{"id":863030,"date":"2026-06-12T21:07:25","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T21:07:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/863030\/"},"modified":"2026-06-12T21:07:25","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T21:07:25","slug":"david-hockney-whose-art-celebrated-sun-drenched-los-angeles-dead-at-88","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/863030\/","title":{"rendered":"David Hockney, whose art celebrated sun-drenched Los Angeles, dead at 88"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

David Hockney, the innovative and prolific British artist who arrived in Los Angeles in 1964, soon celebrating its sun-drenched life and landscapes in colorful, wildly popular paintings, died Thursday at his home in London. He was 88.<\/p>\n

His death was confirmed in a statement by his publicist Erica Bolton.<\/p>\n

Calling himself \u201can English Los Angeleno,\u201d Hockney immortalized the city\u2019s sparkling swimming pools, palm trees and beautiful young men, then went on to experiment with intricate photo collages, portrait suites, painted and filmed images of Yorkshire landscapes, iPad drawings and more.<\/p>\n

\u201cLos Angeles will always be thought of by many people worldwide through the images that David created,\u201d said Stephanie Barron, senior curator and head of the modern art department at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which holds more than 150 works by Hockney in its permanent collection. \u201cBut for me one of David\u2019s greatest gifts was his ability to look at the world with wonder and joy in whatever medium he decided to work in. … He was fearless in his embrace of technology, and I think that enormous curiosity ran throughout his career, and continued to the end. He was involved in looking at art history and the future simultaneously.\u201d <\/p>\n

Barron, who knew Hockney for 50 years, said LACMA staged more exhibitions of Hockney\u2019s work during that time than any other artist. \u201cDavid considered LACMA and the Tate his two museums,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n

Since his Pop Art paintings in the early \u201860s at London\u2019s Royal College of Art, Hockney was rarely out of the limelight and, more importantly, rarely out of fresh ideas for how to draw, paint, film, print, photograph or otherwise express his creativity. The David Hockney Foundation owns more than 8,000 of his works, including about 200 sketchbooks, more than 230 self-portraits, opera designs and portraits of family and friends.<\/p>\n

Hockney first visited Los Angeles in 1964 \u2014 attracted to its light and leisure and hopeful that it represented a less repressive atmosphere when it came to homosexuality. He moved officially to L.A. in 1976, and in 1978 he rented a multicolored home and studio complex nestled in the Hollywood Hills. There one might find a clutch of art world luminaries at the dining room table, a guest or two in the pool or on the bright blue porch, or, in the studio, a model for his newest opera set. The writer Christopher Isherwood and his partner, artist Don Bachardy, were among his many favored guests.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor David in the 1960s, Los Angeles was an enigma \u2014 a unique city different from his native London or even from New York City where he had his first encounter with \u2018America,\u2019\u201d his close friend and fellow artist Doug E. Roberts told The Times last year.<\/a> <\/p>\n

Hockney loved Hollywood \u2014 the people and the place \u2014 and liked to say he was brought up in England and Hollywood because of the time he spent at the movies. His peroxide blond hair reportedly was inspired when he was a student and saw Clairol TV ads claiming \u201cblondes have more fun.\u201d But it was his interest in everything from Elvis Presley to the Hubble Space Telescope and his sense of humor that set him apart. Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes once called him \u201cthe Cole Porter of modern art.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was open about being gay, even when homosexuality was outlawed in Britain. His early love affair with artist Peter Schlesinger, a younger man he met when teaching a summer drawing class at UCLA in 1966, inspired Hockney\u2019s monumental 1972 painting \u201cPortrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),\u201d a centerpiece of Jack Hazan\u2019s 1974 film \u201cA Bigger Splash.\u201d The painting\u2019s 2018 auction at Christie\u2019s drew a record $90 million for a living artist.<\/p>\n

He was a dedicated reader and student of art, paying homage in his work to Picasso and Cubism as well as to Monet, Matisse, Van Gogh and C\u00e9zanne. A lover of opera, he often had it playing loudly in the studio and enjoyed taking visitors on curated car trips through the Hollywood Hills or Malibu while listening to Wagner. He designed sets for major companies in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, London and elsewhere over the years, and some of his set models were later shown in museums.<\/p>\n

\"David <\/p>\n

David Hockney\u2019s work \u201cGregory in the Pool (Paper Pool 4)\u201d was part of his solo exhibition \u201cDavid Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed\u201d at the Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Springs in 2024-2025. <\/p>\n

(From Palm Springs Art Museum)<\/p>\n

His solo shows drew enormous crowds to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as early as 1988. In 2017 a major retrospective of his work, keyed to his 80th birthday, was presented at New York\u2019s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Paris\u2019 Centre Pompidou and London\u2019s Tate Modern. Chronicling Hockney\u2019s arrival as an important artist in the \u201cravishing\u201d Met retrospective, the New Yorker writer Andrea K. Scott called it \u201ca revelation.\u201d It was, she wrote, \u201ca retort to all the eye-rollers,\u201d including herself, who dismissed his work \u201cas, at best, a guilty pleasure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hockney, who signed letters with the phrase<\/a> \u201clove life,\u201d was known for celebrating the world around him. Arne Glimcher, founder of Pace Gallery, which showed Hockney\u2019s work, described him in a statement as \u201can artist and friend whose humanity and talent could extend the perception of all levels of society. The artist of intellectuals and the person on the street.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2012 Hockney received the coveted Order of Merit, which Queen Elizabeth II presented to him at Buckingham Palace.<\/p>\n

He was born the fourth of five children to a working-class family in Bradford, England, on July 9, 1937. He has said he started \u201cmaking marks on paper\u201d at 8 and received private painting lessons before moving on to Bradford School of Art in 1953. His father, Kenneth, was a pacifist and a conscientious objector in World War II, which made the family somewhat outcast in its small hometown. Hockney\u2019s mother, Laura, was a devout Methodist who kept a detailed diary that later proved priceless to Hockney\u2019s biographer, Christopher Simon Sykes, who noted that when Laura learned that Hockney was gay she wrote, \u201cI commend my boy to God and leave it to Him to decide.\u201d <\/p>\n

The family supported their son in his passionate pursuit of art, and the first painting he sold was a portrait of his father in 1955. He later attended the Royal College of Art in London from 1959 until his graduation in 1962, receiving the school\u2019s Gold Medal.<\/p>\n

After college he did not slack off, noted Sykes. In his 2014 book, \u201cHockney: The Biography,\u201d Sykes pointed out that the artist\u2019s first flat had a chest of drawers near the bed on which he had painted, in large capital letters, the words \u201cget up and work immediately.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Artist <\/p>\n

David Hockney sits in his studio in the Hollywood Hills in February 2017.<\/p>\n

(Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

Hockney lived by that command for the rest of his life, turning out canvas after canvas, photo after photo. In the \u201980s came his extraordinary multi-image photographic collages of friends including Isherwood and Bachardy and such landmarks as the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Canyon and Pearblossom Highway.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Polaroids started oddly enough when I\u2019d just finished a long period of work in the theater, which is of course playing with perspective and illusion,\u201d he once told The Times. \u201cPeople say, \u2018You are a painter, and photography is a sideline.\u2019 But nothing is a sideline for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

That included his continuing fascination with technology. The artist\u2019s long career swept in artworks made not only on cameras and canvases, but on such things as fax machines and photocopiers. Hockney liked to experiment, whether it was with state-of-the-art printing devices or centuries-old painting techniques. <\/p>\n

He went several times to a show of portraits by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres at London\u2019s National Gallery in 1999 and was greatly taken with the photographic quality of Ingres\u2019 19th century drawings. Certain that Ingres had used something optical to achieve that quality, Hockney bought himself a camera lucida, a small device that works like a prism. He then applied Ingres\u2019 methods \u2014 as Hockney imagined them \u2014 to his own portraits of friends and family, and in 2001 he published \u201cSecret Knowledge,\u201d exploring his theories on early artistic uses of optical devices.<\/p>\n

The artist was an accomplished draftsman, and drawings accompanied nearly every step of his career. He had his inside jacket pockets tailored to accommodate his large drawing tools of sketchbooks, pencils and, later, an iPad. In 2010, the first of several Hockney iPad drawings graced the cover of the New Yorker, and many have been featured in the artist\u2019s exhibitions since then.<\/p>\n

Hockney went home to England for Christmas for 30 years, often visiting his mother in the coastal town of Bridlington. It was just a few hours away from Bradford, where, as a teenager in the 1950s, Hockney would ride his bicycle to work in the fields.<\/p>\n

In 1997, when his good friend Jonathan Silver was dying, Hockney stayed in Yorkshire for four months. It was Silver, Hockney told The Times, who suggested he paint Yorkshire again, something he hadn\u2019t done since he was a student.<\/p>\n

By 2005, Hockney was painting the countryside en plein air, his easel \u2014 or, sometimes, easels \u2014 set up outdoors in the midst of what he was painting. When his paintings grew larger, he would add more canvases, resulting in paintings of nine or more canvases. Later he equipped a Jeep with nine small carefully mounted high-definition cameras to film Yorkshire\u2019s rolling hills, trees and skies, then showed the films on multiple screens for friends and, later, in exhibitions.<\/p>\n

Based in Bridlington in the family home, with a huge studio a few miles away, Hockney went on to paint Yorkshire in every season, a project he knew would take him a long time to complete. \u201cAs we say in Hollywood,\u201d he would quip, \u201cI\u2019m on location.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hockney returned to Los Angeles full-time in 2013 but hardly slowed down. \u201cMost people die of boredom,\u201d he said in 2018. \u201cI\u2019m not bored yet. I\u2019m still curious. I\u2019m still excited by pictures. I say that when I\u2019m in the studio, I feel like I\u2019m 30, but when I leave it, I know I\u2019m 80. So, naturally, I stay in the studio.\u201d<\/p>\n

As his hearing worsened, he left his home less. Rather, he brought the world to him, inviting painting, photography and film subjects to perform for his camera or sit for portraits in his studio.<\/p>\n

At 82, he also set up a studio in France, a country he felt was more hospitable to smokers like himself, and rented a large home in Normandy. He told reporters he wanted to be closer to the Bayeux Tapestry, his favorite artwork, where he could create work inspired by the tapestry and which he hinted might be his swansong. \u201cIt is going to be marvelous,\u201d he told the Art Newspaper. \u201cI can\u2019t think of anything better than to watch the arrival of spring in Normandy in 2019. Van Gogh would have loved it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Isenberg is a former Times staff writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"David Hockney, the innovative and prolific British artist who arrived in Los Angeles in 1964, soon celebrating its…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":863031,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[9],"tags":[1037,8067,192835,64376,171,246,1532,351840,14107,2676,405,1069,42381,351906,351905,67,132,68,8066],"class_list":["post-863030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-art","tag-artist","tag-canvas","tag-david-hockney","tag-entertainment","tag-family","tag-friend","tag-hockney","tag-hollywood","tag-london","tag-new-york","tag-painting","tag-portrait","tag-royal-college","tag-sun-drenched-los-angeles","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-work"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116739181822881808","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=863030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863030\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/863031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=863030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=863030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=863030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}