David Hockney

David Hockney (born July 9, 1937, Bradford, Yorkshire, England—died June 11, 2026, London) was an English painter, draftsperson, printmaker, photographer, and stage designer whose works are characterized by economy of technique, a preoccupation with light, experimentation with media, and a frank mundane realism derived from Pop art and photography. Hockney was also unusually direct in his treatment of gay desire, making it part of his subject matter before sexual acts between men were decriminalized in England in 1967.

Education and career in the United States

Hockney studied at the Bradford College of Art (1953–57) and the Royal College of Art, London (1959–62), where he received a gold medal in the graduate competition. While studying, he made such works as We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), whose title comes from Walt Whitman’s poem of the same name and whose imagery alludes to male intimacy. His treatment of the subject became more explicit as the 1960s went on, notably in the etchings he made for Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from C.P. Cavafy (1966), an artist’s book inspired by the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy’s poems of love and desire between men.

Hockney visited the United States in 1961 and returned in 1964–67 to teach at the universities of Iowa, Colorado, and California and thereafter commuted between England and the United States until settling permanently in Los Angeles in 1978. That city’s intense glaring light and sleek “California modern” aesthetic had a pronounced influence on his work, including his images of pools, showers, and male figures in domestic or recreational settings.

Discover the fascinating events that shaped the world, straight from our editors.

SIGN UP

By clicking “Sign Up”, you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Britannica Quiz

Which Artist? Part One Quiz

Much of Hockney’s subject matter was autobiographical, including portraits and self-portraits and quiet incidental scenes of his friends, lovers, and his quarters—e.g., Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972), in which the model for the standing figure is Peter Schlesinger, Hockney’s former partner. The casual elegance and tranquil luminosity of these pieces also predominated in his still lifes. Hockney’s exploration of photography in the 1980s resulted in Pearblossom Hwy., 11–18th April 1986 and other ambitious photocollages. He published several series of graphic works in book form, including illustrations for Six Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (1970) and The Blue Guitar (1977). Hockney also achieved international prominence as a stage-set designer for the ballet and opera, including a much-admired set for a 1975 production of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (1948–51) at the Glyndebourne Festival, near Lewes in southern England.

Return to England and late career

Hockney experimented with abstract landscapes during the 1990s, and upon returning to his native Yorkshire at the turn of the 21st century, he began documenting the light and changing of seasons in the English countryside in a series of landscapes. He also pursued his long-standing interest in new technologies. Among the many large-scale pieces featured in the traveling exhibition “David Hockney: A Bigger Picture” (2012–14; “David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition” at the de Young Museum in San Francisco) were several compelling drawings done on an iPad.

A traveling retrospective that opened at Tate Britain in 2017 attested to Hockney’s enduring popularity when it became the most-visited exhibition at that venue. The following year Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), one of Hockney’s most well-known paintings, sold at auction for some $90 million, breaking the record for a living artist and cementing his place in the art history canon. Meanwhile, Hockney continued to draw landscapes with an iPad, including a multi-panel frieze (2020) of Normandy, where he spent the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The work was shown the following year in the exhibition “A Year in Normandy” at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, and was featured in his late-career retrospective (2025) at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris.

Publications and honors

Hockney’s books included Hockney by Hockney (1976), Travels with Pen, Pencil, and Ink (1978), Paper Pools (1980), David Hockney Photographs (1982), China Diary (with Stephen Spender; 1982), and Hockney Paints the Stage (1983). In 1989 he received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for painting. Queen Elizabeth II appointed Hockney to the Order of Merit—a group of no more than 24 individuals at a time who have distinguished themselves in science, art, literature, or public service—in 2012.