David Hockey

‘Hyper-stylised, ultra-cool visions’: 10 ways David Hockney changed art

He pushed landscape painting into the stratosphere, demolished one-point perspective, invented the Los Angeles look, embraced iPads, created dazzling stage sets for theatre and opera …

Eddy Frankel
Saturday 13 June 2026

He was the ultimate synthesist

David Hockney didn’t just appear out of nowhere like some fully formed artistic wunderkind. His work was a synthesis of so much that came before and was happening around him. He took the ideas of minimalism and abstraction, fused them with the traditions of portraiture, and filtered it all through the innovations in pop and conceptualism that were going on in the 1960s. He was heavily indebted to a lot of other artists, but he synthesised all those influences into something so simple, immediate, digestible and approachable that it became something new.

‘He found the right style to show gay life as it is’ … David Hockney, 1966, by Jane Bown. Photograph: Jane Bown/From Observer Picture Library

‘David Hockney changed the world just by looking at it’: a tribute to the artist whose work was a feast of visual pleasures

He was subversive and bold, yet also playful and accepting – putting the fun into pop art and finding freedom and fulfilment amid the blue skies and pools of California. David Hockney, who has died aged 88, lived and painted the truth

Jonathan Jones
Friday 12 June 2026

David Hockney’s art was a feast of unabashed visual pleasure, one long orgy of the gaze, the delighted lifelong epiphany of someone who cherished flowers in a vase and freeways in the sun and thought endlessly about new ways of making pictures of such passing treasures. He changed the world just by looking at it. It didn’t seem to occur to him that the way he saw was revolutionary – all he cared about was truth. But no one had ever captured the look and feel of the contemporary world with such acceptance before. He has the same simple perfection as the Beatles – just as they caught the sound of the modern world, he caught its look.

Geoffrey Reeve/Bridgeman Art Library

Hockney at work at the Royal College of Art in 

This article is more than 9 years old

David Hockney: I wasn't keen on Hillary when she banned smoking in the White House

In an exclusive interview the artist treads carefully – for most of the time – around US politics but is firm in his favour for painting. ‘If those were photographs in there, it would be a lot less interesting,’ he tells Gay Alcorn

Gay Alcorn

Fridady 11 November 2016

David Hockney laughs, and pauses to think. It is one day after Donald Trump was elected the next president of the United States, and the world has shifted a little on its axis.

Trademark accessories … Hockney in 2023. Photograph: Dave Benett/Getty Images

FASHION

Peroxide mop, statement specs, tweed suits and quirky Crocs: David Hockney’s genius for fashion

With his trademark glasses, his bleached hair and a thrillingly haphazard approach to colour, the artist’s signature style evolved and captivated decade after decade

Lauren Cochrane
Friday 12 June 2026

If artist style is now a well-trodden path in fashion, there are some examples that stand out. David Hockney – with his trademark glasses, rugby shirts, trenchcoats and quirks like wearing a pair of yellow Crocs to meet King Charles in 2022 – might have been top of that list.

David Hockney's 5 Most Famous Paintings

David Hockney 

David Hockey / Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) New York, 2017

David Hockney's 5 Most Famous Paintings

reviewed by Erin Argun
Last updated23 Dec 2025

David Hockney has become an icon of British art over his illustrious career, combining a range of different styles to produce his bright, colourful paintings and sculptures. The Yorkshire born artist became an emblem of British Pop Art in the 1960s before moving to California in 1964, where the sun-drenched, sexually liberated atmosphere that he encountered transformed both his style and subject matter.

Lucian Freud (1922-2011), the Freud Museum stages its first ever exhibition of the great artist’s work.

 

Lucian (left) with his father Ernst Freud and brothers Clement and Stephen Gabriel, c. 1930. © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2022 / Bridgeman Images. Collection of the Freud Museum London

6 July 2022 to 29 January 2023

In the centenary year of British painter Lucian Freud (1922-2011), the Freud Museum stages its first ever exhibition of the great artist’s work.

Lucian Freud: The Painter and His Family is the first exhibition of Lucian Freud’s work in the home of his grandfather, Sigmund Freud, and aunt, Anna Freud. The exhibition features paintings, drawings, family photographs, books and letters. These works are drawn from galleries and private collections, the Museum’s archives and members of Lucian Freud’s family. Some of the items have never, or very rarely, been seen in public before.

Lucian Freud painting denied by artist is authenticated by experts

 

Lucían Freud

Lucian Freud painting denied by artist is authenticated by experts

This article is more than 3 years old

The artist insisted he did not paint Standing Male Nude, but three specialists have concluded it is his work

Dalya Alberge

Sun 28 Nov 2021

Almost 25 years ago, a Swiss art collector bought a Lucian Freud painting – a full-length male nude – at auction. He then received a call from the British artist, asking to buy it from him. The two men did not know each other, and the collector politely refused, as he liked the picture.

Harry Holland / Women III

Harry Holland

MUJERES III
NUDES

Harry Holland / Women II

Harry Holland

WOMEN II

WOMEN AND WATER

Jenny Saville

Interview

Jenny Saville: 'I used to be anti-beauty'

Saville made her name with giant paintings of fleshy, flawed bodies. She talks about being bankrolled by Charles Saatchi, how having children is changing her art – and the joy of late-night vacuuming

Emine Saner
Monday 25 April 2016

I

t’s funny to think of Jenny Saville in her studio at 1am, music blaring, with vacuum cleaner in hand as she approaches one of her canvases and starts sucking great lines through her work. That it should be a Henry vacuum, the shamelessly anthropomorphised device, makes it even better: as he approaches Saville’s giant works, ready to wreak destruction, his expression will be one of eternal cheerfulness.

‘Like looming planets’: Tacita Dean’s Prisoner Pair (2008), from Still Life at the National Gallery. Photograph: Courtesy the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris

Three galleries, three genres – UK celebration of Tacita Dean

Film artist to address landscapes, portraiture and still life in upcoming shows at three of London’s major galleries

Mark Brown 

Arts correspondent
Tue 16 Jan 2018 14.35 GMT

The reputation of Tacita Dean as one of the most important and influential British artists working today will be cemented this year with an unprecedented collaboration between three major galleries showing her work across three genres.

Focus on portraiture … Ronald Stevenson (1983) by Victoria Crowe. Photograph: RS Anderson/Victoria Crowe

Tacita Dean and Jenny Saville lead strong female presence at Edinburgh art festival

Phyllida Barlow, Lucy Skaer and Victoria Crowe also feature in the lineup alongside old masters including Canaletto and Rembrandt

Dale Berning Sawa
Mon 26 Mar 2018 00.01 BST

The Edinburgh art festival has announced its 2018 programme. The annual event, which this year takes place between 26 July and 26 August alongside the international festival and the fringe, will mark its 15th anniversary with 36 exhibitions at venues across the city.

The Guardian view on artist Tacita Dean: epic, intimate and in touch with history

Editorial

Contemporary art is often seen as having brutally abandoned tradition. But the best work of the present is in conversation with that of the past

Sunday 18 March 2018

T

his is the artist Tacita Dean’s year: she is the focus of four major British exhibitions. Two have just opened: Portrait, at London’s National Portrait Gallery, which focuses on her films of human subjects, including choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the artists David Hockney and Cy Twombly; and Still Life at the National Gallery next door, a delicate, two-room exhibition for which she has assembled works of art from the present alongside paintings from the past. In May comes a retrospective at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. In July, an exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh looking at performance in her work.

Euan Uglow / Form, Color and Space

 

EUAN UGLOW

Form, Color and Space

May 10, 2018

Eduardo Fernández

One of my favorite British painters is Euan Uglow ( 1932 - 2000 ). His work is painterly, precise and visually compelling. He worked from life almost exclusively and focused mostly on still-life, interiors and the figure. Uglow studied with William Coldstream at the Slade School of Art and is considered a contemporary of Lucien Freud.