Art legend David Hockney died at age 88. The world-renowned British painter’s portraits and landscapes made him an icon of the contemporary art world.
Per his publicist, Hockney died “peacefully at home” on Thursday. He was one month short of his 89th birthday.
David Hockney’s Early Years
Hockney trained at the Bradford School of Art from 1953 through 1957. He later studied at the Royal College of Art in London, from 1959 through 1962, earning a Gold medal of distinction.
The artist left London in 1964 and moved to Los Angeles, where he painted his beloved swimming pool series, Beverly Hills Housewife, and a double portrait of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. During this time, he began using photography in his portraiture. He later abandoned this technique, citing it as overly reliant on photorealism.
Not only is Hockney a celebrated painter, but he also created iconic opera and theater stage designs for productions including Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (in 1966) and Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (in 1975).
English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer David Hockney and American artist, director and producer Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987), UK, 29th June 1976. (Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images)By the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, Hockney had moved from a painter to exploring his subjects through an art-historical lens. Using optical devices, he approached his subjects from a deeper perspective as an investigator and theorist. In 2001, he published “Secret Knowledge” (a.k.a. The Hockney/Falco Thesis) with Professor of optical science, Charles Falco.
Hockney returned to Yorkshire in the early 2000s, again focusing on landscapes. During this time, he created a watercolor series, Midsummer: East Yorkshire, and oil paintings, Bigger Trees near Warter.
The artist moved back to Los Angeles in 2013, and then back again to London a decade later. Hockney spoke with the BBC in 2025, prior to his exhibition at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, sharing, “I just thought I probably wouldn’t be here…I’m still a smoker, a happy smoker fed up of bossy people telling you what to do, but I don’t know.”
David Hockey on Technology
He embraced the use of modern technology in his later years, telling the Royal Academy Magazine, “I am at the moment drawing, or painting really, on an iPad. I have been working this year, 2020, to depict the arrival of spring in Normandy. This takes about three months, and I think it’s the most exciting thing nature has to offer in this part of the world.”
He continued, “It is a new medium. With pluses and minus like any medium…Once, when we were just sitting outside the house, we put all the lights off in the house to see the moonlight more clearly. The moon could then be seen to cast shadows of the trees on the grass, so with my backlit iPad, I could draw it. That would have been virtually impossible without it.”
David Hockney would have turned 89 on July 9.
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