‘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.

He outlived four of his doctors’ / What was behind David Hockney’s lifelong love of smoking?

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British painter David Hockney poses at the Pompidou Centre in Paris on September 26, 2017 in front of one of his painting, a work made of an assemblage of various paintings, that he donated to the museum. Photo by STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN 

He outlived four of his doctors’: what was behind David Hockney’s lifelong love of smoking?

His passion got him into scraps with the Paris Metro and numerous other bodies. Was it a social crutch? A Freudian response to his father? And why did he take such delight in writing to the Guardian about it all?

Zoe Williams

Saturday 13 June 2026

David Hockney’s last self-portrait that went on show while he lived, in 2025’s Paris retrospective, has a Droste effect: the figure holds a picture in which the figure holds a picture. Between the fingers of one hand, a paintbrush; of the other, a cigarette. He could have been smoking and smoking and smoking into infinity. That’s the elemental truth of the work, and even while that turned out not to be literally true – he died this week, aged 88 – he gave it his best shot.

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.

‘I think about him every time I go swimming’ / David Hockney remembered by Rachel Whiteread, Jeremy Deller and more

 

‘He made the wild milkshake of the world a place of granular human interest’ … Hockney’s A Bigger Splash, 1967. Photograph: David Hockney

‘I think about him every time I go swimming’: David Hockney remembered by Rachel Whiteread, Jeremy Deller and more

Artists and cultural figures celebrate the great Yorkshire painter who could ‘make teabags and toothpaste glamorous’ – with a poem from a fellow YorkshiremanRachel Whiteread, artist: ‘It was like he was breathing art’

 

David Hockney, 2017

Fans and Friends on the Genius of David Hockney

BY VOGUE

June 12, 2026

Almost a decade ago, ahead of his 80th birthday and a major exhibition of his works, friends and fans of David Hockney shared their perspectives on one of the world’s most popular artists in British Vogue. Following Hockney’s passing in June 2026 at the age of 88, revisit the words of some of his many admirers—from Erdem to Ian McKellen—in the February 2017 issue.

David Hockney’s Two Boys Aged 23 or 24 / Sensuality and history

 

David Hockney’s Two Boys Aged 23 or 24. Photograph: © David Hockney

Anatomy of an artwork

David Hockney’s Two Boys Aged 23 or 24: sensuality and history

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The cultural icon captures close intimacy between his friends to illustrate CP Cavafy’s poem

Skye Sherwin
Friday 12 July 2019

English Painter David Hockney / Photo by mikel roberts

David Hockney: 40 Images That Prove He Was Always a Tastemaker

BY ANNA CAFOLLA AND ELLIE PITHERS

June 12, 2026

David Hockney was “a proper dandy,” as his friend, Christopher Simon Sykes, once remarked—and the picture of a very English kind of elegance. The revolutionary British artist has passed away aged 88.

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.

Obituaries / David Hockney

 

David Hockney working on one of his Woldgate Woods series in east Yorkshire in 2006. Photograph: Jean-Pierre Goncalves/Tate Britain/PA

Obituary

David Hockney obituary

Ceaselessly inventive painter whose best known works were inspired by the light and colour he encountered in 1960s California

Charles Darwent

Friday 12 Jun 2026 13.35

Soon after he moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s, the artist David Hockney was visited by his mother. As they drove back from the airport, far from her native Bradford, she gazed about her in apparent awe at the beauties of sun-kissed southern California. Then, as Hockney was fond of recalling, she turned and said: “I don’t understand it. Such lovely drying weather and no one’s got their washing out.” Mrs Hockney thus joined Mrs Warhol and Alan Bennett’s “Mam” as working-class mothers who delighted in their son’s success without ever quite understanding it.