Famous for his swimming pool pictures: David Hockney is a painting giant

Hockney, who was used to the gray skies of England and described his home, the industrial city of Bradford in Yorkshire, as “radical and working-class,” is considered one of the first artists to make LA their main subject.

In 1964, the Brit, who grew up as the fourth of five children in a working-class family, moved to Los Angeles. He was fascinated throughout his life by the American West Coast, which he got to know during a trip at a young age. In his pop art paintings he captured the atmosphere of the city, the colors, the palm trees, the houses and the sunlight. His series with swimming pools made him world famous. The cheerfulness and cheeky carefreeness that radiate from his pictures became his trademark. In 2018, one of his swimming pool paintings sold at auction for a record price of almost £70 million.

Hockney not only had a flamboyant clothing style with eye-catching tweed jackets and round black glasses as his basic outfit, he was also extremely curious and keen to experiment. As an artist, he worked with almost all media available at the time: he drew, photographed, created interiors and stage sets, video installations, designed stained glass windows, painted outdoors like the Old Masters and was a digital pioneer.

He was already using the iPad for his art in 2010. In 2020, during the Corona lockdown, he created his famous iPad landscape series “220 for 2020”. He documented the arrival of spring, starting with the winter trees, showing the budding of the flowers, the unrolling of the leaves, the growth of the fruits, all in pixels because, at the age of 83 at the time, working in oil was too uncomfortable and also too slow for him. “Do remember, they can’t cancel the spring,” he wrote as a defiant encouragement to friends and the public. The saying was later presented as an illuminated sign at an exhibition in Paris.

Hockney’s father was an amateur painter and gave his son private painting lessons. As a child, he drew “12 hours a day, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., every day,” the artist said in an interview. From 1953 he studied at the Bradford School of Art, refusing to take any subjects other than art. In his early 20s he went to the Royal College of Art in London, where his teachers included artists such as Francis Bacon and Peter Blake. With Blake and painters such as Allen Jones and RB Kitaj, he belonged to the generation that shaped British Pop Art. It is said to have been Kitaj who gave him the most important advice of his life: “Paint what you love.” Hockney adopted this maxim.

From his first solo exhibition in 1963 at the Kasmin Gallery in London, his career took off. The famous American curator Henry Geldzahler became one of his most important supporters and mentors. In 1979, Hockney was one of the co-founders of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. His works have been exhibited in numerous important museums around the world.

Hockney, who lived openly about his homosexuality – even when it was still banned in Great Britain – created numerous portraits of lovers and friends. His portrait “Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy” from the early 1970s, in which the icons of the British fashion world, Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell, are depicted with their cat Percy, is famous. While in classic double portraits the men tend to stand and the women sit, Hockney depicted his old friends in exactly the opposite way, a subtle comment on the power dynamics in this marriage.

In 2025, the Fondation Louis Vuitton showed around 400 of his pictures, including around 50 of his famous double portraits. The foundation gave Hockney the entire building and the artist was personally involved in every detail of the exhibition design. He says in advance that it is the largest exhibition he has ever had, and: “I think it’s going to be very good.”

Hockney spent the last 25 years of his life in his British native Yorkshire, Normandy and London. He died “peacefully at home” aged 88, the PA news agency said, citing his publicist.