David Hockney dies, the most iconic British art of the 20th century

BarcelonaA swimming pool and a big splash that tells us someone has just dived in. This image corresponds to Thesplash, one of the most famous paintings by the English painter David Hockney, who died at the age of 88 this Thursday, as confirmed by his agent. Considered one of the great references of pop art, Hockney is known for his representation of affluent Californian environments, where he was based for a long time. "The celebrated British artist David Hockney, one of the most important figures in 20th and 21st century contemporary art, died peacefully at his home on June 11, 2026, one month before his 89th birthday," his representative stated in a press release.

The son of an administrator and a devout Methodist mother, Hockney began his art studies in his hometown of Bradford, in northern England, but soon rebelled against conventions, with gestures such as giving his abstract paintings titles like Going to be a Queen for tonight and Doll boy, at a time when homosexuality was punishable by imprisonment. Later, in 1959, he moved to London to continue his studies; he rose meteorically within the British pop art movement and associated with figures such as the dancer Rudolf Nureyev and the singer Mick Jagger.

But Hockney longed for the excitement he saw in the work of American artists, and with the money earned from the sale of his works, he traveled to New York for the first time in 1961 — where he befriended Andy Warhol — and three years later settled in California. "I thought people who produced work like that had to live in color, so I went to find it," Hockney said in an interview with art critic and friend Peter Adam. "I had spent the first twenty years of my life in the gothic darkness of the north. Here I felt free," he added.

His images of swimming pools and naked men in showers became icons of a sun-drenched lifestyle that he documented with luminous acrylic paint before dividing his time between Los Angeles, London, and Paris in the late sixties and throughout the seventies. But despite his success, Hockney had an unpretentious attitude. "I'm really still a student," he told Adam. "It just so happens that I have quite a few credit cards in my pocket." In 1985, when he was invited to the White House to dine with US President Ronald Reagan, Prince Charles, and Princess Diana, he was held up for half an hour by security guards because he was the only guest who had arrived on foot, according to his biographer.

The return to Yorkshire

One of his most famous paintings, Portrait of an artist (Pool with two figures), showing a figure swimming underwater and a man looking towards the pool, was sold for $90.3 million in 2018, becoming at that time the most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction.

Over the years and with a more domestic life, dogs replaced men in his work, at a time when many of his friends were dying of AIDS. He said he cried for two days when Stanley, one of his beloved dachshunds, died in 2001, after having been immortalized in numerous paintings and drawings. In the late nineties, Hockney began to return more often to Yorkshire, in the north of England, where he had grown up, to visit his mother, and a friend with a terminal illness encouraged him to paint the local landscapes.

Feeling increasingly lonely, he moved from California to the coastal town of Bridlington, on the North Sea coast. For a decade he painted groups of bare trees in winter, fields full of ripe crops, and paths stretching towards the rolling Yorkshire hills. It was the most productive period of his entire career, in a race to capture scenes that, he said, changed more dramatically with the seasons than those in California. "This is not a retirement job," he told the BBC in his strong Yorkshire accent when asked about his inexhaustible energy: “You just do it until you drop.”

The former enfant terrible of British art, almost always with a cigarette in hand, never stopped experimenting with new techniques. He used the fax machine to share his work and later the iPad to create it. His Yorkshire paintings led to a stained-glass window for Westminster Abbey, in central London. In 2018, Hockney bought a country house in Normandy, northern France, and turned his gaze to the fields and flowers in his garden. The 90-meter frieze A year in Normandie was inspired by the almost thousand-year-old Bayeux Tapestry. Hockney's work ethic—forged by getting up every day at six in the morning to work in hospitals for two years, when he refused to do military service—barely diminished in his later years. "I tend to think you have to work every day," he said. "And so I do."