Sir David Hockney, the iconic British painter with an unmistakable body of work that made him considered one of the greatest artists of the 21st century, has died at the age of 88, Reuters and BBC report.
As a child growing up in the gray north of England, David Hockney noticed the sharply defined shadows in Hollywood films of the famous comic partnership of Laurel and Hardy.
“Strong shadows meant a lot of sun,” the painter recalled in an interview with the BBC in 2009. “So I thought: wherever that place is, it's always sunny there,” he recounted.
Two decades later, Hockney moved to Los Angeles to immerse himself in that blinding light.
The artist, whose vividly colored depictions of California would make him one of the most acclaimed artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, died Thursday, his publicist, Erica Bolton, said in a statement Friday. He was 88 years old.
The cause of death was not specified.
The place where David Hockney felt “free”
At first, almost as much as his paintings, Hockney was known for his own image – thick-rimmed glasses, bleached hair and a shiny gold jacket – which became a symbol of Britain's 'Swinging Sixties' period.
As an arts student in the northern English town of Bradford – where he had been born into a family of an accountant father and a devout Methodist mother – Hockney rebelled against convention. He gave his abstract paintings titles such as “Going to be a Queen for Tonight” and “Doll Boy” at a time when homosexuality was punishable by imprisonment.
To continue his studies, he moved to London in 1959, where he experienced a meteoric rise in the British pop art movement and entered the circles of personalities from the dancer Rudolf Nureev to Mick Jagger.
But Hockney longed for the effervescence he saw in the works of American artists. Using the money from the sale of his works, he visited New York for the first time in 1961 – where he befriended Andy Warhol – and three years later moved to California.
“I thought that people who create this kind of work must live in a colorful world, so I set out in search of it,” he is quoted as saying in the biography written by art critic and friend Peter Adam.
“I had spent the first 20 years of my life in the gothic darkness of the North. Here I felt free,”
An international artist
His paintings of swimming pools and naked men in showers became symbols of a sun-drenched lifestyle, which he documented using luminous acrylic paints, before dividing his time between Los Angeles, London and Paris in the late 1960s and into the 1970s.
Despite his success, he remained modest.
“Actually, I'm still a student,” he told Adam. “I just happen to have quite a few credit cards in my pocket,” he added.
In 1985, when he was invited to the White House to dine with President Ronald Reagan, Prince Charles and Princess Diana, he was detained for half an hour by security agents because he was the only guest who had arrived on foot, his biographer wrote.
Hockney's images of love, sex and material prosperity have led some art critics to consider his work shallow. However, he achieved greater notoriety than any other British artist of the 20th century.
One of his best-known paintings, “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” — which depicts a person swimming underwater and a man looking into a pool — sold in 2018 for $90.3 million, making it the most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction at the time.
David Hockney had the most productive part of his career back home
As he grew older and his life became quieter and more domestic, dogs took the place of men in his works, at a time when many of his friends were dying of AIDS.
He said he cried for two days when Stanley, one of his beloved dachshunds, died in 2001 after being immortalized in dozens of paintings and sketches.
In the late 1990s, Hockney began returning more and more often to Yorkshire, the county in northern England where he had grown up, to visit his mother, and a terminally ill friend encouraged him to paint local landscapes.
Feeling increasingly lonely, he moved from California to Bridlington, a town on the North Sea coast in eastern England. For a decade he painted groups of dead trees in winter, fields full of ripe crops and roads leading to the rolling hills of the Yorkshire Wolds.
This was the most productive period of his entire career as he rushed to capture landscapes that, he said, changed much more dramatically with the seasons than those of California.
“You don't retire from something like that,” he told the BBC in his thick Yorkshire accent when asked about his tireless energy. “You just keep doing it until you drop.”
In 2018, Hockney bought a farm in Normandy in northern France and, with the help of his long-time partner and assistant, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, turned his attention to the fields and flowers in the property's garden. The 90-meter-long frieze titled “A Year in Normandie” was inspired by the nearly 1,000-year-old Bayeux Tapestry.
His work ethic — instilled from the time he woke up at 6 a.m. every day to work in hospitals for two years after refusing to do military service — hardly waned in his later years.
“I tend to think you should work every day,” he would say. “And that's exactly what I'm doing.”
