David Hockney, OM, blockbuster artist whose vivid paintings were recognisable to millions

David Hockney, OM, who has died aged 88, was widely considered Britain’s greatest living artist, his popularity impervious to critical maulings.

With his peroxide blond thatch of hair, cartoonish, owl-like horn-rimmed spectacles, trouser braces, lamé suits and defiantly ever-smouldering cigarette, he was a figure of fascination for the world’s media, as his hero Picasso had been to an earlier generation.

Picasso once claimed never to have “made a painting as a work of art. They are all research.” Hockney took this as his creed, reinventing himself with clockwork reliability and restless curiosity in each successive decade. Having emerged from the fringes of Pop Art in the 1960s to forge a vibrant painting style that was distinctly his own – and eventually recognisable to millions – he went on to make an impression in media as varied as graphic design, theatre sets, printmaking, photography, video and, as early as the 1980s, the brave new world of computer art. He even touched the fashion world, inspiring a Burberry catwalk collection and a Vivienne Westwood jacket.

There was something of the eternal child about him: “part boy, part sage,” as one critic put it. Partly it was his taste for vivid colour and bold, sausage-like lines; partly the way he tackled each new medium – from the fax to the Polaroid – like a shiny toy, its technical obstacles a puzzle to be savoured.

In his 70s, he embraced the iPad, using it to create a new stained-glass window for Westminster Abbey, a mischievous clash of old and new. In his 80s, he experimented with virtual reality in an immersive retrospective staged in a cube-like room lined with screens, the show’s title a manifesto for the kind of octogenarian Hockney was determined to be: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away).

His appetite for technology was all the more remarkable because, as The Washington Post put it, “There is no living art star less in need of a machine… Hockney can draw water. Hockney can draw smog. He can draw the bleaching sunlight… in Los Angeles. He can draw the chilling damp of Bradford… He can draw the glow of friendship.”

His gifts as a draughtsman and colourist were indeed remarkable, but what stamped him for greatness was his intellect. The public adored him because he could turn anxiety-inducing, big-picture questions – about whether what you are seeing is the same as what the person standing next to you is seeing, and what any of that has to do with “reality” – into art that, quite simply, felt like fun.

“I suppose essentially I am saying we are not sure what the world looks like. An awful lot of people think we do, but I don’t,” he observed. “I’ve always believed that pictures make us see the world. Without them, I’m not sure what anybody would see.”

One of his hobby-horses was photography, which purports to depict the world accurately but in fact leaves out the element of time – something the roving “active eye” of the Cubists had tried to redress. Inspired by Chinese landscape scrolls, in the 1980s Hockney began making sprawling collages of photographs, documenting his wandering gaze with the camera.

“It takes time to look at anything if you want to really see it,” he said. His photographic portrait of Henry Moore came out with three eyes. “Cubism didn’t fail,” he claimed, of the previous half-century – the problem was that “the photograph got in the way.”

He was also a lifelong amateur archaeologist of his predecessors’ techniques, and in 1999 advanced the thesis that optical aids such as curved mirrors and the camera obscura, which condense reality into picture projections, were the unacknowledged “secret” that explained how early Renaissance artists had achieved such feats of naturalism and accuracy.

Critics were divided on his findings, just as they were about his exhibitions, which routinely suffered what he called “ritual slaughter”. One critic accused him of covering up his own lack of ideas as a painter with “gizmos, faxes, computer graphics and wearisome conceptual subterfuge”. But Hockney was immune, convinced that he was “way ahead of everyone”.

His view of things was endorsed by the British public, who flocked to his exhibitions, and by the art market. In 2018 his 1972 Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) became the most expensive artwork by a living artist ever sold at auction, at $90 million (a record later broken by a Jeff Koons sculpture, though the Hockney still holds the auction record for a painting).

Hockney’s “world” revolved around three distinct locations: Yorkshire, where he was born; California, the setting of his adventurous youth; and London, where he blended into its artistic circles. Collectively, these disparate environments provided much of what fascinated him in life: the beauty of widescreen landscapes and the intimate lives of people in their comfortable enclaves. He captured these elements through a broad spectrum of media, with a palette as bright as his outlook, favouring marine blues, lush greens and reds that throbbed with energy.

Even to the most urban of subject matter he brought an unexpected naturalist’s eye. His “Splash” paintings of the late 1960s – in which he captured Hollywood’s high society plunging into their swimming pools – were as much about the elemental pleasures of water as they were about the jet set. In his London and Los Angeles interiors, house plants and cut flowers vie for attention with his human subjects.

So often in the past, notably with Augustus John, the lionisation of an artist has both exaggerated and ultimately destroyed the talent it sought to celebrate. Hockney, however, always retained a deep common sense and seriousness of purpose about his art.

He united two seemingly antithetical worlds by becoming a Californian without ever ceasing to be a Yorkshireman. “I’ve got Bradford – they’ll never take that away from me,” he once remarked to his lifelong friend, the painter RB Kitaj. That self-perceptiveness, and the burning need to communicate it directly with the viewer, was in a sense the subject matter of his art, and the key to his many achievements.

David Hockney was born on July 9 1937, one of five children; one of his brothers later became mayor of Bradford. As Hockney later put it, “We didn’t think we were working class, we thought we were first class.”

Although their circumstances were modest – his father worked as an accounts clerk in Bradford – the family was a close one, even if later not entirely comprehending of his way of life. Both his parents held strong and unconventional views. His devoutly religious mother was a convinced vegetarian; his father waged imaginative lifelong campaigns against both war and smoking.

Something of that same seriousness and need for a cause were an important part of Hockney’s make-up. He later blamed his hobby-horses for driving away several boyfriends who tired of his tirades, and he also espoused vegetarianism and pacifism at various stages in his career, even if he found himself on the opposite side of the smoking crusade to his father. (“I smoke for my mental health,” he explained. “Tobacco gives you little pauses, a rest from life.”)

He won a scholarship to Bradford Grammar School, but did deliberately badly in academic subjects so that he could remain in the lower general class and study art. His gift was evident from the cartoons he drew for the school magazine, and at 16 he was given a grant to attend Bradford School of Art.

There he found his authentic voice in graphic art; as always, his creativity was sparked on the flint of technical difficulties. A lithograph entitled Self-Portrait (1954), presages many of the themes that were to fascinate Hockney later: a cool self-interest, a strong sense of pattern, the contrast between stillness and movement, surface and depth.

His fascination with graphic elements – drawing and lettering in particular – was to play a vital part in the look of his first mature paintings, produced when he went to the Royal College in 1959, having spent the two years of his National Service as a conscientious objector working in hospitals in the south of England, doing no painting but voraciously reading poetry, Whitman in particular.

At the Royal College he formed part of a remarkable group including Kitaj, Allen Jones and Peter Phillips who created a stir of serious critical interest while still students. Kitaj was the major influence on Hockney (and the group in general), encouraging him towards a more open and intimate expression of his feelings, an autobiographical element that would become central to his art.

The most pressing personal matter was his declared homosexuality which, although evident in his student work, found more confident expression after a brief first trip to New York in 1961. He effected a parallel flamboyant transformation of his appearance, dyeing his naturally oaty-coloured hair an icy blond after seeing a late-night American television advertisement which declared: “Blondes have more fun!”

He emerged from art school as something of a prodigy, able to earn a good living from his work almost immediately, after a spell teaching art in Maidstone. A young dealer, John Kasmin, took him on and oversaw his first major graphic production, 16 etchings on The Rake’s Progress (1961-63), based on his experiences in New York, which went to market at £250 a set, a price then quite unheard of for a new artist.

Major prizes began to follow. To the Gold Medal he had won at the Royal College on his graduation in 1962 he added the Graphic Prize at the Paris Biennale of 1963 and first prize at the prestigious British open exhibition for painters, the John Moores in Liverpool, in 1967. At this last event he caused a sensation by walking up to receive his prize – in a gold lamé suit, naturally – and asking John Moores, the pools and mail-order magnate who was presenting the prize: “Would you mind signing your name and address on the back?”

A love affair with America that had begun in 1961 took a more serious turn in 1964 when, with the money he had made from The Rake’s Progress and a highly successful show of paintings at Kasmin’s, he visited California for the first time. With typical quirkiness he chose Los Angeles rather than San Francisco (which he claimed to find rather provincial), and although he continued to keep houses in Yorkshire and London, he effectively made the Hollywood Hills his home from then on.

The freedom and openness of life in LA appealed strongly. He was instantly absorbed into the gay scene, the writer Christopher Isherwood becoming a great early supporter (his collection of Hockneys was considered the most important private holding in the world). Hockney’s painting in turn evolved dramatically, discovering a flatter, more deadpan and realistic style which captured to perfection the bland, hedonistic and oddly suburban California townscape of patios and palm trees, lawn sprinklers and swimming pools, and, of course, men.

More personal, and perhaps remarkable, are the drawings and etchings of this period. “Taking a line for a walk” in the spirit of Paul Klee, he produced sketches of marvellous simplicity and expressiveness, of himself, his mother and father, his friend Celia Birtwell, and in particular of Peter Schlesinger, with whom he was having an affair.

Schlesinger became the model for many of his California paintings of the 1960s and early 1970s, and features in his greatest etching achievement of this period, Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from CP Cavafy, the quintessential expression of Hockney’s feelings about homosexuality. Taken together with the 36 illustrations to Six Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (1970), their deceptive simplicity, conveying by means of a few lines skimmed across the surface such depths of charged emotion, established Hockney as one of the great graphic masters of modern times.

If the 1960s had been all success and Californian sunshine, the 1970s proved altogether more trying, both personally and artistically. It had started off well enough with his first major retrospective show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1970 (aged only 33), which cemented his reputation as one of the major figures of his generation. However, as he later admitted, his paintings had been leading him into an impasse; then, much to his distress, his relationship with Peter Schlesinger broke up.

The super-realist character of the paintings of this period, which often feature swimming pools, water in movement, or figures watching other figures swimming under water, were all about stillness and reflection. They convey a powerful sense of loss. So, too, do the psychological double portraits of the period, with lover (usually in profile) and loved one (usually full face) observed by Hockney, who in turn is trapped outside, looking in.

But the liveliness and humour that was still apparent in his graphic work had begun to fade from his painting, and he virtually gave it up altogether in the mid-1970s, only to find his way back into painting through a somewhat unexpected route.

An inspired commission from Glyndebourne in 1975 to create the designs for Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress started the process of reinvigoration. Though Hockney’s art had often shown an interest in theatrical effects and devices, no one could have predicted the enormous influence that the stage was to exert on him in the following years.

Another Glyndebourne assignment followed for the sets to The Magic Flute (1978), and in 1981 a huge commission from the Metropolitan Opera in New York to create the sets for two full evenings of opera and dance. Other superb sets for Wagner at the Met appeared in the late 1980s, but none perhaps surpassed the freshness of the design of this first period.

Equally important was the revolutionary form of Cubist photographic collage he had evolved in the early 1980s, known as “joiners”, playing with space and illusion to great effect. This, and theatre, plucked him out of the conceptual shallow-end he had reached with the swimming pools. In the 1980s he began painting again, with terrific vitality, a dizzying sense of space and in high-pitched colour.

His public image had also changed. The enfant terrible of the 1960s had matured via the Californian playboy of the 1970s into the respected innovator and even elder statesman of the 1980s. A series of interviews on 20th-century art that he did with Melvyn Bragg on The South Bank Show revealed his brilliant gift for talking about art with warmth, clarity and real perception.

Though never overtly political, he took a firm public stand on a handful of issues in which he had a personal stake – notably fighting the Thatcher government’s Section 28, against “promoting homosexuality by teaching or by publishing material”. He also campaigned against anti-smoking laws, which were, he declared, simply “mean-spirited”. He held up a placard at one Labour Party conference saying: “DEATH awaits you all even if you do smoke”.

 In 1988 Hockney returned triumphantly to the United Kingdom for a major retrospective of his work at the Tate, which became one of the most successful exhibitions of a living British artist that the gallery had ever mounted.

Further stage and screen commissions arrived in the 1990s, with set designs for Puccini’s Turandot (Chicago Lyric Opera, 1991) and Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (Royal Opera House, London, 1992) and a TV broadcast of Plácido Domingo’s Operalia in Mexico City (1994).

As Hockney’s hair faded from peroxide to white, his interest was increasingly drawn to the past. In 2001 he published Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, investigating the use of optical aids by Holbein, Caravaggio and Vermeer. Yet he chose never to meet his hero, Picasso, even though he had the chance. Hockney was, he explained, “too in awe of him. Why would I waste his time?”

​In 2012 the Royal Academy staged one of his late triumphs: a blockbuster retrospective entitled A Bigger Picture, gargantuan, ebullient, Fauvist canvases of his native Yorkshire, twice the size of Claude Monet’s water-lily paintings. Brian Sewell called them “careless, crude and coarse… the visual equivalent of being tied hand and foot and dumped under the loudspeakers of the Glastonbury Festival”, but the critics’ drubbing was powerless to sever what had become an almost mystical bond between Hockney and his public. A retrospective of his work at Tate Britain in 2017 broke the gallery’s attendance records.

“Bigger” seemed the watchword of his late career. Having set the Hockney stamp on landscape, he set out to do the same with portraiture, embarking on a series of 50 portraits of friends: “I am painting the human comedy,” he explained. In the end he exhibited 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life at the Royal Academy in 2016, followed by 150 portraits of the same five sitters – including Celia Birtwell – at the National Portrait Gallery in 2023.

The closer he got to the end, the more frantically he painted. His 2025 exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris was the largest he had ever had, and confronted his mortality head on, with paintings inspired by William Blake’s Dante and Virgil Approaching the Angel Who Guards the Entrance of Purgatory.

A self-confessed hermit, Hockney described himself as “not that easy to live with. I tend to put my work first – I always have done – and people don’t like that very much.”

He retained an endearing modesty in the face of fame, and wore a badge on his lapel saying “End bossiness soon”, explaining that it could not say “End bossiness now” because that would have been too bossy.

Latterly he added a house in Normandy to his annual rotation between California and Yorkshire. Friends far afield would wake up to find a fresh iPad drawing of Hockney’s domestic life, showing a pair of curtains or perhaps an ashtray, in their email inbox. He claimed that both Van Gogh and Picasso would have “gone mad” for the iPad.

He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1991. His many accolades on both sides of the Atlantic included The Royal Photographic Society’s Progress Medal in 1988 and their Special 150th Anniversary Medal for his contribution to the art of photography in 2003.

He refused a knighthood in 1990, claiming that he did “not care for a fuss” and that awards “of any sort are a bit suspect”. He accidentally became a Companion of Honour in 1997 because, he complained, someone else opened the envelope: “I never claimed to be a respectable person – I smoke dope…”

In 2012, however, he accepted the Queen’s appointment to the Order of Merit, although when he was asked to paint her, he declined, explaining that he was “very busy painting England, actually. Her country.” This year he was appointed to the Légion d’honneur.

His exhibition, David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting, is currently on at the Serpentine Gallery in London.

David Hockney, born July 9 1937, died June 11 2026​