{"id":357815,"date":"2026-06-12T13:00:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T13:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/357815\/"},"modified":"2026-06-12T13:00:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T13:00:16","slug":"david-hockney-whose-art-celebrated-sun-drenched-los-angeles-dead-at-88","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/357815\/","title":{"rendered":"David Hockney, whose art celebrated sun-drenched Los Angeles, dead at 88"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

David Hockney, the innovative and prolific British artist who arrived in Los Angeles in 1964, soon celebrating its sun-drenched life and landscapes in colorful, wildly popular paintings, died Thursday. He was 88.<\/p>\n

His death was confirmed in a statement by his publicist Erica Bolton.<\/p>\n

Calling himself \u201can English Los Angeleno,\u201d Hockney immortalized the city\u2019s sparkling swimming pools, palm trees and beautiful young men, then went on to experiment with intricate photo collages, portrait suites, painted and filmed images of Yorkshire landscapes, iPad drawings and more.<\/p>\n

Since his Pop Art paintings in the early \u201860s at London\u2019s Royal College of Art, Hockney was rarely out of the limelight and, more important, rarely out of fresh ideas for how to draw, paint, film, print, photograph or otherwise express his creativity. The David Hockney Foundation owns more than 8,000 of his works, including about 200 sketchbooks, more than 230 self-portraits, opera designs and portraits of family and friends.<\/p>\n

Hockney loved Hollywood \u2014 the people and the place \u2014 and liked to say he was brought up in England and Hollywood because of the time he spent at the movies. His peroxide blonde hair reportedly was inspired when he was a student and saw Clairol TV ads claiming \u201cblondes have more fun.\u201d But it was his interest in everything from Elvis Presley to the Hubble Space Telescope and his sense of humor that set him apart. Time Magazine art critic Robert Hughes once called him \u201cthe Cole Porter of modern art.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was open about being gay, even when homosexuality was outlawed in Britain. His early love affair with artist Peter Schlesinger, a younger man he met when teaching a summer drawing class at UCLA in 1966, inspired Hockney\u2019s monumental 1972 painting \u201cPortrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),\u201d a centerpiece of Jack Hazan\u2019s 1974 film \u201cA Bigger Splash.\u201d The painting\u2019s 2018 auction at Christie\u2019s drew a record $90 million for a living artist.<\/p>\n

He was a dedicated reader and student of art, paying homage in his work to Picasso and Cubism as well as to Monet, Matisse, Van Gogh and Cezanne. A lover of opera, he often had it playing loudly in the studio and enjoyed taking visitors on curated car trips through the Hollywood Hills or Malibu while listening to Wagner. He designed sets for major companies in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, London and elsewhere over the years, and some of his set models were later shown in museums.<\/p>\n

\"David <\/p>\n

David Hockney\u2019s work \u201cGregory in the Pool (Paper Pool 4)\u201d is part of his solo exhibition \u201cDavid Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed\u201d at the Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Springs. (Courtesy of the Palm Springs Art Museum)<\/p>\n

(Courtesy of the Palm Springs Art Museum)<\/p>\n

His solo shows drew enormous crowds to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as early as 1988. In 2017 a major retrospective of his work, keyed to his 80th birthday, was presented at New York\u2019s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Paris\u2019 Centre Pompidou and London\u2019s Tate Modern. Chronicling Hockney\u2019s arrival as an important artist in the \u201cravishing\u201d Met retrospective, the New Yorker writer Andrea K. Scott called it \u201ca revelation.\u201d It was, she wrote, \u201ca retort to all the eye-rollers,\u201d including herself, who dismissed his work \u201cas, at best, a guilty pleasure.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2012 he received the coveted Order of Merit, which Queen Elizabeth II presented to him at Buckingham Palace.<\/p>\n

David Hockney was born the fourth of five children to a working-class family in Bradford, Yorkshire, on July 9, 1937. He has said he started \u201cmaking marks on paper\u201d at 8 and received private painting lessons before moving on to Bradford School of Art in 1953. The first painting he sold was a portrait of his father in 1955. He attended the Royal College of Art in London from 1959 until his graduation in 1962 and received the school\u2019s Gold Medal.<\/p>\n

After college he did not slack off, noted his biographer Christopher Simon Sykes. In his 2014 book, \u201cHockney: The Biography,\u201d Sykes pointed out that the artist\u2019s first flat had a chest of drawers near the bed on which he had painted, in large capital letters, the words \u201cget up and work immediately.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"David <\/p>\n

David Hockney in 2017.<\/p>\n

(Catherine Opie, Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong and Seoul.)<\/p>\n

Hockney lived by that command for the rest of his life, turning out canvas after canvas, photo after photo. In the \u201880s came his extraordinary multi-image photographic collages of friends including writer Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy and such landmarks as the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Canyon and Pearblossom Highway.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Polaroids started oddly enough when I\u2019d just finished a long period of work in the theater, which is of course playing with perspective and illusion,\u201d he once told The Times. \u201cPeople say, \u2018You are a painter, and photography is a sideline.\u2019 But nothing is a sideline for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

That included his continuing fascination with technology. The artist\u2019s long career swept in artworks made not only on cameras and canvases, but on such things as fax machines and photocopiers. Hockney liked to experiment, whether it was with state-of-the-art printing devices or centuries old painting techniques. He went several times to a show of portraits by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres at London\u2019s National Gallery in 1999 and was greatly taken with the photographic\u2019 quality of Ingres\u2019 19th century drawings. Certain that Ingres had used something optical to achieve that quality, Hockney bought himself a camera lucida, a small device that works like a prism. He then applied Ingres\u2019 methods–as Hockney imagined them–to his own portraits of friends and family, and in 2001, he published \u201cSecret Knowledge,\u201d exploring his theories on early artistic uses of optical devices.<\/p>\n

Isenberg is a former Times staff writer<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"David Hockney, the innovative and prolific British artist who arrived in Los Angeles in 1964, soon celebrating its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":357816,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[2308,12837,12947,145676,1431,1576,145709,1743,48,52,51,6547,47,50,49,4694,27635,18106,145711,145710,1968],"class_list":["post-357815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-art","tag-artist","tag-canvas","tag-david-hockney","tag-family","tag-friend","tag-hockney","tag-hollywood","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-london","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-new-york","tag-painting","tag-portrait","tag-royal-college","tag-sun-drenched-los-angeles","tag-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357815\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/357816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}