NEWS: The Death of David Hockney

David Hockney, one of the world's most popular painters, dies at 88. 

Transcript

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David Hockney, the immense British figure of the contemporary art world, died a few days ago, just a few days short of his 89th birthday. His paintings, just as the man himself, were unique, full of character, refusing to be diluted by an external gaze or the shifting sands of fashion or style. His was work that was at once British and still international, gay but also universal, camp and yet serious, stylized and still deeply real. A few months ago, I met somebody who was at university with Hockney and was among his first collectors. Without bragging, he told me how he had bought many of Hockney's early works for five pounds and a bottle of rum. And then years later, he purchased himself a house in Mayfair in London with the proceeds of the sale of some of these works. It was a remarkable story, but also told you something of how Hockney was possessed as an artist. He did what he did, and that was all. It was his life. Although he is considered an English painter, it was really in the Los Angeles of the 1960s that he really came to prominence, and certainly where he started to resonate in a pop art context. It was there that he started to paint swimming pools, which became a source of fascination to him, a sort of dreamy, sex-infused landscape of wonder. Hockney was also a huge figure in France, where he also lived later in his life, and which regarded him as curiously more French than British, at least in sensibility. Many artworks, especially paintings, seem trapped or caught in a moment of movement. But in Hockney's work, often it feels as though there is no movement at all, as though the figures are su uh somewhere stuck between real figures and placed props held in position. He was productive right to the end of his life, and the legacy of his life and work is about as fixed as these things can ever be.