David Hockney, Painter of Swimming Pools and Yorkshire Landscapes, Dies at 88

David Hockney died at his London home on Thursday, June 11, according to a statement from his publicist, Bolton & Quinn, confirmed to CBS News. He was 88. His 89th birthday would have been next month.

His partner of many years, Jean-Pierre Goncalves de Lima, survives him, along with two brothers and extended family.

Who He Was

Hockney was born July 9, 1937, in Bradford, West Yorkshire, the fourth of five children in what he described, per The Guardian, as a "radical working-class family." His father was a conscientious objector. His mother was a devout Methodist. Neither came from money.

He sold his first painting — a portrait of his father — for £10 at the Yorkshire Artists Exhibition in 1957, according to The Guardian. He enrolled at London's Royal College of Art in 1959 and graduated with a Gold Medal distinction, per CBS News, after the school bent its own rules to accommodate him. He had refused to write the required essay and submitted a drawing of a male figure from an American physique magazine in place of a mandatory female life study.

The RCA gave him the diploma anyway. They knew what they had.

The Work

Hockney moved to Los Angeles in 1964 and never fully left it behind. The California swimming pool paintings that followed, including A Bigger Splash and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), became among the most recognizable images in postwar Western art. Light on water. Flat color. A moment suspended.

In November 2018, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at Christie's in New York for $90.3 million, according to CBS News, setting an auction record for a living artist. He was unseated the following year by Jeff Koons' Rabbit.

But the pool paintings were one chapter in a career that ran seven decades. He did photo-collages that challenged how perspective itself works. He painted the Yorkshire Wolds in a palette so vivid it looked almost hallucinatory. In later years he worked extensively on iPads, producing landscapes that were distributed digitally before they ever touched canvas. He designed opera sets. He made etchings, lithographs, and stained-glass windows, according to BBC.

BBC described him as "a genius in practically every medium." His own explanation for longevity was simpler. Per BBC, his one rule was: "Paint the things you love."

Openly Gay Before It Was Legal

Hockney was publicly gay at a time when homosexuality was a criminal offense in Britain, not decriminalized until 1967. His 1961 painting We Two Boys Together Clinging, named after a Walt Whitman poem, depicted gay intimacy with directness that was genuinely unusual for the era, according to The Guardian. His work made no apologies and asked no permission.

This is part of his legacy that some conservative cultural critics have complicated feelings about, and that's fair to acknowledge. Hockney used his art to challenge a legal and moral framework that criminalized private adult behavior. Reasonable people can hold different views on the cultural shift he represented. What is not disputable is that he did it through paint, not politics, and that the work stood on its own.

Still Working

Hockney never retired in any practical sense. London's Serpentine Gallery is currently holding his first exhibition there, conceived in close collaboration with him, showcasing new paintings, according to CBS News. Future exhibitions at Tate London and the Munch Museum in Oslo were already in development at the time of his death.

In 2026, France awarded him the rank of Officier in the Légion d'Honneur, one of the few non-French citizens to receive it, per CBS News. Britain had given him the Order of the Companions of Honour back in 1997.

Honors and Plainness

For all the accolades, Hockney kept his Yorkshire accent his entire life, per CBS News. He was a committed smoker and an outspoken critic of anti-smoking campaigns, a stance that irritated the health establishment but was entirely consistent with his broader suspicion of received wisdom.

He distrusted abstraction for its own sake, skeptics of photography, and critics who over-theorized art. He believed in looking at things directly.

What Comes Next

The Serpentine exhibition in London remains open as of June 12, 2026. The unresolved question for the art market is how his estate will manage the commercial legacy of a painter whose auction record was set eight years ago and whose work, particularly the California pool series, commands prices that most institutions cannot easily afford. Whether those paintings remain accessible to the public or migrate permanently into private collections will shape how future generations actually encounter his work.