David Hockney (1937-2026), the British artist who truly made a bigger splash

The celebrated British artist David Hockney, one of the most important figures in contemporary art in both the 20th and 21st centuries, passed away peacefully at home on 11 June 2026, one month short of his 89th birthday.

Hockney was a painter whose restless intelligence and chromatic brilliance placed him at the centre of British cultural life for more than half a century.

He never much liked being told what to do. When London’s Royal College of Art (RCA) threatened to withhold his degree in 1962 because he refused to sit a written examination – on the grounds that he should be judged solely on his art – the RCA eventually backed down. It was a small incident, but characteristic of the man. Throughout his career, Hockney remained resolutely, cheerfully himself: a northern working-class boy with peroxide hair, thick-rimmed glasses and an absolute conviction that painting mattered, that looking mattered, and that joy was not a lesser artistic emotion than suffering.

He was born in Bradford in July 1937, the fourth of five children, into a working-class household where his father, Kenneth, was an accountant's clerk and his mother, Laura, a devout Methodist. Kenneth had been a conscientious objector during the Second World War – a piece of principled stubbornness that Hockney seemed to have inherited. He studied first at Bradford College of Art and then, from 1959, at the RCA, where he graduated with a Gold Medal in 1962, entering a London art scene already crackling with energy, from Francis Bacon's visceral figuration to the kitchen-sink social realism of the Euston Road painters.

His peers at the RCA included Derek Boshier, Allen Jones, Patrick Caulfield and Peter Phillips, as well as the fashion designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell, and a young Ridley Scott. It was a remarkable cohort, and Hockney stood out even within it – irreverent, prolific and already commercially astute. His first solo show at John Kasmin's Mayfair gallery in 1963 sold out entirely. Soon after, he boarded a plane for California.

Los Angeles was a revelation. The light, the heat, the unabashed hedonism of it, Hockney absorbed all of it into his palette and never quite let go. The swimming pool paintings that followed: A Bigger Splash, Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool, the whole glittering series – weren't simply celebrations of Californian leisure. They were studies in surface and transparency, in the way light behaves differently through water than through air, painted with an economy of means that disguised their considerable technical sophistication.

California also gave Hockney something harder to articulate: the freedom to live and work openly as a gay man, at a time when that required real courage. His relationships fed directly into the work, nowhere more so than in Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) from 1972, painted in a ferocious 48-hour sprint after Hockney saw a chance photograph and understood immediately what the picture had to be. The figure standing at the water's edge, watching the swimmer below, carries a weight of unspoken feeling that has made the painting one of the most quietly devastating images in postwar art. In 2018, it sold at auction for $90 million, a record for a living artist.

The 1970s brought further brilliance and some turbulence. The end of his relationship with Peter Schlesinger – the young art student who had been his partner, model and muse – hit him hard, and the paintings from that period carry a more pensive quality, an awareness of absence running beneath their polished surfaces. Jack Hazan's 1974 film A Bigger Splash, in which Hockney played himself, documented something of that emotional aftermath, and remains one of the stranger and more compelling portraits of an artist at work.

Through the 1980s, Hockney threw himself into photography with the same intellectual restlessness that characterised everything he touched. His photo-collages, which he called ‘joiners’, assembled dozens of individual prints into composite images that deliberately fractured single-point perspective, drawing on Cubism's logic to produce something entirely his own. He also became a sought-after stage designer, producing celebrated productions for Glyndebourne, the Metropolitan Opera and the Chicago Lyric Opera, work that gave his already vivid colour sense a theatrical scale it relished.

The 2017 retrospective at Tate Britain became the most visited exhibition in the gallery's history, a statistic that said something about both the breadth of Hockney’s audience and the warmth with which British culture had come to regard him. By then, he had long since returned to Yorkshire, to the wide skies and skeletal hedgerows of the East Riding, painting the same lanes and woodlands through every season with an insistence that felt almost devotional.

The enormous canvases of The Arrival of Spring series, acid green and blossom-bright, were not the work of a man winding down. He published a book of interviews during the pandemic entitled Spring Cannot Be Cancelled, a title that captured something essential about his entire outlook: that beauty persists, that the world is worth attending to, that making pictures of it is one of the more dignified things a person can do.

He declined a knighthood. He embraced the iPad with the same enthusiasm he had once brought to the fax machine and the Polaroid. He accepted the Order of Merit in 2012, and was seen to be genuinely pleased by it. He kept painting.

What Hockney leaves behind goes well beyond the canonical images – the pools, the portraits, the Yorkshire lanes – though those alone would have secured his place in art history several times over. He leaves behind a model of what it means to be a working artist: curious, prolific, resistant to fashion, and absolutely certain that the world, looked at with enough attention, never runs out of things to give.