Art's great innovator whose vivid paintings made him a household name
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- David Hockney died aged 88, the peroxide-blond Bradford boy who set the art world alight in the 1960s and packed out galleries more than half a century later.
- In 2018, one of Hockney's swimming pool paintings sold for nearly £70 million at auction — a record for a living artist.
- "A Bigger Splash" — his best-known work — was painted with a roller for the angular LA buildings and sky, then with a brush to capture the momentary disturbance from an unseen diver.
- Hockney refused to write the single essay required to graduate from the Royal College of Art, failed his finals, and the resulting outcry forced the college to award him his degree and Gold Medal.
- In the 1990s, Hockney pivoted from California to monumental Yorkshire Wolds landscapes from Bridlington — an "old man's challenge" to the Young British Artists scene of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.
- Hockney lost many friends to the 1980s AIDS epidemic and responded by obsessively painting their portraits, describing the work as "a way of holding loved ones close."
Why it matters: His 2018 auction record of nearly £70 million — then the highest for a living artist — quantified a six-decade career spanning Pop Art swimming pools, photocopier and iPad works, and monumental Yorkshire landscapes. Hockney's death removes the last major British artist of the Pop generation, ending a chapter that began with his refusal to write a graduation essay at the Royal College of Art.
