against government anti-smoking rules, Hockney complained when a poster for the 2025 exhibition was banned from the Paris Metro because it showed him holding a cigarette.

Hockney had a minor stroke in 2012 and was increasingly deaf in later years – something he said had improved his visual perception.

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

He never stopped working.

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