David Hockney, British Pop Art Icon, Dies at 88

David Hockey, the English artist whose vivid trans-Atlantic portraits and landscapes made him one of the most influential artists of the last two centuries, has passed away at the age of 88 in his home in London on Thursday. His publicist, Erica Bolton, confirmed the news, though a cause of death was not provided.

He will be remembered as an important contributor to the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. A prodigious artist with name-brand recognition, he dabbled in many mediums, but was most heralded for helping to reinvigorate and redefine figurative painting in an era when abstraction had come to domiante. “David Hockney's enduring legacy reflects his underlying enthusiasm for life, his outstanding sense of humor, his immense generosity, and his investigative curiosity encapsulated by his signature phrase, ‘Love life.’” Bolton said in a statement.

Hockney was born on July 9, 1937, in Bradford, a city in West Yorkshire. He was the fourth of five children for working-class parents Kenneth and Laura Hockney, both of whom David would remain very close to throughout their lives. The young Brit was interested in art from the beginning, and attended to his early education in Bradford, where he was recognized for his talent early on and granted a scholarship to the local art school. To avoid the prospect of being drafted into the British army, Hockney followed the steps of his pacifist father and declared himself a conscientious objector. He then spent two years in alternative service, working as a hospital orderly before enrolling in the Royal College of Art in 1959. It was there that he became associated with the then-fledgling British Pop Art movement. When he graduated from RCA in 1962 with gold medal distinction (which he famously accepted in a gold lamé jacket), he already had London gallery representation.

The artist adopted a fairly conspicuous look around this time. He became known for his brightly-colored plaid suits and mismatched socks, which he complemented with bold, rounded glasses, a rotating selection of clownish headwear, and bleached blonde hair. It is a style he would embrace throughout his life.

In 1961, Hockney visited New York City for the first time and immediately felt a kinship with America. He was taken by the country’s sexual liberation, which sat in contrast to England’s own repression. Having come out at the beginning of the decade, Hockney often depicted homosexuality in his work, despite the act’s illegal status in Britain at the time. The life-study painting he created as a graduation requirement was inspired by a muscleman on the cover of a homoerotic physique magazine. But the Academy did not penalize Hockney for this indiscretion; they celebrated his talents, as did the press.

Hockney took his inaugural trip to Los Angeles in 1963 and immediately embraced the city that would become a second home to the artist. He was inspired by the lifestyle—the palm trees, the modern houses, the celebrity—but also the bright sun and the enriched colors of the landscape. The pools of Southern California specifically infatuated the artist, and he painted a series of them.

During this time, Hockney began teaching at UCLA at met then-18-year-old student Peter Schlesinger in 1966. The two dated for five years, and their breakup led to an especially productive period for Hockney, in which he created Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which featured Schlesinger as the “artist.” The 1972 work sold at Christie's on November 15, 2018, for $90 million (£70 million). It was, at the time, the most expensive artwork by a living artist sold at auction.

In addition to painting—for which he dabbled in oils, acrylics, and watercolors—Hockney also embraced collaging, printmaking, photography, and drawing. More recently, he adopted new technologies, creating works on iPads and iPhones. He also designed sets for many plays throughout his life, working with the Royal Court Theater, the Metropolitan Opera House, and other venues around the world.

Hockney’s first retrospective took place in 1970 at London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery, marking the beginning of a continuous parade of showcases. In 2017, Tate Britain celebrated the artist’s 80th birthday with a massive show, which later traveled to Paris’s Centre Georges Pompidou and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. And just last year, the Foundation Louis Vuitton, in Paris, hosted David Hockney, 25, a retrospective that focused on the artist’s 21st century output, along with the inclusion of some of his most popular works from the 60s and 70s, including A Bigger Splash (1967), Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970–71), and Portrait of an Artist.

Hockney was a celebrity in his own right, often socializing with Andy Warhol, Paloma Picasso, Amanda Lear, Karl Lagerfeld, Tony Richardson, Dennis Hopper, and more stars of the day. He was extremely principled and outspoken on his views, whether they were about smoking (Hockney was a long-time pro-tobacco campaigner) or sexuality. He refused the British Knighthood in 1990, but accepted the Order of Merit from Queen Elizabeth II in 2012.

Hockney lost his hearing in his middle age, and he resorted to hearing aids. He began stepping back more and more from public life, preferring instead to spend time with his beloved pet dachshunds and his partner, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima. Hockney is said to have worked up until his death, painting from his wheelchair in his studio in London for about three hours a day, even as his health continued to falter. “I just go on,” Hockney told W last year about his impressive fortitude. “Anyway, at my age now, I couldn’t really freeze.”