David Hockney, the British Pop Artist Who Reframed Modern Painting, Dies at 88
David Hockney, one of the defining figures of postwar British art, died on June 11 at his home in London. He was 88. Over more than six decades, Hockney built a career that moved fluidly between painting, drawing, printmaking, and iPad-based work, while remaining unmistakably his own: lucid, intimate, and alert to the emotional charge of place.
Hockney first came to prominence in the early 1960s as a British Pop artist, and his work was notable from the start for its frank attention to queer desire at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in the UK. That candor, paired with a bright formal intelligence, helped make him one of the most visible artists of his generation. He painted the people around him with unusual closeness — friends, lovers, and cultural figures such as Andy Warhol, Dennis Hopper, and, more recently, Harry Styles.
Across his career, Hockney returned again and again to the places that shaped him: London, Los Angeles, East Yorkshire, and Normandy. Few bodies of work are as closely associated with him as the sunlit swimming pools of Los Angeles, images that turned leisure into something more psychologically charged. *A Bigger Splash* is now in the permanent collection of Tate Britain, which is set to present an exhibition of his work next year, alongside a multimedia installation in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern.
The market has long reflected the stature of those paintings. In 2018, *Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)* sold at Christie’s New York for $90.3 million, then a record for a living artist at auction. That mark was later surpassed by Jeff Koons’s *Rabbit* in 2019, but Hockney’s result remains a benchmark. Other major sales followed: *The Splash* brought £23.2 million ($29.9 million) at Sotheby’s London in February 2020; *Nichols Canyon* sold for $41 million at Phillips New York in December 2020; and *Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy* realized $44.4 million at Christie’s New York.
Hockney’s death closes a singular chapter in contemporary art, but the range of his work — from double portraits to digital compositions — continues to shape how artists think about color, intimacy, and the act of looking.
