LOS ANGELES — Celebrated British American painter David Hockney, whose vibrant portraits and sun-drenched depictions of the everyday made him one of contemporary art’s most beloved figures, has died at 88.
The English artist, whose deftly designed and suavely colored paintings turned trans-Atlantic attention to figurative and narrative art beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s, died “peacefully at home” on Thursday, one month short of his 89th birthday, according to a statement by his longtime publicist Erica Bolton.
Over a seven-decade career, Hockney explored and reimagined classical portraiture, landscape painting and pop art, working in painting, collage, photography and digital drawing.
Born in Bradford, UK, in 1937, Hockney attended his local art school before studying at the prestigious Royal College of Art in London. Successful from the earliest stages of his career, he soon relocated to Los Angeles, where he would spend much of the 1960s and eventually settle.
While teaching at various US colleges, he established himself as a key figure in the Pop Art movement. Like many of his contemporaries, Hockney injected his work with bright colors and dancing lines. But while the likes of Andy Warhol (who was just nine years his senior) turned their focus to commercialism and consumer society, Hockney appeared more concerned with his immediate surroundings.
His deeply personal realist style was characterized by self-portraits, still lives and depictions of friends and lovers.
Among his best-known works from this period are a series of light-filled swimming pool paintings that seemed to freeze a moment in time. But his oeuvre was diverse, spanning photography, printmaking and stage design for ballet and opera productions. He went on to produce photocollages in the 1980s, and many of his later — and often more abstract — landscape paintings were also well received.
Hockney held onto much of his own work, and established an eponymous foundation to manage it. Those paintings that did go to market have soared in value in recent years.
In 2018, “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” fetched $90.3 million to become (if only briefly) the most expensive work by a living artist ever to sell at auction. The next year, his double portrait “Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott” went for $49.5 million at Christie’s, while his 1980 landscape painting “Nichols Canyon” went on to fetch over $41 million.
Yet, Hockney never appeared especially interested in the commercial success of his work. Nor did he reap all the benefits — his record-breaking swimming pool painting was sold by his New York dealer for just $18,000 in 1972. And despite his achievements, he continued working throughout his later years. When CNN visited his California studio in 2017, a then-80-year-old Hockney said he still painted for six or seven hours every day.
“I’m perfectly happy doing this,” he said at the time. “I feel 30 when I’m in the studio, so I come in every day and work, because then I feel 30.”
By this time, Hockney, who was never afraid to experiment with technology, had begun creating art using an iPad. Spending much of the Covid-19 pandemic in Normandy, France, he produced a series of digital renderings of the surrounding countryside that were later printed and exhibited at London’s Royal Academy and the de Young Museum in San Francisco, among others.
With his mop of blond (then gray) hair, large glasses and, oftentimes, a cigarette in hand, Hockney was one of art’s most recognizable figures. During his lifetime he was the subject of several major retrospectives, including one in 2017 that traveled between Tate Britain, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A statement from Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson praised Hockney for being an “endlessly inventive artist,” who “taught us about the joy of looking, seeing things the rest of us failed to notice — his witty and sharp observations a constant presence in his work and in person.”
He was also among the UK’s most decorated artists, having been invited to join the Royal Academy and, among other honors, awarded the John Moores Painting Prize and the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for painting.
While he famously turned down a knighthood, he went on in 2012 to accept Queen Elizabeth II’s invitation to the Order of Merit, a group of celebrated public figures that is limited to no more than 24 members at any given time. In true Hockney style, he turned up to one of the Order’s luncheons at Buckingham Palace in a pair of bright yellow Crocs — to the apparent delight of Elizabeth’s successor, King Charles III.
In her statement announcing Hockney’s death, Bolton described him as “one of the most important figures in contemporary art in both the 20th and 21st centuries.” The publicist added that his “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.’”
Source: Saudi Gazette