Farewell to David Hockney: King of British Pop Art and Creator of the Iconic "A Bigger Splash"

The art world mourns David Hockney, who died in London at the age of 88. From his famous California swimming pools to his iPad paintings, the king of British Pop Art has passed away.

The curtain falls on one of the most vibrant and revolutionary visual scenes of the 20th and 21st centuries. At the age of 88, just days before his 89th birthday, the British master David Hockney passed away peacefully in his home in London.

The sad news was announced by his longtime agent, Erica Bolton, who confirmed the passing of a consummate artist whose health had become very fragile in recent times. With his passing, the cultural world loses not only an absolute pioneer of British Pop Art, but also a tireless experimenter who spent his entire life challenging the rules of visual perception, transforming color into an instrument of pure emotional liberation.

From the mists of Yorkshire to the turquoise swimming pools of Los Angeles

Born in Bradford on July 9, 1937, David Hockney showed a deep-seated desire to become an artist from childhood, fleeing at a very early age an industrial reality he deemed gray and devoid of nuance. The turning point in his life came in 1964, when he decided to move to Los Angeles. Dazzled by California’s blinding light, modernist architecture, and the West Coast lifestyle, the painter found his primary source of inspiration in swimming pools.

It was precisely there that immortal masterpieces such as “A Bigger Splash” from 1967 (which inspired Luca Guadagnino’s film of the same name) and “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” sold at auction in 2018 for a record $90 million. His artistic obsession was to capture the ethereal transparency of water and the fleeting nature of a dive on canvas.

Social Commitment and Academic Rebellion

David Hockney has always stood out for his nonconformist and proudly eccentric spirit, marked by his inseparable round glasses, bleached hair, and the ever-present cigarette between his lips. As early as his years at the Royal College of Art in London, he caused a sensation by presenting the painting “The Diploma” to protest the requirement to write a final thesis.

A champion of civil rights and of his own homosexuality at a time when it was still considered a crime in the United Kingdom, the artist tackled this theme unfiltered in iconic canvases such as “We Two Boys Together Clinging,” inspired by the poems of Walt Whitman, demonstrating extraordinary political and civic courage.

From photographic collages to painting on the iPad

Mr. Hockney’s extraordinary creative journey was marked by relentless technological innovation. The artist navigated with ease between abstract painting, printmaking, murals, and his famous “joiners”—photographic collages created using Polaroids. Even in his later years, while suffering from severe respiratory and hearing problems, he embraced new digital technologies, becoming famous for his paintings created on an iPad.

In 2025, the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris dedicated the largest retrospective exhibition ever held to him. A final and monumental tribute to this genius who taught the whole world to view reality through the prism of an eternal and dazzling spring.