Were his works worlds of sunshine, swimming pools and natural beauty or doorways to darker things? The British artist David Hockney, who died on June 11th, at the age of 88, leaves behind an enduring enigma.
Born on July 9th, 1937, he grew up in Bradford, an industrial Yorkshire city that was heavily bombed during the second World War. With shortages ongoing, the small boy would draw on the kitchen floor. He was funny, popular and bright, gaining a scholarship to the local school, but all he wanted to do was art.
At 16 he enrolled at Bradford School of Art. Perhaps already realising the deceptive importance of surfaces, he turned up in a pinstripe suit and bowler hat, anticipating the perennially besuited art duo Gilbert & George by more than a decade.
By 1959 Hockney was at the Royal College of Art, in London, and in a new world of parties and people. A star student, he was also single-minded, preferring to paint a male figure from a magazine than the required female life-drawing model, and refusing to write an essay for his finals. Art, he believed, was the thing, not words, although he would never shy away from speaking his mind.
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The Royal College of Art bent its rules, and he gained his degree – and the institution’s gold medal.
By graduation that early suit had become gold lamé, under the traditional gown. But his work from this period was dark, in a similar vein to that of the Irish artist Patrick Graham. An exhibition in London in 2025, In the Mood for Love, showed his works from 1960 to 1963. Think expressionistic figures, text, numbers, phallic towers, devilish figures, abstract shapes and plenty of black.
The backs of works detail prices from £8 to £17. He wasn’t making much money, although that would change. In 2018 his Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), from 1972, sold at auction for $90.3 million, a record price for a living artist. Inspired by his break-up with a lover, it holds a brilliantly unsettling tension that you need to look properly to see.
In London, and later in the United States, he was hanging out with the likes of Ossie Clark, Tony Richardson and Dennis Hopper, although he would later say, “I thought I was a hedonist, but when I look back I was always working. I am always working.”
A photograph from the 1970s shows Hockney with Andy Warhol, both bleach blond, round glasses, looking at one another, but not quite. It would be easy to lump them together: iconoclastic innovators, homosexual standard bearers, champions of new ways of looking. In a way they were, but while Warhol treated fame, the new consumerism and the fruitless quest for individuality within modernity’s endless repetition, Hockney was on to something else.
California was where the sun came out. His abstraction turned into realism, if realism could be said to inhabit that flawlessness of blue skies, blue water and verdant gardens. These pieces catch a similar mood to Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod paintings: the studied flatness, the beauty and emptiness coexisting, the odd amplification of sadness when experienced in the context of splendour.
Hockney stuck to surface simplicity, but he continued to experiment and innovate, sometimes attracting derision from an art establishment that preferred abstract language and mystique and that was frequently uncomfortable with his public popularity.
In 2001 his book Secret Knowledge created a sensation with his argument that some of the great artists from the canon of western art – Caravaggio, Velázquez, Holbein, Ingres – used mirrors and lenses to aid their work.
His use of Polaroid photographs for reference led to his creation of large photo collages, some of which were shown at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin in 1984. If cubism showed three dimensions on a flat plane, these were chasing movement.
He made opera sets and toyed with fax machines, computer printers and the iPad. Perhaps it was because he pioneered his iPad experiments in public, but they were initially deemed faux-naif, weak and lifeless. He carried on regardless.
Moving, for a time, back to Yorkshire, Hockney continued to revel in natural beauty, but it was always with that sense of something under the surface. His work was never merely picturesque.
He became fascinated with the changing of the seasons. A series of 17 iPad prints, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate (2011), sold for £6.2 million at Sotheby’s last year.
“Why have people stopped drawing?” he wrote in 2020. “It’s ridiculous to think photographs are the ultimate realist picture. They are a little blip on an endless search to see what the world is like.”
In November 2025, hundreds of illuminated drones lit the skies of Bradford, re-creating some of his most famous works, up in the air. It’s tempting to think of him now looking down, to see what the world is like from a whole new perspective.
[ Room with a view: How David Hockney created digital art for a lockdownOpens in new window ]
Hockney is survived by his long-time partner and companion, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima; his great-nephew Richard, who acted as studio assistant in his last years; his brothers Philip and John; and numerous nieces, nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews.
