He died on Thursday. A few lines on the news sites, then the usual flood.
In the days after a famous artist dies, the conversation compresses. The best-known works get cited, the auction records remembered, adjectives like "revolutionary" and "iconic" deployed. Hockney would have hated both. For eighty years he said one thing: looking is a craft. Not a talent. A craft.
Bradford, then everything else
Born in 1937 in an industrial city in Yorkshire, fourth of five children, Hockney knew by the age of eleven what he wanted to do. He drew from nine in the morning to nine at night. Bradford was grey, he remembered. No shadows, no colour. That was part of why he left.
At the Royal College of Art in London he refused to write his final thesis. An artist, he argued, should be judged only on his work. The college changed its rules. He graduated with top marks.
His first trip to New York returned him changed. Then came California. In 1964, at twenty-nine, he landed in Los Angeles without a driving licence. He took lessons on a friend's pickup truck, passed the test by the skin of his teeth. He started driving. He started looking.
The pool is not a pool
He painted about twenty of them over his career. Not out of nostalgia for Californian luxury, not for aesthetics. There was a technical problem that obsessed him: how do you paint transparent water? Water has no colour of its own. It captures the light of whatever surrounds it and transforms it. Hockney wanted to understand how to do that on a flat canvas.
A Bigger Splash, from 1967, is the best-known answer. Someone has just dived in. The body is already under. Only the white splash remains against the flat blue. The figure is gone, the gesture still there. It became one of the most reproduced paintings of the twentieth century, ending up on posters and mugs and book covers, and it appears in BoJack Horseman. The popularity did not make it less precise. It says something about time that almost no other painting manages to say.
Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), from 1972, was painted in the period following his break-up with companion Peter Schlesinger. Two figures in the same space. One swims, the other watches, fully dressed. They do not touch, do not speak. In 2018, Christie's sold that painting for 90.3 million dollars, a world record for a living artist at the time. Hockney did not seem particularly impressed.
Every new tool was a question
Photocopiers, Polaroids, fax machines, computers. When the iPhone arrived, Hockney was already in his seventies and living in Yorkshire. He started drawing from bed in the early morning, looking out the window. Then came the iPad. He took it as seriously as he had taken every other medium. Using it, he said, let him catch rapid shifts in light that traditional painting would have missed.
«Turner would have loved it.»
In 2020, in lockdown at his farm in Normandy, he painted the apple trees in blossom and sent the drawings to friends. He wrote: do remember they can't cancel the spring. The Fondation Louis Vuitton put that phrase in neon on its facade for the 2025 retrospective. More than four hundred works, from 1955 to 2025. Hockney had kept painting until his final months, from a wheelchair.
Fame and its paradox
There is something strange about his popularity. The Californian pools became autonomous visual objects, recognisable even to people who could not name who painted them. Yet Hockney always refused labels. Not pop art, even if he started there. Not realism, even if he painted what he saw. Not abstraction, even if he argued that all figurative painting is abstract the moment it touches a flat surface.
The historian Simon Schama wrote that the lasting power of his work is no mystery: it always presupposes an expectation of pleasure. Not art that wanted to disturb. Art that wanted to make you look.
The paradox is that over seventy years he never stopped doing it himself.
«The world is very beautiful, if you look at it. But most people don't look very much, do they? They scan the ground in front of them so they can walk, but they don't really look at things with any intensity. I do.»
He said that in 2019, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. He was eighty-two. At the Serpentine Gallery in London, this year, ten new works were on show, made in 2025. Portraits of friends, family, carers. Tables with checked tablecloths. No pools.
He was still looking.