British artist David Hockney dies aged 88
David Hockney has died at the age of 88, peacefully at home.
Last updated 8 hours ago
David Hockney, one of Britain's most famous and celebrated artists has died aged 88.
A statement said: “The celebrated British artist David Hockney, one of the most important figures in contemporary art in both the 20th and 21st centuries, passed away peacefully at home on 11 June 2026, one month short of his 89th birthday.”
Looking back at David Hockney's career
From the azure blue swimming pools of California to the lush green landscapes of his native Yorkshire, David Hockney’s art was filled with colour and light.
Over the course of more than seven decades his joyful, optimistic vision made him one of the world’s most popular artists responsible for some of the most memorable images of the 20th and 21st centuries.
In 2018, his painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) was sold at auction in New York for 90 million dollars (£70 million) – smashing the then record for a work by a living artist.
Long seen as a “national treasure”, with his huge round spectacles, gentle Yorkshire burr and bleached blond hair – replaced in later years by a series of flat caps – his image was almost as distinctive and familiar as his paintings.
While liberally drawing on the art of the past – from the Renaissance masters to the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock – he consistently pursued his own path, refusing to conform to the artistic fashions of the day.
As an art school rebel, he was initially denied a diploma, in part because he refused to complete an essay assignment, insisting he should be judged on his artwork alone.
At the start of his career, when the dominant strand in the avant garde was abstraction, he bucked the trend painting figuratively, often in bright colours with a primitivist style.
In later years, when some critics decried his embrace of landscape painting as a retrograde step, he made clear he “didn’t give a damn” about such carping.
Having grown up under the northern skies of industrial Bradford, he was enthralled by the light and freedoms of 1960s California, making the state his main home for 40 years.
In particular, as an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in England, he enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to explore his sexuality.
He produced a series of paintings featuring naked or semi-naked men which he later described as “homosexual propaganda”.
He said: “I felt it should be done. Nobody else would use it as a subject because it was a part of me. It was a subject I could treat humorously.”
Restlessly creative, he was fascinated by the opportunities for using technology to produce art: in the 1980s he made large-scale photo collages using Polaroid prints, while in 2000s he used the Brushes app to create hundreds of pictures on his iPad.
His subjects ranged widely from still lifes and landscapes through to countless portraits of friends and family – and even his pet dachshunds – as well as stage designs for theatre and opera.
A lifelong smoker, rarely seen without a cigarette in hand, Hockney would regularly rail against the “little Hitlers” who sought to clampdown on the practice.
In his 80s, he even had badges made with the slogan “End bossiness soon” – he quipped that a demand to “End bossiness now” would be just “too bossy”.
David Hockney was born in Bradford on July 9 1937, the fourth of five children in a working class family.
His father Kenneth was an accountant’s clerk who painted “Ban the Bomb” posters for local peace marchers, while his mother Laura was a Methodist and strict vegetarian.
At the age of just 11 he decided he wanted to be an artist, an ambition which was not encouraged by his teachers at Bradford Grammar School, but with the support of his parents, he entered the local art college.
From there he went to the Royal College of Art in London where he was mocked for his Yorkshire accent. For his part, he was not impressed by the abilities of his tormentors.
“I’d look at their drawings and think if I drew like that I’d keep my mouth shut,” he later recalled.
There was a memorable run-in with the college authorities when he was warned that he could not graduate – in part because he had not done enough life drawings.
He responded by producing Life Painting for a Diploma featuring a male nude copied from an American body-building magazine alongside an anatomical study of a human skeleton.
In the face of such an overwhelming talent the college backed down, awarding him the prestigious gold medal for painting – which he collected in suitably flamboyant fashion dressed in a gold lame suit.
Clearly a superstar in the making, he featured in the famous Royal Society of British Artists Young Contemporaries exhibition of 1961 which showcased the work of the new wave of British “pop art” with artists such as Peter Blake.
While associated with the movement, which featured images from advertising and popular culture, his own style was somewhat different, drawing on expressionist elements reminiscent of Francis Bacon.
It was, however, his move to Los Angeles in 1964 which brought the decisive shift in his work that was to truly make his reputation.
In contrast to drab, buttoned-up post-war Britain, he was from the start intoxicated by both the brilliant sunlight and hedonistic freedoms he found in California.
“The moment I got to America I thought ‘This is the place’,” he later recalled.
“I was drawn towards California, which I didn’t know… because I sensed the place would excite me. No doubt it had a lot to do with sex.”
After taking a job teaching drawing at the University of California at Santa Cruz, he began a relationship with a 17-year-old student, Peter Schlesinger, who also became his muse.
It was in this period – influenced by the hard clean lines and vivid colours of American pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein – that he produced some of his most famous works.
Using the comparatively new acrylic medium, with strong, vibrant colours, he created a series of striking images of swimming pools – most notably A Bigger Splash – which seemed to encapsulate the allure of the state he called the “promised land”.
He also painted one of the best-known of his many portraits – Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy – depicting his friends, the fashion designers Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark, with their pet cat.
With art dealers clamouring to display and sell his works, he was able to rent a home in the Hollywood Hills, which he later bought and expanded to include a studio, as well as acquiring a beach house in Malibu.
He began experimenting with photo-collage techniques: his Pearblossom Highway, depicting a stretch of desert road, is made up of 850 Polaroids taken from different angles to create an effect which was compared to cubism.
In 1999 he gave up painting for two years as he explored his theory that old masters such as Vermeer and Caravaggio had used mirrors and lenses, in primitive forerunner of photography, to draw accurately from life.
He acquired a camera lucida which he taught himself to use and was soon producing very fast, very accurate pencil portraits of friends, family and himself – although he always denied the technique was a form of “cheating”.
In the 1990s he began returning more regularly to Yorkshire where he was encouraged by a friend to start capturing the local surroundings, which he initially did from memory, completing his painting of Garrowby Hill in 1998.
Despite his years in the States, he insisted he had always felt “very English”.
He said: “I’m from the peasantry, frankly. But it makes you connect with the land and because I found this subject, at my age it’s terrific, you stick with it and get turned on.”
He eventually returned full-time, setting up home in the seaside resort of Bridlington, while going out to paint the surrounding countryside en plein air using both oils and watercolours.
His works from this time included the massive Bigger Trees Near Warter, an oil painting more than 12 metres wide, made up of 50 panels, which he completed in 2007.
In 2012, an exhibition at the Royal Academy focusing on his Yorkshire landscapes, entitled A Bigger Picture, was a smash hit attracting 600,000 visitors, effectively confirming his status as the country’s best-loved living artist.
It also highlighted his growing use of technology, including iPad drawings and a series of films produced using 18 cameras which were displayed on multiple screens.
Tragedy struck the following year when his 23-year-old assistant, Dominic Elliott, died after drinking a household drain cleaner at the artist’s home having first consumed a powerful cocktail of drugs and alcohol.
An inquest heard Hockney, who had become increasingly deaf, had slept through it, unaware of what was happening. In the aftermath he returned to California.
Having once declined the opportunity to paint Queen Elizabeth II, he claimed he was “too busy” painting England – “her country”, he nevertheless found time to design a stained-glass window at Westminster Abbey in tribute to her.
Unveiled in 2018, it marked her love of the countryside with a scene of Hawthorn blossom from his native Yorkshire. “I hope she’ll like it,” he said.
When the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020, he retreated to an isolated farmhouse in Normandy where he set up a studio. With typical chutzpah, he also took the opportunity to advocate the benefits of his beloved smoking – suggesting it could ward off the disease.
At the age of 87, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris staged the largest exhibition yet of his art, with more than 450 works – the majority from the preceding 25 years – filling the entire museum, much to his obvious pleasure.
His health was, however, by this stage in serious decline and he required round-the-clock nursing care.
He nevertheless remained resolutely upbeat. He once said his loss of hearing had actually sharpened his work – “If you lose one sense, you gain other senses, and I feel I could see space clearer.”
He never lost his love of painting, continuing to work for four to six hours a day.
“I’m happiest when I’m painting,” he said. “If I can paint every day I don’t care about anything else.”