LONDON — The iconic British contemporary artist David Hockney has died, his publicist said Friday.
He was 88.
One of the art world’s most influential figures, Hockney developed an unmistakable style of pop art that captured the modernist architecture and glinting swimming pools of 1960s Los Angeles, where he lived at the time.
He “passed away peacefully at home” in London on Thursday, a month short of his 89th birthday, publicist Erica Bolton said in an emailed statement.
He was “one of the most important figures in contemporary art in both the 20th and 21st centuries,” she said, and “one of the most influential and defining figures in contemporary art.”
London Mayor Sadiq Khan called Hockney a “true icon and revolutionary of British art who never stopped reinventing his work.” Khan said in a statement that the artist had “inspired millions” and “helped me see the beauty and fragility of our natural world — and why it must be protected.”
The billionaire vacuum-cleaner entrepreneur James Dyson called the artist “a creative genius.” Dyson was at the Royal College of Art shortly after Hockney, who he said “inspired every one of us with his bold realism, his perceptive colors,” in an emailed statement.
Art historian Richard Morris said that Hockney’s “huge achievement was to make serious painting look effortless.” Morris wrote on X that “British art has lost a giant.”
Hockney was born in Bradford, in the northern English region of Yorkshire, in 1937. He trained at the Bradford School of Art and then the Royal College of Art in London, sparking a seven-decade career in which he “emerged as one of the seminal talents in the new generation of British artists,” the publicist said.
He began his career in abstract expressionism, but his work really took off when he moved to California in 1964 and switched styles, adopting a more figurative approach in which he captured real-world scenes albeit heavily stylized.
His work “A Bigger Splash” is one of several he made of swimming pools in the city. “It would become a defining image of sun-lit, clean-contoured southern California,” the London gallery Tate Modern says of the image.
Another of these works, 1972’s “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),” was briefly the most expensive painting by a living artist sold at auction, going for $90 million at Christie’s in New York in 2018.
This record was beaten the next year when Jeff Koons’s “Rabbit” sold for $91 million at the same auction house.
Generally more muted than his depictions of California were his artworks of London, such as 1971’s “Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy,” showing designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell shortly after their wedding, where Hockney was best man.
While in his hometown of Bradford six years later, he painted “My Parents,” showing his mother and father, the latter who died a year later, in brighter tones.
He was also a prolific theater and opera designer, with landmark productions including Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” at Glyndebourne, England, in 1975, and Giacomo Puccini’s “Turandot” for LA Opera in 1990.
Outside of art, he was a passionate campaigner for individual liberties, particularly smokers’ rights.
He was “a committed life-long and defiant smoker, expressing the pleasure in life it brought him,” his publicist said. “He smoked up to the end.”
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