David Hockney, pioneering British artist famous for swimming pools and portraits, dies at 88 David Hockney

David Hockney, the famous British painter who cast a revolutionary outlook on twentieth-century art, has died at the age of 88.

He made his name as a Pop artist during the 1960s and is perhaps best known for his paintings of swimming pools that helped define the Los Angeles aesthetic. Works such as A Greater Splash and Portrait of the Artist (A Pool with Two Figures) depict hedonistic scenes of love, lust and loss that occur under sun-filled city skies.

But Hockney’s career, which spanned six decades, cannot be defined by a single era. He produced perspective-shifting portraits using collages, experimented with abstract landscape painting, and, later in life, investigated the possibilities of creating artworks using emerging 3D technology.

Artist Tracey Emin said she felt proud to know Hockney, adding: “A great artist and a wonderful man, who through the power of art changed the concept of British identity. A proud gay man smoked heavily and raised the flag higher than any other British artist.”

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer was also among the first to pay tribute to Hockney. A government spokesman said: “The Prime Minister is saddened to hear of the death of David Hockney, one of Britain’s most famous artists.”

“His vivid and instantly recognizable works have influenced generations of artists, and the Prime Minister’s thoughts are with his friends and family.”

King Charles said Hockney was a man of “irrepressible charm, talent and constant innovation”. Charles wrote on social media that Hockney was “a giant of the world of art and painting, a Yorkshireman in every sense of the word, and a dear friend and inspiration to many.”

He wrote: “David was one of life’s true innovators; one who wore his genius as lightly as the beloved yellow crocs that brightened palace events. I am confident they will watch him step gracefully into the afterlife as we mourn a man whose irrepressible charm, talent and constant innovation will be sorely missed, but whose dazzling creations still live on in galleries and museums around the world.”

A statement from Hockney’s representatives said: “The famous British artist David Hockney, one of the most important figures in contemporary art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, passed away peacefully at his home on June 11, 2026, one month before his eighty-ninth birthday.”

He added: “David Hockney’s lasting legacy reflects his inherent enthusiasm for life, his distinctive sense of humour, his immense generosity and his investigative curiosity embodied in his famous phrase: ‘Love life.'”

“Details of memorials will be forthcoming in due course.”

Alex Farquharson, director of the Tate Britain art gallery in London, described Hockney as a “hugely important figure.”

Farquharson told the BBC: “David was an endlessly creative artist with a unique vision of the world.”

“He was always completely himself and fearless, both in his work and in life. He taught us about the joy of looking, of seeing things that the rest of us failed to notice — and his witty, sharp observations were a constant presence in his work and in person.”

“The loss to the art world is enormous: David’s death brings to an end an extraordinary body of work characterized by reinvention.”

The Tate is planning a major exhibition of his work at Tate Britain next year, as well as a multimedia installation in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, and said it would continue to work with the Hockney team to ensure both go ahead.

The Center Pompidou in Paris, with whom Hockney collaborated on two prominent exhibitions, described him as “without a doubt one of the key figures in contemporary art.”

She added that the works he leaves behind remain “dazzling, vibrant and eternal.”

He is survived by his long-time partner and companion Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima. his great-nephew Richard, who worked as a studio assistant in his later years; His brothers Philip and John. and numerous nieces, nephews, great-nephews and great-nephews, said his publicist, Erica Bolton.

Hockney was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, in 1937, the fourth of five children in what he described as a “radical working-class family”. His parents encouraged their son’s early artistic promise. He studied art at Bradford College and sold his first painting – a portrait of his father – for £10 at the Yorkshire Artists’ Gallery in 1957.

A conscientious objector, he completed two years of National Service as a hospital nurse before entering the Royal College of Art in London in 1959. He quickly gained a reputation as a unique talent, albeit one with a rebellious streak. His refusal to draw a sketch of a fashion model almost kept him from graduating – and apparently he submitted a life drawing for his diploma, which depicted a muscular male figure from an American fitness magazine. Hockney also refused to write an essay required for the final exam, believing that it should be assessed on his artistic works alone. Realizing the talent it was nurturing, RCA broke its rules so it could award him a diploma.

It was the beginning of a career in which Hockney had no qualms about challenging conservative society. His 1961 painting “We Two Boys Clinging Together,” named after a Walt Whitman poem, was an early indicator of this. The works that followed, such as Brushing Teeth, Early Evening (10pm) W11 (1962), with Colgate phallic tubes and chains, depicted gay life with an honesty and openness that was almost completely at odds with Britain in which homosexuality remained a criminal offense until 1967.

With his distinctive blond hair, round, thick-rimmed glasses and a cigarette dangling from his lip, Hockney became a figure on the 1960s party circuit in London and the United States. He partnered with Andy Warhol, Ossie Clarke and Dennis Hopper, and gained a reputation as a playboy and wanderer. However, while immersed in the hedonistic life of a drug-addled bohemian, he never lost sight of his strong Yorkshire work ethic. Even after suffering a stroke in 2012, which temporarily impaired his ability to speak, he continued to work.

After moving to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, his more mature and restrained works were acclaimed for their ability to convey deep and complex emotions to canvas. Man in the Bathroom in Beverly Hills (1964) found the artist hitting his stride as he evolved toward a more realistic style. In November 2018, Hockney’s 1972 masterpiece, Portrait of an Artist (A Pool with Two Shapes) sold for $90.3 million (£70.2 million) at Christie’s, a world record for a living artist at the time. The work, inspired by Hockney’s breakup with his lover, impressed critics, including Jonathan Jones of The Guardian, who that same year described it as “a quiet distillation of love and sadness.”

While working on one of his paintings in Los Angeles, Hockney took a series of reference photographs with a Polaroid camera and stumbled upon the next phase of his career: photography, or “carpenters” as he called them. By piecing together multiple images, Hockney was able to explore his fascination with perspective. The portraits he painted of his mother and the British art dealer John Casmin showed a strong Cubist influence that led to comparisons with his idol, Picasso.

In later years, Hockney experimented with many new fields including setting and costume design for opera and ballet. The artist has been fascinated by the development of technology: as his career has developed, his art has made use of a copier, a fax machine, a printer and an iPad – the latter allowing him to create collages of digital paintings that he enthusiastically emails to his friends and acquaintances. But his technological interests have always come back to one thing: “I’m only interested in technology that has to do with images,” he told Interview magazine in 2013. “I’m interested in anything that makes an image.”

Hockney was a heavy smoker all his life, and maintained that cigarettes were good for his mental health. Writing in The Guardian in 2007, he described the UK’s impending smoking ban as “the most bizarre act of social engineering”.

He returned to Yorkshire from Los Angeles in 2005, but in 2013 tragedy struck when his 23-year-old assistant Dominic Elliott was found dead at his home in Bridlington. Elliot was found to have consumed household drain cleaner after taking a range of recreational drugs including ecstasy and cocaine. The coroner ruled that Elliot died as a result of misadventure. Hockney said that he considered for a time giving up art altogether, because he was unable to paint in the wake of Eliot’s death.

Hockney is believed to have declined knighthood on several occasions, and once declined an invitation to paint a portrait of the Queen. Iconoclasm found its way into the 2001 book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, in which he challenged much of the established thinking regarding how the great paintings of the past were created. It has succeeded in enraging and arousing the admiration of critics and art historians.

“Teaching people to draw is teaching people to see,” he told the Yorkshire Post in 2018. It is undeniable that his art had a profound influence on the way we viewed the twentieth century – not that it would necessarily have been viewed that way.

“I don’t think too much,” he told Guardian reporter Simon Huttenstone in 2015. “I live in the now. It’s always now.”