David Hockney Passed Away at 88

David Hockney passed away peacefully at his home in London on June 11, 2026, one month short of his 89th birthday — and barely months after the closing of David Hockney 25, the sprawling retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris that many had already begun to describe as the definitive account of his lifetime’s work. His publicist confirmed the news of his passing in a statement describing him as “one of the most important figures in contemporary art in both the 20th and 21st centuries” — a formulation that, for once, is not an exaggeration. No cause of death was given. He is survived by his longtime partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, his great-nephew and studio assistant Richard Hockney, and his brothers Philip and John. He leaves behind one of the most sustained, inventive, and sheer voluminous bodies of work in the history of British art.

Born on July 9, 1937, in Bradford, Yorkshire, Hockney knew what he wanted to be at the age of eleven and never seriously wavered. He trained at the Bradford School of Art from 1953, graduated with first-class honors in 1957, and arrived at the Royal College of Art in London in 1959, where he encountered Francis Bacon, Peter Blake, and R.B. Kitaj, and began to find his own footing. His early paintings of this period are gritty, abstract, and self-consciously modern — influenced by Pollock and Picasso, marked by an emerging openness about his homosexuality that was, at the time, genuinely courageous. However, the decisive move came in 1964, when Hockney first visited Los Angeles and immediately understood that he had found his city. The light, the colour, the freedom, the swimming pools — and above all, the permission, in the broadest possible sense, to be exactly who he was. He moved there, bought a house in the Hollywood Hills, and produced, over the following decade, the paintings that would make him famous across the world: A Bigger Splash (1967), Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970–71), Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972), among many other iconic works.

What is easy to forget, looking at them now, is how startling they must have seemed at the time. Abstract Expressionism with Rothko and Pollock was still broadly regarded as the pinnacle of modern painting, the culmination of a progressive trajectory that had been building since the early twentieth century. Into that context, Hockney arrived with figurative paintings of swimming pools, couples, and domestic interiors, rendered with a clarity and pleasure that the dominant critical language of the moment had no real framework for. He was promptly labeled a British Pop artist, which was both convenient and deeply unsatisfying — a category that said more about the exhaustion of modernist thinking, with its insistence that art moves in clean progressive movements, than it did about the work itself. Hockney was not making Pop Art. He was doing something harder to name: inaugurating, almost single-handedly, a postmodern figuration that refused the hierarchies of the avant-garde and proposed, instead, that looking carefully at the visible world was sufficient grounds for serious painting. His L.A. paintings are not about California in any documentary sense; they are about the nature of looking itself, and they carry that inquiry with a lightness of touch that has rarely been matched.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Hockney continued to experiment restlessly — with photography, with Cubist-inflected perspective, with theatrical set design, with the Polaroid collages he called “joiners,” with fax machines and photocopiers as artistic instruments. His Pearblossom Hwy. (1986) anticipated the digital image long before the digital image existed. He seemed constitutionally incapable of settling into a style, which made him difficult to categorize and easy to underestimate: critics who had pinned him as a Pop artist found themselves confronted with intimate and layered portraits; those who had filed him as a portrait painter found themselves looking at a series of sixty canvases forming A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998). The range was not restlessness for its own sake. It was the expression of a man for whom looking — really looking, with attention, with pleasure, with curiosity — was the primary activity of existence.

The later career brought further reinvention. In the 2000s and 2010s, Hockney returned to Yorkshire and produced a series of monumental multi-panel landscapes culminating in Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007), the largest en plein air painting ever made, at 4.5 by 12 meters. He then discovered the iPhone and later the iPad, producing digital drawings of extraordinary delicacy and color that he distributed to friends by email each morning — a practice that, during the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020, took on the character of a public gesture of solidarity. His message from his Normandy garden — “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring” — became one of the more quoted sentences of the pandemic. Hockney had moved to Normandy in 2019, partly, he said, with characteristic candor, because he wanted to be somewhere he could eat and smoke at the same time. The French, he observed, knew about pleasure. To describe the legacy Hockney leaves behind is simply impossible. The retrospective numbers, for instance, are staggering. Over seven decades of professional practice, Hockney worked in oil, acrylic, watercolour, crayon, ink, lithography, etching, photography, collage, fax, iPad, and theatrical design. He designed stained glass for Westminster Abbey in 2018. His 1972 pool painting sold at Christie’s New York for $90 million in 2018, briefly setting the record for the most expensive work by a living artist. His 2017 retrospective at Tate Britain was the most visited exhibition in the gallery’s history. Two further Tate projects — a major retrospective spanning seven decades, and a multimedia installation in the Turbine Hall based on his opera set designs — had been planned for 2027; the institution has confirmed it will proceed with both.

However, Hockney’s true legacy cannot be measured in numbers. What made Hockney one of the greatest artists of all time — and the case, stated plainly, is that he was — has nothing to do with any single style, since he adopted and discarded styles throughout his career as freely as other painters change brushes. It has nothing to do with technical innovation for its own sake, even though he innovated constantly: in his hands, the iPhone and the fax machine and the Polaroid and the theatrical stage all feel like natural extensions of the same impulse, not departures from it. It has nothing to do with the weight of theory, although he was not without intellectual ambition — his controversial Hockney-Falco thesis, proposing that Renaissance masters used optical aids including lenses and mirrors, generated years of art-historical debate and demonstrated that his curiosity extended well beyond the studio. None of these things, individually or together, account for why his work matters as much as it does. What accounts for it is simpler and harder to argue: Hockney believed, with total conviction and across eighty-eight years of living and working, that joy is not a lesser subject than tragedy. That the act of looking carefully at the world — at a man stepping out of a pool, at the hawthorn blossom in May, at the face of a friend, at the light on a Californian morning — is one of the things art is for. That the act of painting the visible world with attention and with pleasure is not a lesser form of art but, at its best, the highest form there is. He called it “Love Life.” He meant every word of it. And the paintings, all of them, prove him right.

Last Updated on June 16, 2026