No contemporary British artist was as universally loved as David Hockney, who died on Friday, 12 June 2026, aged 88. Born and raised in Bradford, West Yorkshire, he was always committed Art And was always forward thinking. He stood out at the Royal College of Art for his bleached blonde hair and the gold lamé jacket he bought for his graduation, in which he was awarded a gold medal distinction. He had his first one-man show just 18 months later, moving to LA in 1964 – A big splash Painted in 1967 – and then back Londonfrom A flat on Powys Terrace In Notting Hill. Home and garden It was photographed in 1969 in the middle of a cut-out forest treesand where the words ‘Get up and work immediately’ were painted on the chest of drawers at the foot of his bed.
The following decades were spent living between London and LA, with few years off Paris From 1973-75, a long spell in Yorkshire between 2004 and 2013 and a move to Normandy in 2019 before returning to live in London in 2023. Ever the dandy, he was instantly recognizable in the flat cap, tie and jewel-toned cardigan, bright crow and 202 famous for it. Lunch with the King.
His routine, wherever he lived, was to work every day. In the 1960s, he was at the forefront of the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, which welcomed postwar optimism—and he painted his lovers at a time when homosexuality was still illegal. In the 1970s, he began designing opera sets – for Glyndebourne, LA Opera, the Royal Opera House and the Metropolitan Opera. New York. In the late 1980s, he turned his attention to his beloved dachshunds, Stanley and Budgie. And then came the images of Yorkshire and Normandy that many of us are familiar with and that gave us so much comfort during the Covid lockdown, when he issued an image of daffodils with the message, ‘Remember, they can’t cancel. spring.’
He was the only living artist to have a work feature in the final ten of the Greatest Paintings in the 2005 Britain Vote (it was his 1970–71 Double Portrait of Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell, Mr. and Mrs. Clarke and Percy), and his 2017 retrospective at Tate Britain was the fastest-selling and most visited exhibition by a living artist in the gallery’s history. But, as curator Kathleen Soriano comments, ‘Looking at the colorful, joyful paintings, we tend to forget what iconoclast David Hockney was all about.’ In 2012, Kathleen curated David Hockney: A big picture At the Royal Academy of Arts – which marked a UK first – works created on the iPad were displayed in a museum setting.
