David Hockney, Art Icon, Dies at 88

David Hockney’s canary yellow hair went white years ago, his hearing was failing for decades, and he suffered a stroke in 2012. But the man considered by many to be the world’s greatest living painter had, year after year, decade after decade, steadfastly remained his boyish, familiar self: gabby, opinionated, workaholic, mischievous, chain-smoking, ever the bespectacled dandy surrounded by a reliable retinue of friends. It was as if Hockney transcended time. He was, after all, one of the few artists—along with Picasso, Dalí, Warhol, and Kahlo—who could be said to be iconic in the real, literal sense: instantly recognizable, indelibly familiar, culturally omnipresent. Hockney, put plainly, was the most famous artist in the world. He had been in the public eye for so long, and held dear by so many, that the announcement of his death, at the age of 88, not only triggers something of a global shock but also marks a turning point in the history of art. His is the most impactful passing of an artist since Warhol’s in 1987. A cause of death was not immediately available.

With his statement eyewear and bleach-blond hair, not to mention his penchant for rainbow-hued raiment (rugby shirts, cardigans, floppy caps, polka-dotted ties, flowing suits, checkered sport coats), Hockney was as conspicuous as a pop star. His paintings, drawings, etchings, photographic collages, sets for opera and theatre, and iPhone/iPad works took up residence in just about every museum on Earth and were the focus of boffo retrospectives and extravaganzas, including jam-packed exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, in 2017, and at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, in Paris, in 2025, the largest show of his seven-plus-decade career, a victory lap.

Mikel Roberts/Sygma/Getty Images

In November of 2018, Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), a dazzling seven-by-ten-foot, acrylic-on-canvas painting from 1972, set the all-time auction record for a living artist when it was hammered down at Christie’s for $90.3 million. (It was later eclipsed by Jeff Koons’s Rabbit.) Hockney once said, “The price of art is nothing to do with works of art really. It’s just a little game that keeps people amused.”

David Hockney was born on July 9, 1937, in the West Yorkshire city of Bradford, a half hour west of Leeds. Someone once likened his signature Yorkshire accent, which he retained all his life, to lumpy custard. The Hockneys of Bradford were a Northern working-class family with a progressive, eccentric bent. The artist’s father, Kenneth, was a conscientious objector in the Second World War; his mother, Laura, was a strict vegetarian. The title of his brother John’s memoir, The Hockneys: Never Worry What the Neighbours Think, captured the household bent. Another brother, Paul, grew up to become Bradford’s Lord Mayor as well as the artist’s accountant. David had a particularly tight bond with his sister, Margaret, a nurse. She would inspire Hockney, in the final decades of his life, to take up the iPhone as an artistic implement, leading to the artist’s prolific, late-career exploration of picture-making—in particular, landscapes—in the digital realm.

The young David displayed hypergraphic tendencies—the compulsive need to make a mark, to depict. Paper was scarce during the war, so the boy would roust himself out of bed early and intercept the delivery of newspapers and magazines, going at their blank margins with his pencil, drawing figures, cartoons, landscapes, whatever struck his fancy. Soon enough, he took up painting. “I used to paint just around where I lived,” Hockney recalled of his boyhood. “Eventually, I got a pram and put the paints in it, and I’d wheel it out.” In 1953, Hockney entered the Bradford School of Art; he loved it so much he would spend 12 hours a day there. At 17, he sold his first work, an oil painting of his father, for ten pounds. Hockney’s parents and siblings remained lifelong, recurring subjects.

After a two-year National Service stint as a hospital orderly (thanks to his own conscientious-objector status), Hockney landed at the Royal College of Art, in London, in the fall of 1959. With the turning of the decade, British postwar art was tipping into a vivid new era, one that included the likes of R.B. Kitaj and Derek Boshier (both friends of Hockney’s at RCA), along with Peter Blake, Bridget Riley, and Pauline Boty. Kitaj and Hockney were especially close, with the older, American Kitaj, acting as something of a mentor. Amid all of the young, attention-grabbing prodigies at the Royal College, Hockney’s technical prowess—a dimension of his art that would be noted throughout his career—made him stand out. Kitaj said that his friend made “the most beautiful drawing I had ever seen at an art school.” It depicted a human skeleton.

According to Kitaj, “Hockney had a two-week abstract period.” But the angsty machismo of abstract expressionism didn’t suit him, so he toggled to figurative painting and began incorporating imagery from commercial culture into his work: the stuff of Pop. There were boxes of Typhoo tea (his mother’s favorite), male figures inspired by the singer Cliff Richard. Still an art student, Hockney was already busy crafting some of the foundational images of British Pop art, as he distilled a panoply of inspirations, both visual and literary, from Bacon to Dubuffet, Whitman to Cavafy. Hockney’s metabolism when it came to absorbing influence and emitting utter originality was rapid, inexhaustible, and, even early on, subject to public scrutiny, as would befit a precocious art star. Henry Geldzahler, the Met curator and all-purpose New York art gadfly, would later observe that Hockney “conducted his education in public with a charming and endearing innocence.” (Geldzahler became one of Hockney’s close associates and the subject of his portraiture.)

At the RCA’s Young Contemporaries exhibition of 1961, Hockney’s work caught the eye of Cecil Beaton, who bought one of the young artist’s paintings, Adhesiveness. (Beaton said of Hockney, “Life is a delightful wonderland for him.”) The canvas had wit, verve, and precision. It was Hockney’s breakthrough, what he called “his first attempt at a double portrait,” depicting two abstracted male figures in a 69 position. The title was inspired by Whitman. It was a bold statement about queer love at a time when queer love was a criminal offense in England. Hockney would execute other “gay” paintings at the Royal College, his so-called “love pictures,” including We Two Boys Together Clinging. “They were partly propaganda of something I felt hadn’t been propagandized, especially among students, as a subject: homosexuality,” Hockney recalled. “I felt it should be done. Nobody else would use it as a subject, but because it was a part of me it was a subject that I could treat humorously.”

Hockney was unabashed about his sexuality, using charm and honesty to establish his position and ward off prejudice. He made a conscious decision not to be evasive or under the radar. As if to drive the point home, after seeing a TV commercial for Miss Clairol hair dye during a visit to the States in 1961, Hockney, whose natural hair color was dark brown, went bottle blond. Along with the requisite round, chunky glasses, the signature Hockney look—not quite camp but head-turningly dandified—was set. At his RCA graduation, he made the most of it, turning up in a gold-lamé jacket and toting a matching gold bag for hauling away the College Life Drawing and Gold Medal for Work of Outstanding Distinction prizes.

David Hockney posing with his painting.From Cecil Beaton Archive.

But Hockney was no show horse. As a student, he was remembered as “an incredible grafter”— a guy with an appetite for grindingly hard work. Upon moving into his first studio, in ratty Powis Terrace, in Notting Hill, in 1962, Hockney fashioned a sign that he posted at his bedside that read GET UP AND WORK IMMEDIATELY, a career-long motto. By then he’d already signed on with the upstart London dealer John Kasmin and was nearing completion of a series of 16 etchings called A Rake’s Progress, after Hogarth, published in an edition of 50 at £250 a pop. Hockney was flabbergasted by the asking price. He was perhaps even more flabbergasted when they sold like hotcakes, topping up his bank account to the point of enabling him to achieve the dream of returning to America.

By the summer of 1963, Hockney was in New York, where he met Andy Warhol, Henry Geldzahler, and Dennis Hopper on the same day. (Hopper famously photographed the occasion.) Manhattan was but a way station. Hockney ultimately headed to Los Angeles, the city that is most identified with his work and where he was wowed by the sun and the suntans, the swimming pools and the swimmers. “It was free and sexy,” he said. Like many arrivals from colder, cloudier climes, Hockney went all in on LA, buying a Ford Falcon and devouring John Rechy’s City of Night. He found Venice, California, to be more beautiful than Venice, Italy. He exalted in the colors: turquoise, pink, green, bright blue. And he acquired a taste for hamburgers—even though, English to the core, he once allegedly asked a waitress in LA if he might be served toast with bloater paste.

Most significantly, Hockney fell in love with a UCLA student named Peter Schlesinger, who would prove to be his most famous partner and muse, and set about executing what were destined to become his best-known works, the swimming-pool paintings, such as A Bigger Splash, from 1967, and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures.) (The latter includes Schlesinger as a subject; their breakup was the focus of the 1973 documentary A Bigger Splash.) The two pictures are among the most recognizable in postwar art. In each, the mood is of hedonistic distraction; the weird, dozy attenuation of modern life is masterfully distilled.

Hockney’s paintings of pool water and splashes demonstrated his obsession with capturing elemental natural phenomena, even in suburban settings. In them, he was not only depicting the play of water and air and light, he was depicting the act of depicting them. Hockney once said of rendering a splash, “I loved the idea of painting this thing that lasts for two seconds; it takes me two weeks to paint this event.” Throughout Hockney’s 70-year career, picture-making was the constant focus, a complete engagement with and commitment to the idea of creating images on a two-dimensional surface. Hockney’s paintings and drawings, as well as his later photo collages and digital works, invariably had a playful, exploratory, interrogative relationship with perspective, light, scale, framing, rendering—the basic components of picture-making. As such, they were elaborate inquisitions into the very nature of seeing.

It was this publication’s good fortune to have maintained a long and fruitful collaboration with the artist. Hockney’s photograph of his own white saddle shoes, with brilliantly mismatched sock and laces, appeared on the cover of Vanity Fairs’s fourth issue after the magazine relaunched in 1983. He provided “homemade Hockneys,” pictures making their debuts in our pages. He eventually appeared in no less than 130 articles over 40-plus years.

But it was a 1986 assignment that would prove to be his most consequential VF commission. To accompany a story on the 30^th anniversary of Nabokov’s Lolita, Hockney was asked to visually capture the vagabond mood of the novel. He spent ten days in the California desert, eventually combining hundreds of still photos to create a pixelated rendering of a desolate highway intersection. His vision was to have it published as a gatefold, a kind of mural-in-a-magazine. When the editors balked at the production costs, he didn’t seem to mind. He returned the advance and took the picture back, knowing he’d made a masterpiece: Pearlblossom Highway, his most elaborate photo collage.

In conversation and on the page, Hockney was a witty, observant, and often contrarian scholar of art, offering exuberant opinions on the likes of Turner, Constable, Ingres, Caravaggio, Van Gogh, Bacon, and Warhol. Insatiably curious and omnivorously well-read, Hockney, perhaps foremost among contemporary artists, thrived on intellectual sparring and parlor talk—a gregarious, wide-ranging, eloquent, polemical, and polymathic opinionizer on art and all things art-adjacent, including photography, the natural world, history, literature, the creative process, Internet culture, music, and life in general, as evidenced by such books as A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, by the British art historian Martin Gayford.

Hockney’s boldest position, which continues to spark debate, is the one he laid out in the year 2000 in a New Yorker piece by Lawrence Weschler: that the Old Masters used optical devices to help them achieve stunning visual effects and realistic rendering. Hockney was also convinced that pure abstraction was old hat, “a period piece.” He saw traditional Western perspective as limited, a way of “strangling space.” Photography, he asserted, was “not really looking.” He was skeptical about monumentalism and existential dread in contemporary art. “To be honest, I don’t really understand [Gerhard] Richter,” he once said of the German painter known for his brooding abstractions made with the aid of squeegees. “The pictures are quite nice, but also a little like the belle peinture from Paris in the 50s… And I mean that pejoratively.” Hockney’s own work may have had its touches of anxiety and tension, but humor, wit, resplendent color, a touch of unapologetic sentimentality, even beauty—these facets took precedence. “What fun they are to see!” Hilton Kramer wrote in a 1977 Times review of Hockney paintings: a radical statement if there ever was one, the pleasure principle at work.

David Hockney poses in front of a large painting of a street scene in his studio in 1980.Susan Wood/Getty Images

Yet daring to be playful—and making beautiful things—had a downside for Hockney’s reputation. Kramer, for one, also called his paintings “facile.” The critical tradition of questioning Hockney’s “seriousness” goes back nearly as far as celebrating his skill and originality. Was Hockney a people-pleasing lightweight? A kind of supernaturally gifted illustrator of the late 20th-century zeitgeist? (One chronicler called him “an Aubrey Beardsley of the 1960’s.”) Does the charm of Hockney’s work nullify its seriousness? Simon Schama bemoaned “the critics’ habit of writing off Hockney’s formal virtuosity as a sure sign of stunted conceptual growth”—as if the artist were simply too good to be truly great. There was something puritanical and stunted in all of this critical handwringing. Hockney himself once argued, in a Wildean turn, “There’s a bit of schmalz in Rembrandt, but I suspect there is in a lot of really great art.”

Gregarious, sociable, and stylish, Hockney was, as the London Sunday Times observed in 1977, “tailor-made for Fleet Street and the color supplements.” In an era of rock stars and celluloid heroes, Hockney was the art world’s own entry into the fame game; he was said to be the Beatles of contemporary art. As such, his life was the object of enduring fascination and close scrutiny, in no small part because the life was so entwined with the work. Hockney’s portraiture, a stunning, collective documentation of personalities, featured recurring friends, family, neighbors, lovers, and associates, including the fashion designer Ossie Clark and the textile artist Celia Birtwell (the subjects of Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy), Schlesinger, Geldzahler, various studio hands, and an expansive retinue of subjects who, taken together, suggested a personal yet expansive café society: Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, Man Ray, Michael Chow, Billy Wilder, Brooke Hayward, Harry Styles, and many others. (Eighty-two Hockney portraits were included in a show at LACMA in 2018.)

The poet W.H. Auden sat for Hockney in 1968. While Hockney worked, Auden, as the artist recalled, played the part of the impatient, irritable grump. But, typical of Hockney portraiture, the resulting drawings magnificently captured every crag in Auden’s impossibly craggy face. Hockney later reflected, “I kept thinking if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?” there is no better artist rendering of the poet of “September 1, 1939.”

Hockney was a dedicated smoker who railed against smoking bans, ascribing them to “bossy-boots politicians.” (In his later years, he took to wearing a lapel button with the slogan END BOSSINESS SOON.) By his own account, he smoked 20 cigarettes during daylight hours, ten more in the evening, and five more at night. His preference ran to the Davidoff brand. His doctors told him to stop; he outlived them. “In my profession,” Hockney said, “Picasso smoked and died at 91, Matisse smoked and died at 84 and Monet chain-smoked and died at 86. I don’t smoke much when I’m painting, but I light a cigarette every fifteen minutes when I stop to check what I have done.” (In 2023, he accidentally set off fire alarms after sparking up during an opening in London.) Hockney found the 21st-century concept—and business—of “wellness” abhorrent. His health advice was succinct, grounded in his own practice: “Love LIFE.”

A few years ago, as he neared 85, Hockney reflected on the concept of beauty and its place in a modern world. “I think the world is beautiful to look at, but most people don’t see it,” he said, sounding a recurring theme, a kind of parting lesson. “The world is beautiful, and it’s also mad. People are mad. And I don’t think that’s going to change that much.”