David Hockney, the British painter who made color feel both lucid and mischievous, has died at 88
David Hockney, the British artist whose work ranged from sunlit California pools to the fields of Yorkshire, has died at 88. Over seven decades, he built one of the most recognizable bodies of work in contemporary art, moving fluidly between painting, watercolor, collage, printmaking, drawing, and digital media while keeping a distinctly Hockneyan sense of wit and clarity.
Born in Bradford, west Yorkshire, in 1937, Hockney grew up as the fourth of five children in what he described as a “radical working-class family.” He studied at Bradford College of Art and sold his first painting, a portrait of his father, for £10 at the Yorkshire Artists Exhibition in 1957. From those early beginnings, he developed a career defined by restless experimentation and an unusually broad public reach.
Hockney was an early and enthusiastic adopter of new tools. He embraced iPad drawings and immersive installations long before they became familiar fixtures in museum programming, and he continued to surprise audiences with the scale and variety of his output. His 2021 work “A Year in Normandie,” a monumental, Bayeux Tapestry-inspired meditation on the changing seasons, was on view this year at London’s Serpentine North through August 23.
The artist’s exhibition history was as formidable as his market record. In his lifetime, he had more than 400 solo exhibitions, including a 2017 retrospective at Tate Britain for his 80th birthday that later traveled to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Met in New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2018. In 2024, he also oversaw his largest retrospective yet at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.
At auction, Hockney became the most valuable living painter of his time. His 1972 painting “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” sold for $90.3 million at Christie’s in 2018, a figure that underscored both the durability of his market and the breadth of his appeal.
Yet the measure of Hockney’s legacy is not only financial or institutional. He remained, until the end, an artist of plainspoken charm and unmistakable style — often arriving at openings in a wheelchair, dressed in a flat cap, a colorful cardigan or checked suit, and his signature round glasses. He signed his letters, simply: “Love life. David Hockney.”
