David Hockney dies at 88
David Hockney has died at the age of 88:
Over a seven-decade career, Hockney explored and reimagined classical portraiture, landscape painting and pop art, working in painting, collage, photography and digital drawing.
Hockney was born in the north of England but lived much of his life in Southern California, making its sun-drenched suburban views a major motif. …
Historian Simon Schama said it’s no mystery why the appeal of his work endures.
“His work is admired — loved is not too strong a word — by the millions who, worldwide, flock to see it because it presupposes an expectation of pleasure,” Schama wrote in an essay accompanying a 2025 Hockney exhibition in Paris.
I was not a big Hockney fan, but his work seemed pleasant enough. However, having lots of friends and in-laws in Southern California, I was and I remain exceptionally familiar with those “sun-drenched suburban views” in real life.
But I must say that this quote from that article endears Hockney to me:
In 2019, he moved to Normandy, where during the 2020 coronavirus lockdown he produced joyous iPad drawings of springtime for his friends. His message — “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring” — was emblazoned in neon across the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris when it hosted a huge Hockney exhibition that opened in April 2025.
RIP.
In most my college years, my bedroom found it decorated with a large poster-sized reprint of Hockney’s “Bigger Splash.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bigger_Splash
He did a substantial series from 1967 that have gained this title, but the one I have in mind looks like a home in Palm Springs. A flat nondescript rectangular house with some tufts from young and skinny palm trees on the right is the backdrop.
The foreground shows a home pool sized spring board or diving board. In the middle-ground is the pool water itself, only disturbed by a white surf plume upward, the diver lost underwater.
For me, it’s always been an iconic lifestyle statement about SoCal living, where everybody has a pool. With agreeably romantic coupling implied by the perspective view from one side of a sunny day’s pool dip — and the hidden partner about to surface after the dive.
In my brief research, The Splash or “The Bigger Splash” is widely claimed to be a statement about the emptiness of living in America!
Obviously, to me it is a lifestyle affirmation — not the reverse! Certainly, these opposite evaluations are all about self-projections.
I can only reply that my positive mythic version includes the implied humanity, while the conventional inversionists overread the human absence as an indictment aimed against wealth and middle class success. In today’s woke argot, my interpretation is more inclusive — my opponents capitalist critique is certainly not.
Somehow, I’ve always seen this period of Hockney as reflective of Joan Didion’s writings. Any reactions?
Of course, any implication that pool diving and shared time on my bed are somehow equivalent experiences is nothing I cannot not claim.
Hockney started as a hungry-to-make-it young artist who did indeed catch the Pop Art wave and made it … BIG… with all those sun-drenched LA pool scenes. Good for him.
But he didn’t stop there. He kept asking deeper questions about art. He wrote an impressive book on the use of camera obscura and camera lucida by the Old Masters.
Robert Hughes’ “The Shock of the New” series about modern art ends on a downcast note that maybe modern art has destroyed art.
Twenty-five years later Hughes did an hour-long counterpoint, “The New Shock of the New” in which Hockney emerges as an elder creator helping to forge the way to a new modern art. Here’s that section cued up:
–Robert Hughes, ‘The new shock of the New”
https://youtu.be/mPUO6F-8p1o?t=1948
Anyway. There’s more to Hockney than those pleasant “sun-drenched suburban views”.
RIP David Hockney (1937 – 2026)
@TJ: Somehow, I’ve always seen this period of Hockney as reflective of Joan Didion’s writings. Any reactions?
I understand why you would say that and yes, there’s plenty of drenched sunlight in both artists.
However, casting no judgments, Hockney was basically an optimistic artist. Didion, though I do love her, was not.
Didion famously said, not without reason, “Writers are always selling someone out.”
I feel sure that was not a question Hockney asked of himself or any other painter. He was too busy trying to figure out how to paint California light or how the Old Masters might have done so.
BTW, Hockney grew up working-class.
Didion famously said, not without reason, “Writers are always selling someone out.”
==
Believe Janet Malcolm said that.
There’s a lot of truth.in.this “They can’t cancel.the spring,”
There’s something about those iconic southern California paintings that captures the peculiar quality of light in that area. Being from Pennsylvania, when visiting relatives there over the years, I found that light to be a little alarming somehow.
huxley, I own that camera obscura book of Hockney’s. It’s fascinating. What an eye he had!