David Hockney, the ceaselessly inventive painter whose best-known works were inspired by the light and colour he encountered in 1960s California, has died aged 88.
Early Life and Career
Born in Bradford, the fourth child of Laura and Kenneth Hockney, David was raised in a back-to-back terrace house. Both parents had artistic leanings – Laura was a pattern-maker in a firm of drapers, Ken was a keen photographer. Signs of his talent emerged early. To the annoyance of his brothers, three-year-old David would draw on their comics. When that was forbidden, he chalked pictures on the kitchen linoleum floor.
From Wellington Road primary, David followed his brothers on a scholarship to the revered Bradford grammar school. Art at the grammar school was for less clever boys; the scholarship stream was allowed one period a week. Accordingly, Hockney set about failing, swiftly falling from first in his class of 30 to 30th. When his ploy was discovered, Laura paid for him to have lessons in calligraphy from an artist neighbour. Hockney would count this early grounding in graphics as key to his later work.
California and the Swimming Pool Paintings
Soon after he moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s, Hockney was visited by his mother. As they drove back from the airport, she gazed about her in apparent awe at the beauties of sun-kissed southern California. Then, as Hockney was fond of recalling, she turned and said: "I don’t understand it. Such lovely drying weather and no one’s got their washing out."
Hockney had been similarly awestruck when he first went to California in 1963, commissioned to make work for a show in New York. Looking down from a Pan Am jet, he marvelled at the blue glint of swimming pools and thought, "My God, this place needs its Piranesi."
His first Californian picture, Plastic Tree Plus City Hall, celebrated the artificiality of Los Angeles. It also did so in artificial paint, the plastic-based acrylic that Hockney now used seriously for the first time. Acrylic allowed for brighter saturations of colour than had traditional oil paints while doing away with surface texture. It was the perfect medium for capturing that signifier of a shallow world, the dappled surface of a chlorinated pool.
Back in London the following year, at his flat in Powis Square, Notting Hill, Hockney set to work on Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool, based on drawings he had made in California. Pushed up flat against the picture plane, the work’s blue-on-white squiggled surface looks merely pretty, poster-like. It was to be the forerunner of a body of work that, 60 years later, remains Hockney’s best known: paintings such as Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool (1966), centred on the tan-lined bare bottom of the artist’s then partner, the Californian student Peter Schlesinger. These works would culminate, in 1967, in the image that is still Hockney’s most famous: A Bigger Splash.
Later Years and Legacy
In an output as vast and diverse as Hockney’s, it was inevitable that there should be weak patches. For all that, Hockney’s work was, for six decades, the most known and liked of any British artist’s, and not just among Britons. His 13-room retrospective at Tate Britain in 2017, with nearly half a million visitors, was outdone by an even larger iteration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York the following year. That November, his 1972 Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) sold at auction in New York for $90.3m, making it the most expensive painting ever sold by a living artist.
He was made a Companion of Honour in 1997; in 2012, he was appointed to the Order of Merit. In 2019, Time magazine named the then 82-year-old Yorkshireman as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
He remained an unrepentant smoker, even after a stroke in 2012. "Smoking calms me down," a defiant Hockney said. "It’s enjoyable. I don’t want politicians deciding what is exciting in my life."
In 2023, he moved back to London. Hockney’s paintings of Normandy were shown at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen the following year, and a vast retrospective of nearly 500 works at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris the year after that.
He is survived by Jean-Pierre and two of his brothers, Philip and John.
