David Hockney, Painter of Pools and Modern Life, Dies at 88
The British painter who carried figurative art through six decades of changing fashion, from Bradford to the pools of Los Angeles, has died one month short of 89.
David Hockney, the Bradford-born painter whose sunlit swimming pools, tender double portraits and late-career iPad drawings made him one of the most recognizable artists of the modern era, died at his home in London on Thursday, June 11. He was 88, one month short of his 89th birthday.
His publicist, Erica Bolton, confirmed the death in a statement. No cause was given. He is survived by his partner, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima.
"David Hockney's enduring legacy reflects his underlying enthusiasm for life, his outstanding sense of humor, his immense generosity, and his investigative curiosity encapsulated by his signature phrase, 'Love life.'"
Erica Bolton, Hockney's publicist, in a statement
Few careers in art ran so long or so cheerfully against fashion. Hockney committed himself to figurative painting at the moment abstraction ruled the schools and the market, and he kept faith with the picture — a person, a pool, a pair of trees — for more than six decades. The bet paid off twice over. Critics came around, and so did collectors: in November 2018 his 1972 canvas "Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)" sold at Christie's in New York for £70 million, about $90 million, at the time the highest auction price for a work by a living artist.
He was born on July 9, 1937, in Bradford, West Yorkshire, the fourth of five children of Kenneth and Laura Hockney. The family was working class; the talent showed early, and a scholarship carried him to the local art school. Like his pacifist father he registered as a conscientious objector, and he spent two years as a hospital orderly before entering London's Royal College of Art in 1959.
The college made him a name before he had a career. He appeared in the "New Contemporaries" exhibition that announced the arrival of British pop art, drew early comparisons to Francis Bacon, and graduated in 1962 with a gold medal he collected wearing a gold lamé jacket. By then he already had London gallery representation. His student work was openly homoerotic years before Britain decriminalized homosexuality, and the college celebrated rather than punished him for it.
America rewired his palette. A first trip to New York came in 1961; Los Angeles followed in 1963, and he bought a home there the next year. The palms, the modernist houses and above all the backyard pools gave him his great subject, distilled in "A Bigger Splash" (1967), which froze the aftermath of a dive into something close to a corporate logo for California itself. While teaching at UCLA he met the 18-year-old student Peter Schlesinger in 1966; their five-year relationship, and its painful end, produced the charged stillness of "Portrait of an Artist."
Institutional honors arrived in waves. London's Whitechapel Art Gallery mounted his first retrospective in 1970. Tate Britain marked his 80th birthday in 2017 with a survey that traveled to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Just last year the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris staged "David Hockney 25," a show weighted toward his 21st-century output alongside early landmarks such as "Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy" (1970-71).
He looked the part he had written for himself: loud plaid suits, mismatched socks, round glasses, bleached blond hair. He was principled to the point of contrariness, a lifelong defender of smokers, and choosy about official ribbons. He turned down a knighthood in 1990 but accepted the Order of Merit from Queen Elizabeth II in 2012.
New tools never scared him. He made prints, photo collages and stage designs for the Royal Court Theatre and the Metropolitan Opera, and in his last two decades he drew constantly on iPhones and iPads, treating the screen as one more kind of paper. Hearing loss pushed him away from public life in old age, toward his dachshunds, his partner and the studio. He is said to have worked until the end, painting from a wheelchair for about three hours a day.
Asked last year about that persistence, he gave W magazine an answer that could caption the whole career. I just go on,
he said. Anyway, at my age now, I couldn't really freeze.
