Remembering David Hockney: 1937-2026

At a young age, there were signs of David Hockney’s future career path. He sketched on every surface, from bus tickets and church hymn books to his family kitchen’s linoleum floor. His mother had to make a rule: ‘No drawing on the wallpaper.’

Even exam scripts weren’t safe. During a translation test at school, Hockney wrote on one of them: ‘I’m afraid I know no French, but will draw some pictures instead.’

His passion for image-making would abide across a career lasting seven decades — as would a fondness for exploring new horizons, both geographic and artistic. Hockney’s most famous works include sun-drenched paintings of Californian swimming pools (created in the late 1960s and early 1970s) and large-scale landscapes of the Yorkshire Wolds (created in the early part of this century).

Hockney was born in the city of Bradford in northern England in 1937. He was the fourth of five children. His father made ends meet by restoring old prams and bicycles, and young David repurposed one such pram as a mobile studio, loading it with paints, brushes and canvases, and pushing it around town on the hunt for something to paint.

He moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art. There he found himself part of a cohort — including Allen Jones, Patrick Caulfield and R.B. Kitaj — who became key figures associated with British Pop art in the 1960s. Early works included a trio of paintings inspired by packets of Typhoo tea.

Hockney was signed up by the art dealer John Kasmin before even graduating, and at his debut solo exhibition — held at Kasmin’s gallery on New Bond Street in 1963 — every work sold.

Settling in Los Angeles later that decade, Hockney was thrilled by the sunny climes and brilliant light — as well as the fact that, unlike London, the city had been painted by very few artists before him. ‘In Los Angeles, there were no ghosts,’ he said.

He made it his own, with depictions of private swimming pools — which the viewer longs to jump into — beneath a cloudless sky. These works, such as A Bigger Splash, helped generate Hockney’s longstanding reputation as a pleasure-giver — as an artist synonymous with joie de vivre.

It’s true that his palette was often bright and feel-good — popular with museum visitors from Istanbul to Tokyo. However, Hockney was also a deeply serious artist, one forever engaged with art history.

In a celebrated series of double portraits of friends he painted between 1968 and 1975, he took inspiration from a compositional device of Piero della Francesca’s — specifically, the respective poses of Christ and John the Baptist in the early Renaissance painter’s The Baptism of Christ (circa 1437-45): the former facing the viewer, the latter (standing next to him) seen side-on.

The subjects of Hockney’s ‘doubles’ were typically romantic couples, and by posing them at 90 degrees to one another — as in works such as Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott — he captured emotional and psychological tensions between them.

Across his career, Hockney wrote or co-wrote a number of books. The best-known among them is Secret Knowledge (2001), which espoused the theory that many of art’s Old Masters had used optical aids such as the camera obscura.

Hockney, in his own work, liked to experiment with different tools, too, regularly putting down his pencil or paintbrush to make imagery with whatever new technology was available — from Polaroid cameras and fax machines to video cameras and, most recently, iPads.

The artist said that his works, in any medium, were born of an overriding ‘interest in how we see, and what we see’.

One such medium was photography, with which Hockney had a complex relationship. He argued that it ‘freezes’ a moment — which is not how the human eye (being in constant motion) sees things. Hockney created many works with a camera, however: Pearblossom Hwy., 11-18th April 1986, #2, for instance, an immersive photo collage comprising multiple shots of the titular highway north of Los Angeles. The imagined view is that from a moving car, as the road cuts through desert, though no part of the car itself is visible.

Another medium Hockney adopted was stained glass. In 2018, he designed a window to honour the then British monarch, Elizabeth II, which was installed in the north transept of Westminster Abbey. Earlier in his career, the artist had been invited to paint the Queen’s portrait, but he declined on grounds that he was too busy.

Renowned for his fierce work ethic, Hockney also designed opera and ballet productions aplenty, on both sides of the Atlantic, for companies such as Glyndebourne Festival Opera in England and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

That work ethic never left him. The final years of his life were busy indeed, and included the largest exhibition of his career, David Hockney 25, held at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2025. The retrospective featured more than 400 works, and the artist was actively involved in its organisation.

This year, Hockney has been the subject of a show at London’s Serpentine Galleries — the last of his lifetime (running until 23 August 2026). The lead exhibit is a 265ft-long frieze, recently created on his iPad, which captures the changing of the seasons outside his one-time studio in Normandy.

It’s often said that Hockney’s oeuvre contains little that is overtly political. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 1990, the man himself claimed that his art offered a simple message that ‘there are joys in life, sometimes very small and very close to you’.

It is worth bearing in mind, though, that homosexuality was only legalised in the UK, and in a tiny part of the US, during the 1960s. Hockney’s many pictures of gay love from that decade — such as California, with its nude duo floating on lilos in a pool — might well be deemed political, insofar as they affirmed same-sex coupling in such a context.

A few months before his death, aged 88, Hockney said, ‘I assume I’ll die sooner rather than later, so I want to work every day.’ Having made art in an array of styles, genres and media, he never lost his curiosity: a curiosity to find new ways of imagining and representing the world around us.

David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting continues at the Serpentine Galleries in London until 23 August 2026

David Hockney: Sunley Window 2026 at Turner Contemporary in Margate is on show until 1 November

Related artists: David Hockney