David Hockney Dies at 88 as The Hague Court Leaves Mauritshuis Works in Place
British artist David Hockney (1937–2026), one of the defining figures of postwar art, died peacefully at home on June 11, 2026, one month before his 89th birthday, his publicist Erica Bolton said. The artist, born July 9, 1937, built a career that moved fluidly between painting, photography, printmaking, opera design, and digital work, while remaining unmistakably his own: bright, exacting, and deeply attentive to the people and places around him.
Hockney first rose to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a Pop artist, then became synonymous with sunlit Los Angeles pool paintings that helped define his international reputation. His 1972 canvas “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” sold at Christie’s for $90.3 million in 2018, setting a record at the time for the most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction. Yet his practice was never limited to the market’s most visible category. He also made iPad drawings, opera sets, etchings, lithographs, photographs, and stained-glass windows, extending his visual language across media without losing its clarity.
Bolton said Hockney is survived by his partner, Jean-Pierre Goncalves de Lima, two brothers, Phillip and John, and their children and grandchildren. Over a career that spanned London, Los Angeles, East Yorkshire, and Normandy, he remained unusually legible to both the public and critics: an artist whose work could be immediately recognizable and still feel alive to reinvention.
In a separate legal development, a court in The Hague ruled that the Mauritshuis does not have to return 25 artworks, including eight Rembrandts, to the heirs of Abraham Bredius, the museum’s former director. The descendants of Joseph Kronig had argued that the museum had failed to honor Bredius’s wishes that the works remain permanently on view. The court disagreed, finding that the will left room for uncertainty and did not impose an absolute duty to keep every work hanging at all times. The museum said it is physically impossible to display all 25 works simultaneously.
The ruling closes one chapter in a long-running dispute over museum stewardship, while Hockney’s death marks the loss of an artist whose influence reached far beyond any single movement or medium.
