{"id":733251,"date":"2026-06-13T02:08:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T02:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/733251\/"},"modified":"2026-06-13T02:08:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T02:08:11","slug":"david-hockney-obituary-painting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/733251\/","title":{"rendered":"David Hockney obituary | Painting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Soon after he moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s, the artist David Hockney<\/a> was visited by his mother. As they drove back from the airport, far from her native Bradford, she gazed about her in apparent awe at the beauties of sun-kissed southern California. Then, as Hockney was fond of recalling, she turned and said: \u201cI don\u2019t understand it. Such lovely drying weather and no one\u2019s got their washing out.\u201d Mrs Hockney thus joined Mrs Warhol and Alan Bennett\u2019s \u201cMam\u201d as working-class mothers who delighted in their son\u2019s success without ever quite understanding it.<\/p>\n

Hockney, who has died aged 88, had been similarly awestruck when he first went to California in 1963, commissioned to make work for a show in New York. His response, though, was quite different. Looking down from a Pan Am jet, he marvelled at the blue glint of swimming pools and thought, \u201cMy God, this place needs its Piranesi.\u201d<\/p>\n

His first Californian picture, Plastic Tree Plus City Hall<\/a>, celebrated the artificiality of Los Angeles \u2013 what the critic Robert Hughes<\/a> called its role as \u201ca flat, glaring, over-lit, antiseptic madhouse\u201d. It also did so in artificial paint, the plastic-based acrylic that Hockney now used seriously for the first time.<\/p>\n

Acrylic allowed for brighter saturations of colour than had traditional oil paints while doing away with surface texture. It was the perfect medium for capturing that signifier of a shallow world, the dappled surface of a chlorinated pool.<\/p>\n

Hockney\u2019s A Bigger Splash (1967), which sold for \u00a323.1m in 2020. Photograph: David Hockney<\/p>\n

Back in London the following year, at his flat in Powis Square, Notting Hill, Hockney set to work on Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool<\/a>, based on drawings he had made in California. Pushed up flat against the picture plane, the work\u2019s blue-on-white squiggled surface looks merely pretty, poster-like. Like the artist who made it, though, its frivolity is deceptive. Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool is a polished, late-modernist work, its interplay of surface and depth consciously drawing on its maker\u2019s knowledge of Matisse and C\u00e9zanne.<\/p>\n

It was to be the forerunner of a body of work that, 60 years later, remains Hockney\u2019s best known: paintings such as Peter Getting Out of Nick\u2019s Pool <\/a>(1966), centred on the tan-lined bare bottom of the artist\u2019s then partner, the Californian student Peter Schlesinger<\/a>. These works would culminate, in 1967, in the image that is still Hockney\u2019s most famous, lending its name to Jack Hazan\u2019s 1973 semi-fictionalised biopic of the artist: A Bigger Splash<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"DavidDavid Hockney: the artist whose work was a feast of visual pleasures \u2013 video obituary<\/p>\n

Square and white-bordered, the 8ft x 8ft canvas, now in Tate Britain<\/a>, mimics the Polaroid snapshot on which it was based, the better to claim its own status as a painting.<\/p>\n

When Hockney had arrived at the Royal College of Art just a few years before, in 1959, after a national diploma in design at Bradford College of Art followed by two years of alternative service (Hockney, like his father, was a conscientious objector) it was a feverish place at a febrile time. Recent graduates included Peter Blake, Frank Auerbach<\/a> and Bridget Riley. Hockney\u2019s particular admiration was for an older American called Ron Kitaj, better known as RB. It was Kitaj<\/a> who suggested the subject of his first London paintings, Hockney being at the time a militant vegetarian. \u201cI handed out leaflets about the cruelty involved in making the terrible sausages you got in the common room,\u201d he remembered. \u201cAt Kitaj\u2019s suggestion, I started painting vegetarian propaganda pictures and they became absurd and interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n

The older man\u2019s magic lay in his nationality. Like most students at the RCA \u2013 and, indeed, like most postwar Britons \u2013 Hockney was fascinated by the US: Kitaj\u2019s speciality at the time was proto-pop paintings of American motorcyclists and film stars. He also introduced the young Yorkshireman to Walt Whitman<\/a>, whose poems of gay love would inspire a series of works Hockney called the Love Paintings. One, described by its new owner as \u201can indecent picture\u201d, was bought by the photographer Cecil Beaton. Whitman\u2019s verse was also the source of Hockney\u2019s best-known college piece, a more-or-less openly homoerotic canvas called We Two Boys Together Clinging<\/a>. Unusually, this had begun life as an etching. The influence of graphic art would remain central to Hockney\u2019s painting.<\/p>\n

David Hockney with his partner Peter Schlesinger in Jack Hazan\u2019s film A Bigger Splash, 1973.
Photograph: Collection Christophel\/Alamy<\/p>\n

Awarded the RCA\u2019s gold medal by Richard Hamilton<\/a> in 1961 (\u201cDavid looked fine in his gold lam\u00e9 jacket,\u201d his proud mother wrote) Hockney was by now the college star. His work hogged reviews of that year\u2019s Young Contemporaries show in London, catching the eye of the gallerist Paul Kasmin, who proposed himself as his promoter. With Kasmin\u2019s backing, Hockney flew to New York on 9 July 1961, his 24th birthday. There, he saw a television advertisement for Lady Clairol hair dye, its slogan \u201cIs it true blondes have more fun?\u201d He returned to London a blond, in which guise he appeared, photographed by Lord Snowdon<\/a> and alongside Francis Bacon, in the Sunday Times\u2019s new magazine the following June.<\/p>\n

The 60s had taken Hockney to the US and stardom, but the decade that followed would be marked by loss. He had, for a time, been the lover of the couturier Ossie Clark; when Clark married the fabric designer Celia Birtwell<\/a>, in 1969, Hockney was the pair\u2019s best man. His portrait of them, made as a wedding present, is full of foreboding. Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-71)<\/a>, painted contre-jour, looks like the depiction of an idealised couple. It is, in reality, a problem painting, peppered with ominous hints and clues.<\/p>\n

If Clark has the couple\u2019s cat, Blanche, in his lap, the one in the picture\u2019s title is Percy, slang for penis. Reversing the traditional order of wedding portraits, Clark sits while his wife stands; Hockney remains a presence in their life, in the form of one of the etchings from his early 60s series, The Rake\u2019s Progress<\/a>, hanging on a wall to the left. (These would feed into his set design for Stravinsky\u2019s opera of the same name at Glyndebourne in 1975.) By 1974, Clark\u2019s marriage was over, as was Hockney\u2019s friendship with him.<\/p>\n

David Hockney in his Notting Hill studio in London, 1977. Photograph: Martyn Goddard\/Rex\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

All this was a far cry from Hockney\u2019s early life. Born in Bradford, the fourth child of Laura (nee Thompson) and Kenneth Hockney, David had been raised in a back-to-back terrace house. Both of his parents had artistic leanings \u2013 Laura<\/a> had been a pattern-maker in a firm of drapers, Ken was a keen photographer \u2013 but life in Steadman Terrace was nonetheless drab.<\/p>\n

The elder Hockneys were strict Methodists, high-minded and teetotal; Laura was a vegetarian, Kenneth a pacifist. While his relationship with his parents remained close to the end of their lives, for their third son California was to be everything that Bradford was not.<\/p>\n

Signs of his talent emerged early. To the annoyance of his brothers, three-year-old David would draw on their comics. When that was forbidden, he chalked pictures on the kitchen linoleum floor. It was watching his father at work on the old prams he restored for a living that opened David\u2019s eyes to paint. \u201cHe had a special brush and he would hold his finger along the brush so he could paint a perfect line,\u201d he recalled. \u201cI thought: incredible that you can make a straight line like that with just your eye. It\u2019s like watching Michelangelo draw a circle.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Hockneys were ambitious for their children. From Wellington Road primary, David followed his brothers on a scholarship to the revered Bradford grammar school. His parents were delighted, their son less so. Art<\/a> at the grammar school was for less clever boys; the scholarship stream was allowed one period a week, the bottom class could study it to A-level. Accordingly, Hockney set about failing, swiftly falling from first in his class of 30 to 30th. When his ploy was discovered, Laura paid for him to have lessons in calligraphy from an artist neighbour. Hockney would count this early grounding in graphics as key to his later work.<\/p>\n

His second discovery, arriving at Bradford College of Art in 1953, would be colour. This was a day of kitchen-sink realism in British art, characterised by Hockney\u2019s older contemporary John Bratby as a mood \u201cof ration books, sackcloth and ashes \u2013 introvert, grim, khaki\u201d.<\/p>\n

A lithograph made at the end of Hockney\u2019s first year shows him bucking this trend. A self-portrait, it shows the artist-to-be on a red plush chair set in front of a wall tricked out in yellow paper, his hair already shaped in the pudding-bowl cut that would become his trademark. His first painted portrait reverts to the older, Sickertian palette favoured at Bradford. \u201cWhat you were really concerned about was tonal values,\u201d Hockney recalled. \u201cThis meant you ignored colour. Colour was not a subject of painting in that school.\u201d Nonetheless, Portrait of My Father<\/a> (1955) was to be his first sale, fetching \u00a310 from a show of Yorkshire art at the Leeds Art Gallery. Told the news, Hockney rang Laura and said, \u201cHello, Mum, I\u2019ve sold my Dad.\u201d<\/p>\n

David Hockney working on one of his Woldgate Woods series in east Yorkshire in 2006. Photograph: Jean-Pierre Goncalves\/Tate Britain\/PA<\/p>\n

Hockney continued to paint his parents<\/a> over the next quarter of a century, flying them over to Paris to sit for him in the mid-70s after he had moved there to get over his break-up with Schlesinger. The result was a trio of French double portraits of which My Parents and Myself <\/a>(1975) and My Parents <\/a>(1977) survive.<\/p>\n

In the former, the artist appears between Laura and Ken, reflected in a mirror in the manner of Vel\u00e1zquez\u2019s Las Meninas. Hockney found the image unsatisfactory: it was taken home to Los Angeles and left there, unseen, until its reappearance in an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2020.<\/p>\n

By contrast, My Parents was bought by Tate in 1981 and has been on show ever since. It is a work suffused with nostalgia, focusing on Laura\u2019s slippered feet and Ken\u2019s homely absorption in a book. It would be Hockney\u2019s last portrait of his father, who died in 1979, although he would go on painting and drawing his mother: vulnerable, in reed pen, on the day of Ken\u2019s funeral; asleep in her bed in 1996, arthritic hands twisted in pain. Her son was with her in the Yorkshire seaside town of Bridlington when she died in 1999<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Photography had proved a useful tool in his painting of the 60s and 70s, and in the 80s it became a medium in its own right. Composite Polaroids such as Still Life Blue Guitar <\/a>(1982) used the multiple viewpoints of photography to explore the fractured unities of cubism. Photocollages such as Pearblossom Highway, 11-18 April 1981 #1<\/a> turn the differing colour registers of individual photographs into brush marks. All these fed into the large-scale, multipanelled landscapes that Hockney painted in the 90s and 2000s: enormous, wall-sized works such as The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire (2011), which drew on sources as diverse as Van Gogh and Uccello. In 2010, he began to experiment with the iPad as a tool for drawing, encouraged by his computer-savvy sister, Margaret. This innovation culminated in a huge audiovisual interactive show of \u201ca personal journey through his art\u201d, at Lightroom, King\u2019s Cross, London, in 2022.<\/p>\n

For all this ceaseless reinvention, the loss of his mother seemed to leave him rootless. In 2004, Hockney returned to Bridlington. By now, he lived in a constantly shifting menage of friends, assistants, lovers and former lovers. For the next few years, he moved back and forth between his various homes, finally settling in a 17th-century timbered house in Normandy with his last partner, Jean-Pierre Gon\u00e7alves de Lima, in 2019. His iPad landscapes of the region, made in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, were shown in an exhibition, A Year in Normandy<\/a>, at the Mus\u00e9e de l\u2019Orangerie in Paris in 2021.<\/p>\n

Self-portrait, at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, as part of Hockney\u2019s Eye: The Art and Technology of Depiction, 2022. Photograph: Joe Giddens\/PA<\/p>\n

In an output as vast and diverse as Hockney\u2019s, it was inevitable that there should be weak patches. His 2001 book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, was ridiculed by art historians for its insistence that Jan van Eyck and others had used concave mirrors in their compositions. Hockney\u2019s riff on the French landscape painter Claude Lorrain in the Royal Academy\u2019s 2012 show, A Bigger Picture<\/a>, drew splutters from British critics \u2013 in particular his 15ft x 24ft multipanel remake of Lorrain\u2019s The Sermon on the Mount, the titular mountain rendered in carrot-orange and green.<\/p>\n

For all that, Hockney\u2019s work was, for six decades, the most known and liked of any British artist\u2019s, and not just among Britons. His 13-room retrospective at Tate Britain in 2017<\/a>, with nearly half a million visitors, was outdone by an even larger iteration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York the following year. That November, his 1972 Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures)<\/a> sold at auction in New York for $90.3m, making it the most expensive painting ever sold by a living artist.<\/p>\n

He was made a Companion of Honour in 1997; in 2012, he was appointed to the Order of Merit. In 2019, Time magazine named the then 82-year-old Yorkshireman as one of the world\u2019s 100 most influential people.<\/p>\n

He remained an unrepentant smoker, even after a stroke in 2012. At least part of the reason for this was bloody-mindedness at the growing demonisation of cigarettes. \u201cSmoking calms me down,\u201d a defiant Hockney said. \u201cIt\u2019s enjoyable. I don\u2019t want politicians deciding what is exciting in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2023, he moved back to London. Hockney\u2019s paintings of Normandy were shown at the Mus\u00e9e des Beaux-Arts<\/a> in Rouen the following year, and a vast retrospective of nearly 500 works at the Fondation Louis Vuitton <\/a>in Paris the year after that.<\/p>\n

He is survived by Jean-Pierre and two of his brothers, Philip and John.<\/p>\n

David Hockney, artist, born 9 July 1937; died 11 June 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Soon after he moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s, the artist David Hockney was visited by his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":733252,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-733251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733251","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=733251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733251\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/733252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=733251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=733251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=733251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}