David Hockney, iconic British artist known for his colorful landscapes and pool scenes, dies at 88 | Winnipeg Free Press

LONDON (AP) — David Hockney, a treasured British artist whose paintings of shimmering pools and colorful iPad drawings became icons of contemporary art, has died, his publicist said Friday. He was 88.

Over a seven-decade career, Hockney explored and reimagined classical portraiture, landscape painting and pop art, working in painting, collage, photography and digital drawing.

Hockney was born in the north of England but lived much of his life in Southern California, making its sun-drenched suburban views a major motif.https://www.youtube.com/embed/cG-zmSinBmU?feature=oembed

Later in life he returned to Europe, finding renewed inspiration in the wooded hills of his native county of Yorkshire and the fields and trees of France’s Normandy region. One of the most popular and critically lauded British artists of his generation, his works sold for record prices at auction.

Historian Simon Schama said it’s no mystery why the appeal of his work endures.

“His work is admired — loved is not too strong a word — by the millions who, worldwide, flock to see it because it presupposes an expectation of pleasure,” Schama wrote in an essay accompanying a 2025 Hockney exhibition in Paris.

Hockney’s publicist, Erica Bolton, said he died at his home in London on Thursday, less than a month short of his 89th birthday. She did not give a cause of death.

He is survived by his longtime partner, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima; his great-nephew and studio assistant, Richard Hockney; his brothers Philip and John; and numerous nieces, nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews.

Hockney was an icon of the swinging 60s

FILE - Artist David Hockney after unveiling the bottle design for the 2014 vintage wine of Château Mouton Rothschild in London, Friday, Feb. 3, 2017. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, File)
FILE – Artist David Hockney after unveiling the bottle design for the 2014 vintage wine of Château Mouton Rothschild in London, Friday, Feb. 3, 2017. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, File)

With his trademark round glasses and bleached-blond hair, Hockney was a well-known figure in the swinging British and American art scenes of the 1960s, even before he reached the age of 30. His paintings were just as distinctive, many of them creating a dreamlike world of patterned light bouncing off water and windows, and human forms rendered in flattened, simplified shapes in matte acrylic paint.

“I’m excited every day,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1979. “London has lots of dreary parts, but I never find anything dreary in Los Angeles.”

Hockney was born July 9, 1937, in Bradford, a large industrial city whose chief export was woolen textiles. He spent his first two decades there before going to London’s Royal College of Art. He made an impact even before his graduation, and art dealer John Kasmin took him into his stable of artists in 1961.

His artistic influences ranged widely, including Renaissance portraits, 18th-century English artist William Hogarth’s satirical drawings, 19th-century English painter J.M.W. Turner’s landscapes, Pablo Picasso’s experiments in Cubism and 20th-century American pop art.

He shared with other pop artists an interest in the polished surface of modern life. And, like Andy Warhol with his Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans, Hockney occasionally incorporated advertising labels, such as a British Typhoo Tea box used in his 1961 “Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style.”

FILE - British artist David Hockney stands before one of his paintings of the East Yorkshire landscape at The Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly, London, Monday, Jan. 16, 2012, ahead of his exhibition called 'A Bigger Picture'. (AP Photo/Joel Ryan)
FILE – British artist David Hockney stands before one of his paintings of the East Yorkshire landscape at The Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly, London, Monday, Jan. 16, 2012, ahead of his exhibition called ‘A Bigger Picture’. (AP Photo/Joel Ryan)

He saw success early in his career

He told The New York Times in 1964 that he enjoyed the burgeoning pop art scene in New York but wasn’t sure he was part of it.

“I’m just an ordinary artist,” he said. “I do admire American pop — in fact it seems that everything fresh-looking and vital in England these days has been coming from the U.S.”

Nonetheless, he said in 1995 that he still considered himself “very much an artist in the English tradition.”

Hockney, who was out as a gay man long before it was common, explored erotic themes, giving youthful male bodies the same tender scrutiny that artists had been giving the female nude for centuries.

A painting by David Hockney called California is displayed at Christie's auction rooms in London, Friday, March 1, 2024.  (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)
A painting by David Hockney called California is displayed at Christie’s auction rooms in London, Friday, March 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

Early works like “We Two Boys Together Clinging” and “Two Men in a Shower” celebrated gay relationships when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain.

Early in his career, two of his drawings were bought for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“The moment I first sold pictures to earn a living, I felt rich. I’ve been rich ever since,” he told The Associated Press in 1995. “I didn’t have much money, but I did what I wanted. … You are a rich man if you do the things you want to do.”

In 2018, his 1972 painting “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” sold at a Christie’s auction for $90.3 million, at the time a record for a living artist.

While many of his best-known paintings had American scenes, he also tackled British subjects. He immortalized his parents in several portraits and his friends Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell in “Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy,” a 1971 portrait voted one of Britain’s greatest paintings in a 2005 BBC poll.

Staff members pose for photographs with British artist David Hockney's triptych
Staff members pose for photographs with British artist David Hockney’s triptych “Tall Dutch Trees After Hobbema (Useful Knowledge) 2017”, at the premises of Sotheby’s auction house in London, Monday, March 22, 2021. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

Hockney’s work went beyond drawing and painting

Like many traditional artists, he considering drawing a fundamental skill and lamented that it wasn’t taught as rigorously as it used to be.

“Human beings are the most interesting things we see, so they’re the hardest to draw,” he said in a 1996 AP interview.

Hockney also embraced other media, including printmaking, photo collage and video. He contributed costume and set designs for the theater and opera, including a celebrated production of “Tristan und Isolde” first staged in 1987 at the Los Angeles Opera.

When he took up photography, he fused genres, assembling individual photos into elaborate collages like “Pearblossom Highway, 11-18th April, 1986,” built up of individual views of a desert highway intersection.

Bonhams' employee Ana Paiva from Portugal poses for photographs beside David Hockney's
Bonhams’ employee Ana Paiva from Portugal poses for photographs beside David Hockney’s “Moving Focus – An Image of Celia” at the auction house’s premises in London, Monday, April 18, 2011. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

“My photographer friends said it was a painting,” Hockney told the AP in 2001. “I said it’s a photograph; I used a camera.”

Later he began to draw on iPads, which became his favorite tool.

In the early 2000s, he looked afresh at the fields and forests of Yorkshire in a series of landscape paintings that combined bold color with minute attention to the texture of snow on a hillside or a blossom on a hawthorn hedge. They featured in a 2017 exhibition at Tate Britain in London that was visited by half a million people and moved to the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Hockney used the English landscape for inspiration in his design for a stained-glass window installed at Westminster Abbey in 2018 to celebrate the long reign of Queen Elizabeth II.

King Charles III paid tribute to “one of life’s true originals” as he mourned “a man whose irrepressible charm, talent and constant innovation will be most sorely missed, but whose dazzling creativity lives on in galleries and museums around the world.”

Two Sotheby's employees adjust David Hockney's painting 'The Splash' at Sotheby's contemporary Art sale preview in London, Friday, Feb. 7, 2020.  (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)
Two Sotheby’s employees adjust David Hockney’s painting ‘The Splash’ at Sotheby’s contemporary Art sale preview in London, Friday, Feb. 7, 2020. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

He worked right up until his death

In 2019, he moved to Normandy, where during the 2020 coronavirus lockdown he produced joyous iPad drawings of springtime for his friends. His message — “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring” — was emblazoned in neon across the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris when it hosted a huge Hockney exhibition that opened in April 2025.

Art critic Estelle Lovatt said Hockney “changed how we see the world.”

“He was one of the first artists to use a fax machine,” she told the AP. “He was one of the first artists to use the Polaroid camera to make collages. He was one of the first artists to use really, really vibrant colors.”

An unrepentant cigarette smoker who railed against government anti-smoking rules, Hockney complained when a poster for the 2025 exhibition was banned from the Paris Metro because it showed him holding a cigarette.

British artist David Hockney is seen at the Pierre Berge foundation, in Paris, Monday Oct. 18, 2010. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)
British artist David Hockney is seen at the Pierre Berge foundation, in Paris, Monday Oct. 18, 2010. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)

The announcement of his death from his publicist noted that Hockney was “a committed life-long and defiant smoker, expressing the pleasure in life it brought him. … He smoked up to the end.”

Hockney had a minor stroke in 2012 and was increasingly deaf in later years — something he said improved his visual perception.

Source: https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/2026/06/12/art-icon-david-hockney-dies-at-age-88

David Hockney, iconic British artist known for his colorful landscapes and pool scenes, dies at 88 | PBS News, USA

LONDON (AP) — David Hockney, a treasured British artist whose paintings of shimmering pools and colorful iPad drawings became icons of contemporary art, has died, his publicist said Friday. He was 88.

Over a seven-decade career, Hockney explored and reimagined classical portraiture, landscape painting and pop art, working in painting, collage, photography and digital drawing.

Hockney was born in the north of England but lived much of his life in Southern California, making its sun-drenched suburban views a major motif.

WATCH: David Hockney thinks you should take a longer look at life

Later in life he returned to Europe, finding renewed inspiration in the wooded hills of his native county of Yorkshire and the fields and trees of France’s Normandy region. One of the most popular and critically lauded British artists of his generation, his works sold for record prices at auction.

Historian Simon Schama said it’s no mystery why his work is so enduringly appealing.

“His work is admired — loved is not too strong a word — by the millions who, worldwide, flock to see it because it presupposes an expectation of pleasure,” Schama wrote in an essay accompanying a 2025 Hockney exhibition in Paris.

WATCH: Art exhibit ‘For Dear Life’ shows new perspectives on disability and medicine in the U.S.

Hockney’s publicist, Erica Bolton, said he died at his home in London on Thursday, less than a month short of his 89th birthday. She did not give a cause of death.

He is survived by his longtime partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima; his great-nephew and studio assistant, Richard Hockney; his brothers Philip and John; and numerous nieces, nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews.

Hockney was an icon of the swinging 60s

With his trademark round glasses and bleached-blond hair, Hockney was a well-known figure in the swinging British and American art scenes of the 1960s, even before he reached the age of 30. His paintings were just as distinctive, many of them creating a dreamlike world of patterned light bouncing off water and windows, and human forms rendered in flattened, simplified shapes in matte acrylic paint.

“I’m excited every day,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1979. “London has lots of dreary parts but I never find anything dreary in Los Angeles.”

WATCH: David Hockney continues prodigious picture-making career by adopting new tech

Hockney was born July 9, 1937, in Bradford, a large industrial city whose chief export was woolen textiles. He spent his first two decades there before going to London’s Royal College of Art. He made an impact even before his graduation, and art dealer John Kasmin took him into his stable of artists in 1961.

His artistic influences ranged widely, including Renaissance portraits, 18th-century English artist William Hogarth’s satirical drawings, 19th-century English painter J.M.W. Turner’s landscapes, Pablo Picasso’s experiments in Cubism and 20th-century American pop art.

He shared with other pop artists an interest in the polished surface of modern life. And, like Andy Warhol with his Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans, Hockney occasionally incorporated advertising labels, such as a British Typhoo Tea box used in his 1961 “Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style.”

He saw success early in his career

He told The New York Times in 1964 that he enjoyed the burgeoning pop art scene in New York but wasn’t sure he was part of it.

“I’m just an ordinary artist,” he said. “I do admire American pop — in fact it seems that everything fresh-looking and vital in England these days has been coming from the U.S.”

WATCH: David Hockney thinks you should take a longer look at life

Nonetheless, he said in 1995 that he still considered himself “very much an artist in the English tradition.”

Hockney, who was out as a gay man long before it was common, explored erotic themes, giving youthful male bodies the same tender scrutiny that artists had been giving the female nude for centuries.

Early works like “We Two Boys Together Clinging” and “Two Men in a Shower” celebrated gay relationships when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain.

Early in his career, two of his drawings were bought for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“The moment I first sold pictures to earn a living, I felt rich. I’ve been rich ever since,” he told The Associated Press in 1995. “I didn’t have much money but I did what I wanted. … You are a rich man if you do the things you want to do.”

In 2018, his 1972 painting “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” sold at a Christie’s auction for $90.3 million, at the time a record for a living artist.

While many of his best-known paintings had American scenes, he also tackled British subjects. He immortalized his parents in several portraits and his friends Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell in “Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy,” a 1971 portrait voted one of Britain’s greatest paintings in a 2005 BBC poll.

Hockney’s work went beyond drawing and painting

Like many traditional artists, he considering drawing a fundamental skill and lamented that it wasn’t taught as rigorously as it used to be.

“Human beings are the most interesting things we see, so they’re the hardest to draw,” he said in a 1996 AP interview.

Hockney also embraced other media, including printmaking, photo collage and video. He contributed costume and set designs for the theater and opera, including a celebrated production of “Tristan und Isolde” first staged in 1987 at the Los Angeles Opera.

When he took up photography, he fused genres, assembling individual photos into elaborate collages like “Pearblossom Highway, 11-18th April, 1986,” built up of individual views of a desert highway intersection.

“My photographer friends said it was a painting,” Hockney told the AP in 2001. “I said it’s a photograph; I used a camera.”

Later he began to draw on iPads, which became his favorite tool.

In the early 2000s, he looked afresh at the fields and forests of Yorkshire in a series of landscape paintings that combined bold color with minute attention to the texture of snow on a hillside or a blossom on a hawthorn hedge. They featured in a 2017 exhibition at Tate Britain in London that was visited by half a million people and moved to the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Hockney used the English landscape for inspiration in his design for a stained-glass window installed at Westminster Abbey in 2018 to celebrate the long reign of Queen Elizabeth II.

He worked right up until his death

In 2019, he moved to Normandy, where during the 2020 coronavirus lockdown he produced joyous iPad drawings of springtime for his friends. His message — “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring” — was emblazoned in neon across the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris when it hosted a huge Hockney exhibition that opened in April 2025.

Art critic Estelle Lovatt said Hockney “changed how we see the world.”

“He was one of the first artists to use a fax machine,” she told the AP. “He was one of the first artists to use the Polaroid camera to make collages. He was one of the first artists to use really, really vibrant colors.”

An unrepentant cigarette smoker who railed against government anti-smoking rules, Hockney complained when a poster for the 2025 exhibition was banned from the Paris Metro because it showed him holding a cigarette.

The announcement of his death from his publicist noted that Hockney was “a committed life-long and defiant smoker, expressing the pleasure in life it brought him. … He smoked up to the end.”

Hockney had a minor stroke in 2012 and was increasingly deaf in later years — something he said improved his visual perception.

“If you lose one sense, you gain other senses, and I feel I could see space clearer,” he told the AP in 2017.

He never stopped working.

“It’s my work that keeps me young,” Hockney told the Sun newspaper in 2017. “I’ve been a professional painter for 60 years. Sixty years of getting up every day and doing exactly what I want to do.”

Associated Press journalist Mustakim Hasnath contributed to this report.

Source: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/david-hockney-iconic-british-artist-known-for-his-colorful-landscapes-and-pool-scenes-dies-at-88

David Hockney, Iconic British Artist Known for Colorful Landscapes, Dies at 88 | KQED

An icon of the swinging 1960s, Hockney had recently found inspiration in digital art with an iPad.


A man in a suit leans on a cane in front of a painting of trees

British artist David Hockney poses as he unveils his painting ‘Bigger Trees Near Water’, the largest painting ever shown at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, London, Friday, May 25, 2007.  (AP Photo/Sang Tan)

David Hockney, a treasured British artist whose paintings of shimmering pools and colorful iPad drawings became icons of contemporary art, has died, his publicist said Friday. He was 88.

Over a seven-decade career, Hockney explored and reimagined classical portraiture, landscape painting and pop art, working in painting, collage, photography and digital drawing.

Hockney was born in the north of England but lived much of his life in Southern California, making its sun-drenched suburban views a major motif.

Later in life he returned to Europe, finding renewed inspiration in the wooded hills of his native county of Yorkshire and the fields and trees of France’s Normandy region. One of the most popular and critically lauded British artists of his generation, his works sold for record prices at auction.

British artist David Hockney, stands next to his friend and model Celia Birtwell, in front of one of his most famous works ‘ Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy’ at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Wednesday Oct. 11, 2006.
 (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

Historian Simon Schama said it’s no mystery why his work is so enduringly appealing.

“His work is admired — loved is not too strong a word — by the millions who, worldwide, flock to see it because it presupposes an expectation of pleasure,” Schama wrote in an essay accompanying a 2025 Hockney exhibition in Paris.

Become a KQED Sponsor

Hockney’s publicist, Erica Bolton, said he died at his home in London on Thursday, less than a month short of his 89th birthday. She did not give a cause of death.

He is survived by his longtime partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima; his great-nephew and studio assistant, Richard Hockney; his brothers Philip and John; and numerous nieces, nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews.

Hockney was an icon of the swinging 60s

With his trademark round glasses and bleached-blond hair, Hockney was a well-known figure in the swinging British and American art scenes of the 1960s, even before he reached the age of 30. His paintings were just as distinctive, many of them creating a dreamlike world of patterned light bouncing off water and windows, and human forms rendered in flattened, simplified shapes in matte acrylic paint.

“I’m excited every day,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1979. “London has lots of dreary parts but I never find anything dreary in Los Angeles.”

British artist David Hockney poses for photographers in front of his acrylic on canvas “Studio Interior #4” which features as part of the “David Hockney Painting and Photography” exhibition at the Annely Juda Fine Art gallery in London, Thursday, May 14, 2015. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

Hockney was born July 9, 1937, in Bradford, a large industrial city whose chief export was woolen textiles. He spent his first two decades there before going to London’s Royal College of Art. He made an impact even before his graduation, and art dealer John Kasmin took him into his stable of artists in 1961.

His artistic influences ranged widely, including Renaissance portraits, 18th-century English artist William Hogarth’s satirical drawings, 19th-century English painter J.M.W. Turner’s landscapes, Pablo Picasso’s experiments in Cubism and 20th-century American pop art.

He shared with other pop artists an interest in the polished surface of modern life. And, like Andy Warhol with his Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans, Hockney occasionally incorporated advertising labels, such as a British Typhoo Tea box used in his 1961 “Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style.”

He saw success early in his career

He told The New York Times in 1964 that he enjoyed the burgeoning pop art scene in New York but wasn’t sure he was part of it.

“I’m just an ordinary artist,” he said. “I do admire American pop — in fact it seems that everything fresh-looking and vital in England these days has been coming from the U.S.”

Nonetheless, he said in 1995 that he still considered himself “very much an artist in the English tradition.”

British artist David Hockney sits in front of The Queen’s Window, a new stained glass window at Westminster Abbey, London, designed by David Hockney and revealed for the first time on Wednesday Sept. 26, 2018. (Victoria Jones/Pool via AP)

Hockney, who was out as a gay man long before it was common, explored erotic themes, giving youthful male bodies the same tender scrutiny that artists had been giving the female nude for centuries.

Early works like “We Two Boys Together Clinging” and “Two Men in a Shower” celebrated gay relationships when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain.

Early in his career, two of his drawings were bought for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“The moment I first sold pictures to earn a living, I felt rich. I’ve been rich ever since,” he told the Associated Press in 1995. “I didn’t have much money but I did what I wanted. … You are a rich man if you do the things you want to do.”David Hockney, Frank Gehry Adopt the Arts at Two East Palo Alto Schools

In 2018, his 1972 painting “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” sold at a Christie’s auction for $90.3 million, at the time a record for a living artist.

While many of his best-known paintings had American scenes, he also tackled British subjects. He immortalized his parents in several portraits and his friends Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell in “Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy,” a 1971 portrait voted one of Britain’s greatest paintings in a 2005 BBC poll.

Hockney’s work went beyond drawing and painting

Like many traditional artists, he considering drawing a fundamental skill and lamented that it wasn’t taught as rigorously as it used to be.

“Human beings are the most interesting things we see, so they’re the hardest to draw,” he said in a 1996 AP interview.

Hockney also embraced other media, including printmaking, photo collage and video. He contributed costume and set designs for the theater and opera, including a celebrated production of Tristan und Isolde first staged in 1987 at the Los Angeles Opera.

David Hockney's set design for Act I of SF Opera's "Turandot." In Hockney’s 1993 book "That’s the Way I See It," he wrote "I had seen many productions, most of them kitsch beyond belief, overdone chinoiserie and too many dragons… For the first scene, the city of Peking, I suggested that we take the dragons away and put them into the roofs, in forms that felt like dragons, without specifically looking like them, thus evoking the grotesqueness of the city."
David Hockney’s set design for Act I of Puccini’s ‘Turandot’ at SF Opera, as revived in 2017.  (Photo: Courtesy of Cory Weaver)

When he took up photography, he fused genres, assembling individual photos into elaborate collages like Pearblossom Highway, 11-18th April, 1986, built up of individual views of a desert highway intersection.

“My photographer friends said it was a painting,” Hockney told the AP in 2001. “I said it’s a photograph; I used a camera.”

Source: https://www.kqed.org/arts/13990732/david-hockney-dies-at-88

David Hockney, iconic British artist known for his colorful landscapes and pool scenes, dies at 88

LONDON (AP) — David Hockney, a treasured British artist whose paintings of shimmering pools and colorful iPad drawings became icons of contemporary art, has died, his publicist said Friday. He was 88.

Over a seven-decade career, Hockney explored and reimagined classical portraiture, landscape painting and pop art, working in painting, collage, photography and digital drawing.

Hockney was born in the north of England but lived much of his life in Southern California, making its sun-drenched suburban views a major motif.

Later in life he returned to Europe, finding renewed inspiration in the wooded hills of his native county of Yorkshire and the fields and trees of France’s Normandy region. One of the most popular and critically lauded British artists of his generation, his works sold for record prices at auction.

Historian Simon Schama said it’s no mystery why the appeal of his work endures.

“His work is admired — loved is not too strong a word — by the millions who, worldwide, flock to see it because it presupposes an expectation of pleasure,” Schama wrote in an essay accompanying a 2025 Hockney exhibition in Paris.

Hockney’s publicist, Erica Bolton, said he died at his home in London on Thursday, less than a month short of his 89th birthday. She did not give a cause of death.

He is survived by his longtime partner, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima; his great-nephew and studio assistant, Richard Hockney; his brothers Philip and John; and numerous nieces, nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews.

Hockney was an icon of the swinging 60s

With his trademark round glasses and bleached-blond hair, Hockney was a well-known figure in the swinging British and American art scenes of the 1960s, even before he reached the age of 30. His paintings were just as distinctive, many of them creating a dreamlike world of patterned light bouncing off water and windows, and human forms rendered in flattened, simplified shapes in matte acrylic paint.

“I’m excited every day,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1979. “London has lots of dreary parts, but I never find anything dreary in Los Angeles.”

Hockney was born July 9, 1937, in Bradford, a large industrial city whose chief export was woolen textiles. He spent his first two decades there before going to London’s Royal College of Art. He made an impact even before his graduation, and art dealer John Kasmin took him into his stable of artists in 1961.

His artistic influences ranged widely, including Renaissance portraits, 18th-century English artist William Hogarth’s satirical drawings, 19th-century English painter J.M.W. Turner’s landscapes, Pablo Picasso’s experiments in Cubism and 20th-century American pop art.

He shared with other pop artists an interest in the polished surface of modern life. And, like Andy Warhol with his Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans, Hockney occasionally incorporated advertising labels, such as a British Typhoo Tea box used in his 1961 “Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style.”

He saw success early in his career

He told The New York Times in 1964 that he enjoyed the burgeoning pop art scene in New York but wasn’t sure he was part of it.

“I’m just an ordinary artist,” he said. “I do admire American pop — in fact it seems that everything fresh-looking and vital in England these days has been coming from the U.S.”

Nonetheless, he said in 1995 that he still considered himself “very much an artist in the English tradition.”

Hockney, who was out as a gay man long before it was common, explored erotic themes, giving youthful male bodies the same tender scrutiny that artists had been giving the female nude for centuries.

Early works like “We Two Boys Together Clinging” and “Two Men in a Shower” celebrated gay relationships when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain.

Early in his career, two of his drawings were bought for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“The moment I first sold pictures to earn a living, I felt rich. I’ve been rich ever since,” he told The Associated Press in 1995. “I didn’t have much money, but I did what I wanted. … You are a rich man if you do the things you want to do.”

In 2018, his 1972 painting “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” sold at a Christie’s auction for $90.3 million, at the time a record for a living artist.

While many of his best-known paintings had American scenes, he also tackled British subjects. He immortalized his parents in several portraits and his friends Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell in “Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy,” a 1971 portrait voted one of Britain’s greatest paintings in a 2005 BBC poll.

Hockney’s work went beyond drawing and painting

Like many traditional artists, he considering drawing a fundamental skill and lamented that it wasn’t taught as rigorously as it used to be.

“Human beings are the most interesting things we see, so they’re the hardest to draw,” he said in a 1996 AP interview.

Hockney also embraced other media, including printmaking, photo collage and video. He contributed costume and set designs for the theater and opera, including a celebrated production of “Tristan und Isolde” first staged in 1987 at the Los Angeles Opera.

When he took up photography, he fused genres, assembling individual photos into elaborate collages like “Pearblossom Highway, 11-18th April, 1986,” built up of individual views of a desert highway intersection.

“My photographer friends said it was a painting,” Hockney told the AP in 2001. “I said it’s a photograph; I used a camera.”

Later he began to draw on iPads, which became his favorite tool.

In the early 2000s, he looked afresh at the fields and forests of Yorkshire in a series of landscape paintings that combined bold color with minute attention to the texture of snow on a hillside or a blossom on a hawthorn hedge. They featured in a 2017 exhibition at Tate Britain in London that was visited by half a million people and moved to the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Hockney used the English landscape for inspiration in his design for a stained-glass window installed at Westminster Abbey in 2018 to celebrate the long reign of Queen Elizabeth II.

King Charles III paid tribute to “one of life’s true originals” as he mourned “a man whose irrepressible charm, talent and constant innovation will be most sorely missed, but whose dazzling creativity lives on in galleries and museums around the world.”

He worked right up until his death

In 2019, he moved to Normandy, where during the 2020 coronavirus lockdown he produced joyous iPad drawings of springtime for his friends. His message — “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring” — was emblazoned in neon across the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris when it hosted a huge Hockney exhibition that opened in April 2025.

Art critic Estelle Lovatt said Hockney “changed how we see the world.”

“He was one of the first artists to use a fax machine,” she told the AP. “He was one of the first artists to use the Polaroid camera to make collages. He was one of the first artists to use really, really vibrant colors.”

An unrepentant cigarette smoker who railed against government anti-smoking rules, Hockney complained when a poster for the 2025 exhibition was banned from the Paris Metro because it showed him holding a cigarette.

The announcement of his death from his publicist noted that Hockney was “a committed life-long and defiant smoker, expressing the pleasure in life it brought him. … He smoked up to the end.”

Hockney had a minor stroke in 2012 and was increasingly deaf in later years — something he said improved his visual perception.

“If you lose one sense, you gain other senses, and I feel I could see space clearer,” he told the AP in 2017.

He never stopped working.

“It’s my work that keeps me young,” Hockney told the Sun newspaper in 2017. “I’ve been a professional painter for 60 years. Sixty years of getting up every day and doing exactly what I want to do.”

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Associated Press journalist Mustakim Hasnath contributed to this report.

Source: https://www.tricityrecordnm.com/articles/art-icon-david-hockney-dies-at-age-88/

February ART AND ARCHITECTURE ARTICLES AND MORE FROM MEMBERS OF THE CRITICS’ CIRCLE

In this post, we summarise all the articles by the Critics’ Circle members on art and architecture during February 2026.

Sue Hubbard has reviewed Rose Wylie Memories Relived and Shared at the Royal Academy and Tracey Emin A Mature Voice Emerges at Tate Modern, both for Artlyst.

Tabish Khan has previewed the top exhibitions to see in March for Londonist. For his newsletter Londonist Urban Palette, he has interviewed Iain Chamberlain, asked can video play nicely with other artworks? He has also uncovered the secrets of the Painted Hall in Greenwich, and asks should we save objects and artworks for the nation? For FAD magazine, he has his weekly top 5 art exhibitions and has covered Light Up Berwick. As co-host of the podcast The Good, The Bad and The Arty, he discusses preserving craft and heritage in the Middle East and beyond, as well as Art and Community at Two Temple Place.

Rachel Kubrick reports that an exhibition of Black artists reinterpreting the US flag opens without key Dread Scott work, and Club for working-class art professionals expands from London to northern England, both for The Art Newspaper.

Estelle Lovatt has spoken to AP News on the following occasions: Tracey Emin at Tate Modernhow artists brought love into their workSeurat at The Courtauld, and Lucien Freud at the National Portrait Gallery.

Maev Kennedy reports that an Opulent golden slipper, believed to have belonged to England’s King James II, goes on display in UK, and that Gwen John—the quiet ‘seer of strange beauties’—gets major show in Wales, both for The Art Newspaper.

Lead image is of Tracey Emin’s exhibition at Tate Modern. Photo © Tate (Jai Monaghan)

James McNeill Whistler At Tate Britain | The American

Whistler, Nocturne James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne, c. 1870-76, on a rare loan from the White House Collection PHOTO ©TATE (LARINA FERNANDES)

The largest European retrospective for 30 years of the American painter shows his development and his major influence on the art world

Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG

www.tate.org.uk

By Estelle Lovatt | Published on March 19, 2026


James McNeill Whistler, 1834-1903, was an extraordinary American artist, primarily based in the UK. He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, USA and died in London, England.

As the founder of ‘Tonalism’, in the 1880s, Whistler painted the atmospheric tone and quiet intimacy that we associate the artist with in his reflective canvases. His painterly approach went on to influence the American abstract, stain-and-spray, Color Field painters in New York, during the 1940s and ‘50s, increasingly making abstract expressionism the subject, in itself.

This is the largest Whistler retrospective in Europe for 30 years, featuring 150 artworks that show the full breadth of his painting, drawing, printmaking and design. Don’t underestimate his widespread, major, contribution to the art world. From his iconic Portrait of the Artist’s Mother to his celebrated Nocturnes, the exhibition spans Whistler’s most famous, and infamous, works.

Arrangement in Black and Grey, No. 1 (known as Portrait of the Painter’s Mother and popularly as Whistler’s Mother) is on display at Tate Britain for the first time in 20 years, making its return to the city where it was painted in 1871. Whistler’s 66-year-old mother sat for her portrait after another model failed to arrive. This huge painting has since become an enduring symbol of motherhood, strength and resilience. (And, do you remember this great picture featuring in the comedic Mr Bean film of 1977, Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie?)

This exhibition also includes four previously unseen pocket sketchbooks, on display for the first time. Whistler carried them with him on his travels, to always sketch, draw and capture those fleeting moments of daily life he encountered, across many, many, countries. These small, intimate volumes, though never intended for public view, reveal his constant urge to record what he saw. As he said, “No day without a line”. They include scenes from his travels in the USA, Britain, Europe, Chile and Algeria, as well as a self-portrait made, at age 11, in St Petersburg, Russia.

Whistler was a fashionable, cosmopolitan, celebrity who challenged Victorian society time and time again with his bold, experimental and increasingly defiant approach to artistic innovation. Whistler anticipated modern art in his pursuit for truth and beauty as his artwork became more atmospheric, and increasingly more abstract. Shaped by his subtle, controlled, handling of oil paint, he wasn’t constrained by his palette, but was instead freed by the liberties he took with the slick, transparent medium. Tackling everything. Fearing nothing.

After moving to Paris aged 21, Whistler engaged with his contemporary artists, including Degas. Developing an interest in working-class subjects and urban spaces, he helped pioneer and establish Impressionist techniques and took to painting landscapes, en plein air, outside, on the French coast, through to Battersea and Chelsea and along the industrial River Thames in central London.

And in Britain, Whistler transformed nighttime scenes, of factories and ‘pleasure gardens’ along the Thames, lit by streetlamps and fireworks, into timeless, atmospheric paintings. He advocated a new minimalist style, arguing that “nature is very rarely right”, and believed that artists should create their own harmony of color and line.

Whistler, Head of a Peasant Woman James McNeill Whistler, Head of a Peasant Woman, 1855 ©HUNTERIAN MUSEUM, UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

This now is where we witness the bringing together the largest display of Whistler’s Nocturnes ever assembled. Wow!! Yes, I’d say, it’s a wower!! From the first, painted in Valparaiso, Chile, to the last, painted in Venice. As Whistler said, it was as if they were painted “like breath on glass”. So delicate, mysterious and enigmatic. Among them is Nocturne, c. 1870-76, on rare loan from the White House Collection. It was originally gifted to President John F Kennedy in 1962, and has not left Washington, DC since. Until now, under President Donald Trump. Don’t miss your chance to see it and other magnificent masterpieces.

Another must-see is, Nocturne: Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket, c. 1875. It captures fireworks at night, and sparked a fierce debate among artists, patrons and critics and a famous court case between Whistler and the leading Victorian critic John Ruskin.

It was after seeing this abstract canvas, that Ruskin wrote that the artist was, simply, “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”…and showing “cockney impudence” by asking 200 guineas for it! In the trial, 1878, Whistler sued Ruskin for libel. At the Old Bailey, the artist was asked, how he could charge so much for a painting completed in two days? He replied that he was charging not for two days’ labor, but for “the knowledge of a lifetime!”.

Whistler won his case, but received only a farthing (a quarter of a penny) in damages. The legal costs bankrupted him, though the case secured his place in how he changed the course of modern art history. This feud, and its legacy, is seen as one of the earliest and most defining battles of Modernism, exposing the clash between detailed Victorian Realism and Whistler’s “art for art’s sake” vision of Expressionism and Abstraction.

Now, for the first time in 120 years, Whistler’s early oil portraits are reunited, unseen together since his memorial exhibition in 1905. The attribution of Head of a Peasant Woman (1855; Hunterian Museum, Glasgow) was once uncertain, but now, with new research and conservation it’s duly confirmed as an artwork by Whistler, painted in Paris, in his early twenties. It is therefore his oldest surviving finished oil portrait. It hangs aside his striking full-length portraits, which were repeatedly rubbed back and reworked until they became almost ghostlike. See the enigmatic Portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell (1883) and the Rembrandt-inspired Gold and Brown: Self-Portrait c. 1896–98.

The elegant Butterfly Cabinet, 1877 reflects Whistler’s bold approach to interior design, most notably seen in Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, 1877 (Freer Gallery of Art, Washington). And you can see Whistler’s personal collection of East Asian ceramics, Japanese prints and artist-designed furniture, alongside his easel, palette and brushes.

Whistler’s Finish: Research and Conservation Project, supported by The Lunder Foundation, is a year-long collaboration between Tate, the Colby College Museum of Art and the Hunterian Art Gallery, shedding new light on his methods and techniques.

With Tate offering us this fresh view of how Whistler made his astonishing paintings, this exhibition is particularly eye-catching, entrancing and fearless.

Must-see, 10/10.

Whistler, Arrangement in Black and Grey, No. 1

Source: https://www.theamerican.co.uk/pr/rev-art-James-McNeill-Whistler-At-Tate-Britain