David Hockey obituary: 'Most influential British artist of all time' dies aged 88

David Hockey obituary: 'Most influential British artist of all time' dies aged 88 Beloved British artist and influential figure David Hockney has died aged 88. He was one of the most important figures in contemporary art of the 20th and 21st centuries David Hockney, voted the most influential British artist of all time, has died aged 88. His publicist Erica Bolton confirmed he had passed away peacefully at home in London on Thursday, describing him as "one of the most important figures in contemporary art in both the 20th and 21st centuries." One critic wrote of him: "Hockney is so famous, so popular, such a great talker and character that it's easy to take him for granted as an artist. He is one of only a handful of 20th century British artists who added anything to the image bank of the world's imagination." And a 2011 poll of 1,000 British painters and sculptors declared him Britain's most influential artist of all time, beating Turner, Bacon and Gainsborough. Hockney was working right up to his death, with an exhibition, A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts About Painting, running at the Serpentine North Gallery in London that opened in March. Millions have seen his most famous paintings: A Bigger Splash, painted in 1967, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) and the vast Yorkshire landscapes that became touchstones for generations of painters. Through his career he developed a reputation for the unorthodox - embracing different styles of painting and including technology in his work. Hockney pioneered the photo-collage, the fax drawing and the iPad painting. Hockney’s radical nature extended to his personal life”. His distinctive look - a flat cap and large round glasses - accompanied by a cigarette. “I've had three doctors in the past 40 or so years. They all told me to give up smoking and now they're all dead," he once said. He still wore a badge saying "end bossiness soon." He was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, in 1937, the fourth of five children of Kenneth Hockney, an accountant's clerk who had been a conscientious objector in the Second World War, and Laura Hockney, a devout Methodist and strict vegetarian and described his upbringing as life in a "radical working-class family." Hockney was born with synesthesia. He saw colours in response to music, a condition that helped him design sets for ballet and opera. In 1948 he won a scholarship to Bradford Grammar School, where he was awarded prizes for art, before enrolling at Bradford College of Art in 1953. He then moved to the Royal College of Art in London, where he received a gold medal in the graduate competition in 1962. As a student there, other pupils mocked his Yorkshire accent. "I'd look at their artworks and I'd think, well, if I drew like that, I'd keep my mouth shut," he later recalled. By the time he graduated he had already shown at the Young Contemporaries exhibition and was openly gay at a time when homosexuality remained illegal in England. He produced a series of paintings featuring naked or semi-naked men, which he later described as "homosexual propaganda." He said: "I felt it should be done. Nobody else would use it as a subject because it was a part of me. It was a subject I could treat humorously. In art, new ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling. You can't divorce the two." He knew early what he wanted from life as much as from art. He said: "I was 18 when I first visited London,. But I must confess the moment I got to America I thought: this is the place. It was more open, with 24-hour cities and pubs and restaurants that didn't close." He visited the United States in 1961 and returned in 1964 to teach at the universities of Iowa, Colorado and California - commuting between England and America until settling permanently in Los Angeles in 1978. He bought a house in the Hollywood Hills that year, later expanding it to include his studio. He also owned a beach house in Malibu for many years. The California years made him famous, but they also brought devastating loss. He lived in all the ground zeroes of the AIDS epidemic - New York, London, Los Angeles and Paris. He remarked: "The first person to die of AIDS that I knew was in 1983, and then for ten years it was lots of people." Over his lifetime there were many subsequent losses, including intimate friends such as Christopher Isherwood, Henry Geldzahler and Jonathan Silver, each of whom had a place in his past. He painted portraits of them all. "At the time I couldn't write down all the people," he said. "You think about them every day, and then you stop it because there's too many, actually. It would rather drive you mad if you think about it. Slowly it's become part of your life, something you never, ever expected." In seven decades he reinvented himself repeatedly, moving from the early paintings made at the Royal College to the California pool scenes; from the Polaroid photo-collages he called "joiners" to the monumental Yorkshire landscapes exhibited at the Royal Academy in 2012, which attracted more than 600,000 visitors. In 1989, when his mother joined his sister Margaret in Bridlington, he bought them a larger house on the outskirts of the town and became a regular visitor, reconnecting with the Yorkshire landscape. In 1990 he was offered a knighthood but turned it down, saying: “I don’t value prizes of any sort. I value my friends.” In his 80s, he embraced the iPad as a drawing medium with the same unselfconscious enthusiasm he had brought to every previous technology, producing vibrant digital flower paintings he emailed to friends each morning. He said: "People from the village come up and tease me, ‘we hear you've started drawing on your telephone.' And I tell them 'well, no, actually, it's just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad.'" Having lived and worked in London, Los Angeles, Paris, Malibu and Bridlington, he settled in Normandy, where he found space to create in peace. It was during a four-day road trip through northern and western France in October 2018 that he fell in love with the region, saying: "I'd like to just work and paint. The French know how to live. They know about pleasure." And in November 2018, his 1972 work Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at Christie's in New York for $90 million, becoming the most expensive artwork by a living artist sold at auction at the time. He lived in Normandy until 2023, then returned to London, where he remained until his death. He had used hearing aids since 1979, and was profoundly deaf for many years - a condition that shaped his later life more than many realised. "I'm not very social," he told the BBC in 2012. "I'm too deaf to be social." He stayed fit by swimming every morning and could stand for many hours while painting. He had a stroke in 2012, which temporarily impaired his speech. Much to his relief, he said: "The stroke didn't affect my drawing, and that's the most important thing." He accepted the Order of Merit in 2012 and had been made a Companion of Honour in 1997. Pinned to the wall of his Bridlington studio was a slogan he lived by: "Inspiration. She does not visit the lazy. I think I'm greedy," he said, "but I'm not greedy for money. I'm greedy for an exciting life. I want it to be exciting all the time, and I intend to have it exciting until the day I fall over."