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\u00a0sun-drenched suburban views<\/a>\u00a0a 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\u00a0record prices at auction<\/a>.<\/p>\n Historian Simon Schama said it\u2019s no mystery why the appeal of his work endures.<\/p>\n \u201cHis work is admired \u2014 loved is not too strong a word \u2014 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 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 woolen 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 portraits, 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 \u201cTea Painting in an Illusionistic Style.\u201d<\/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 \u2014 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 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 \u201cWe Two Boys Together Clinging\u201d and \u201cTwo Men in a Shower\u201d celebrated gay relationships when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain.<\/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. \u2026 You are a rich man if you do the things you want to do.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2018, his 1972 painting \u201cPortrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)\u201d sold at a Christie\u2019s auction for $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 and his friends Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell in \u201cMr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy,\u201d a 1971 portrait voted one of Britain\u2019s greatest paintings in a 2005 BBC poll.<\/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 Hockney also embraced other media, including printmaking, photo collage and video. He contributed costume and set designs for the theater and opera, including a celebrated production of \u201cTristan und Isolde\u201d first staged in 1987 at the Los Angeles Opera.<\/p>\n When he took up photography, he fused genres, assembling individual photos into elaborate collages like \u201cPearblossom Highway, 11-18th April, 1986,\u201d 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 Later\u00a0he began to draw on iPads<\/a>, which became his favorite 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 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 of Art in New York.<\/p>\n![\"British](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/AP26163354537272.jpg\")
FILE \u2013 British artist David Hockney poses as he unveils his painting \u2018Bigger Trees Near Water\u2019, the largest painting ever shown at the Royal Academy\u2019s Summer Exhibition, London, Friday, May 25, 2007. (AP Photo\/Sang Tan, File)
\nHockney was an icon of the swinging 60s<\/p>\n![\"David](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Britain_Obit_Hockney__576_.jpg\")
FILE \u2013 British artist David Hockney, stands next to his friend and model Celia Birtwell, in front of one of his most famous works \u2018Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy\u2019 at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Wednesday Oct. 11, 2006. (AP Photo\/Alastair Grant, File)
\nHe saw success early in his career<\/p>\n![\"British](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/AP26163353246374.jpg\")
FILE \u2013 British artist David Hockney poses for photographers in front of his acrylic on canvas \u201cStudio Interior #4\u201d which features as part of the \u201cDavid Hockney Painting and Photography\u201d exhibition at the Annely Juda Fine Art gallery in London, Thursday, May 14, 2015. (AP Photo\/Matt Dunham, File)
\nHockney\u2019s work went beyond drawing and painting<\/p>\n
![\"Artist](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Britain_Hockney_Obit_42495-1.jpg\")
FILE \u2013 Artist David Hockney after unveiling the bottle design for the 2014 vintage wine of Ch\u00e2teau Mouton Rothschild in London, Friday, Feb. 3, 2017. (AP Photo\/Frank Augstein, File)