David Hockney, British painter of vivid California scenes, dies at 88

A giant of British art

David Hockney, the British painter whose luminous California scenes made him one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, died on Thursday at his home in London, his publicist Erica Bolton announced. He was 88 and a month shy of his 89th birthday. No cause of death was given.

The UK's culture secretary Lisa Nandy called Hockney "a true titan of British art" whose "restless spirit and boundless creativity leave behind a powerful legacy". Art historian Richard Morris wrote that Hockney "carried forward one of the most sustained investigations into vision, space and representation by any post-war artist".

“British art has lost a giant.”

From Bradford to Los Angeles

Born in Bradford, Yorkshire, to a clerk father and a devout Methodist mother, Hockney studied at the Royal College of Art in London, arriving in 1959. His early years were marked by a rebellion against convention: he gave openly homosexual titles to abstract works at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. By the early 1960s he was a fixture of the Swinging Sixties, with his peroxide hair, thick-rimmed spectacles and gold lamé jacket becoming as iconic as his paintings.

Longing for the light he saw in American art, Hockney first visited New York in 1961, befriending Andy Warhol. Three years later he moved to Los Angeles, drawn by the sharp California shadows he had admired as a child in Laurel and Hardy films.

“I had spent the first 20 years of my life in the gothic gloom of the North. Here I felt free.”

Pools, portraits and a record auction

Hockney's immersion in Californian light produced some of his most famous works, including "A Bigger Splash" (1967) and "Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)" (1972). The latter sold for $90 million at auction in 2018, setting a record for a painting by a living artist, later surpassed only by a Jeff Koons sculpture.

Never tied to a single medium, Hockney moved restlessly from stage design to photography collages inspired by Chinese scrolls, from computer art in the 1980s to iPad drawings in his 70s. He created a stained-glass window for Westminster Abbey on his tablet and, in his 80s, experimented with virtual reality.

A restless legacy

The Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris mounted the largest exhibition ever devoted to Hockney's work in 2025, and he attended despite frail health, having struggled with hearing and respiratory problems in his final years while living between London and Normandy.

Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain, described him as "an endlessly inventive artist, with a unique vision of the world" who taught audiences "about the joy of looking". London mayor Sadiq Khan wrote that Hockney's "vivid paintings of our changing seasons helped me see the beauty and fragility of our natural world".

“David was always completely and courageously himself, both in his work and in life. The loss to the art world is immense.”

He remained unpretentious even as his popularity grew. "I am actually still a student," he once told biographer Peter Adam. "I just happen to have quite a lot of credit cards in my pocket."