{"id":732183,"date":"2026-06-12T15:06:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T15:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/732183\/"},"modified":"2026-06-12T15:06:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T15:06:09","slug":"british-artist-david-hockney-known-for-his-colourful-landscapes-and-pool-scenes-dies-at-88","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/732183\/","title":{"rendered":"British artist David Hockney, known for his colourful landscapes and pool scenes, dies at 88"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

David Hockney unveils his painting ‘Bigger Trees Near Water’ at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, London, in 2007.Sang Tan\/The Associated Press<\/p>\n

David Hockney, a treasured British artist whose paintings of shimmering pools and colourful iPad drawings became icons of contemporary art, has died, his publicist said Friday. He was 88.<\/p>\n

Over a seven-decade career, Hockney explored and reimagined classical portraiture, landscape painting and pop art, working in painting, collage, photography and digital drawing.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Normandy region. One of the most popular and critically lauded British artists of his generation, his works sold for record prices at auction.<\/p>\n

Historian Simon Schama said it\u2019s no mystery why his work is so enduringly appealing.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis work is admired \u2013 loved is not too strong a word \u2013 by the millions who, worldwide, flock to see it because it presupposes an expectation of pleasure,\u201d Schama wrote in an essay accompanying a 2025 Hockney exhibition in Paris.<\/p>\n

Hockney\u2019s publicist, Erica Bolton, said he died at his home in London on Thursday, less than a month short of his 89th birthday. She did not give a cause of death.<\/p>\n

He is survived by his longtime partner Jean-Pierre Gon\u00e7alves de Lima; his great-nephew and studio assistant, Richard Hockney; his brothers Philip and John; and numerous nieces, nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews.<\/p>\n

Hockney was an icon of the swinging 60s<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m excited every day,\u201d he told the Los Angeles Times in 1979. \u201cLondon has lots of dreary parts but I never find anything dreary in Los Angeles.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hockney was born July 9, 1937, in Bradford, a large industrial city whose chief export was woollen textiles. He spent his first two decades there before going to London\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

His artistic influences ranged widely, including Renaissance portraitists, 18th-century English artist William Hogarth\u2019s satirical drawings, 19th-century English painter J.M.W. Turner\u2019s landscapes, Pablo Picasso\u2019s experiments in Cubism and 20th-century American pop art.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s soup cans, Hockney occasionally incorporated advertising labels, such as a British Typhoo Tea box used in his 1961 Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style.<\/p>\n

He saw success early in his careerOpen this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

David Hockney poses in front of his acrylic on canvas ‘Studio Interior #4.’Matt Dunham\/The Associated Press<\/p>\n

He told The New York Times in 1964 that he enjoyed the burgeoning pop art scene in New York but wasn\u2019t sure he was part of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m just an ordinary artist,\u201d he said. \u201cI do admire American pop \u2013 in fact it seems that everything fresh-looking and vital in England these days has been coming from the U.S.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, he said in 1995 that he still considered himself \u201cvery much an artist in the English tradition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even his move to California in 1964 had a historic precedent, he noted, since earlier generations of English artists had sought out the brilliant light of Italy.<\/p>\n

Hockney, who was out as a gay man long before it was common, explored erotic themes, giving youthful male bodies the same tender scrutiny that artists had been giving the female nude for centuries. <\/p>\n

Early works like We Two Boys Together Clinging and Two Men in a Shower celebrated gay relationships when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth presents artist David Hockney with the Order of Merit at Buckingham Palace, in May, 2012.POOL New\/Reuters<\/p>\n

Early in his career, two of his drawings were bought for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe moment I first sold pictures to earn a living, I felt rich. I\u2019ve been rich ever since,\u201d he told The Associated Press in 1995. \u201cI didn\u2019t have much money but I did what I wanted. … You are a rich man if you do the things you want to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2018, his 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at a Christie\u2019s auction for US$90.3-million, at the time a record for a living artist.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

David Hockney stands in front of one of his paintings ‘A Closer Grand Canyon, 1998.’Philippe Wojazer\/Reuters<\/p>\n

His work went beyond drawing and painting<\/p>\n

Like many traditional artists, he considering drawing a fundamental skill and lamented that it wasn\u2019t taught as rigorously as it used to be.<\/p>\n

\u201cHuman beings are the most interesting things we see, so they\u2019re the hardest to draw,\u201d he said in a 1996 AP interview.<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t limit himself to drawing and painting, though. He contributed costume and set designs for theatre and the opera, including a celebrated production of Tristan und Isolde first staged in 1987 at the Los Angeles Opera.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

David Hockney in front of his artwork ‘The Chairs,’ in 2015.LEON NEAL\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Always an innovator, Hockney embraced drawing, painting, printmaking, photo collage and video in a seven-decade career.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy photographer friends said it was a painting,\u201d Hockney told the AP in 2001. \u201cI said it\u2019s a photograph; I used a camera.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Later he began to draw on iPads, which became his favourite tool.<\/p>\n

In the early 2000s, he looked afresh at the fields and forests of Yorkshire in a series of landscape paintings that combined bold colour 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.<\/p>\n

Hockney used the English landscape for inspiration in his design for a stained-glass window installed at Westminster Abbey in 2018 to celebrate the long reign of Queen Elizabeth II.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

A David Hockney self-portrait ends a display presented by drones, forming a digital selection of David Hockney’s iconic artworks in his hometown of Bradford, England, 2025.Jon Super\/The Associated Press<\/p>\n

His work changed how we see the world<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 \u201cDo remember they can\u2019t cancel the spring\u201d \u2013 was emblazoned in neon across the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris when it hosted a huge Hockney exhibition that opened in April, 2025.<\/p>\n

Art curator Norman Rosenthal, who helped put together the Paris exhibition, called Hockney \u201cthe Picasso of our times.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I say that, people laugh at me, as Picasso was the archetypal artist of the 20th century,\u201d Rosenthal told the Independent newspaper. \u201cBut David Hockney is also an incredibly popular artist whose work changes how we see things.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The announcement of his death from his publicist noted that Hockney was \u201ca committed life-long and defiant smoker, expressing the pleasure in life it brought him. … He smoked up to the end.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hockney had a minor stroke in 2012 and was increasingly deaf in later years \u2013 something he said had improved his visual perception.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you lose one sense, you gain other senses, and I feel I could see space clearer,\u201d he told the AP in 2017.<\/p>\n

He never stopped working.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s my work that keeps me young,\u201d Hockney told the Sun newspaper in 2017. \u201cI\u2019ve been a professional painter for 60 years. Sixty years of getting up every day and doing exactly what I want to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

David Hockney poses in front of his painting entitled ‘Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy’ at the National Portrait Gallery in London, 2006.CARL DE SOUZA\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: David Hockney unveils his painting ‘Bigger Trees Near Water’ at the Royal Academy’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":732184,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[901,76,354,888,355,902,879,877,903,49,48,876,895,896,891,878,875,356,46,549,75,295,894,887,914,880,881,893,889,890,884,904,885,909,910,912,907,911,905,908,882,898,899,714,897,906,865,61,900,892,886,883,913],"class_list":["post-732183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-alberta","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-arts-news","tag-artsanddesign","tag-bc","tag-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news-video","tag-british-columbia","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-canada-news","tag-canada-sports","tag-canada-sports-news","tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","tag-canadian-breaking-news","tag-canadian-news","tag-design","tag-economy","tag-education","tag-entertainment","tag-environment","tag-federal-government","tag-foreign-news","tag-globe-and-mail","tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","tag-government","tag-life-news","tag-lifestyle","tag-local-news","tag-manitoba","tag-national-news","tag-new-brunswick","tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","tag-northwest-territories","tag-nova-scotia","tag-nunavut","tag-ontario","tag-pei","tag-photos","tag-political-news","tag-political-opinion","tag-politics","tag-politics-news","tag-quebec","tag-sports-news","tag-technology","tag-travel","tag-trudeau","tag-us-news","tag-world-news","tag-yukon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=732183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732183\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/732184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=732183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=732183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=732183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}