He Helped Shape LA's Visual Aesthetic

David Hockney, the Yorkshire-born artist who helped redraw what modern painting could look like, has died at 88. Rising to prominence in 1960s London—after almost not graduating from the Royal College of Art for refusing to paint a portrait of a female model—Hockney became one of pop art's defining figures. He later moved to California, and his luminous Los Angeles pool scenes, including A Bigger Splash and Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures), cemented his global fame and helped shape the visual mythology of LA, per the Guardian. The latter fetched $90.3 million at auction in 2018, then a record sum for a living artist.

In 1979, Hockney noted of his new hometown, per the AP: "I'm excited every day. London has lots of dreary parts, but I never find anything dreary in Los Angeles." Over a six-decade career, Hockney restlessly shifted styles and tools, from photo-collage "joiners" that fractured perspective, to bold landscapes and digital works made on iPads and fax machines, per the Guardian. Openly depicting gay life while homosexuality remained criminalized in Britain, Hockney challenged social norms as readily as artistic ones. A lifelong smoker and self-described radical from a working-class Bradford family, he resisted establishment honors, reportedly declining a knighthood more than once, as well as a royal portrait commission from the queen.

At one tribute Hockney did take part in, a 70th birthday celebration at the Tate Britain, the art gallery's smoke alarms were turned off for 10 minutes so the artist could have a cigarette, per the BBC. Hockney's work ethic was also renowned: Even a stroke in 2012 and the 2013 death of a young assistant didn't fully pull him from the studio. "I live now. It's always now," he said in 2015. "The popularity and durability of David Hockney's art, through all his shape-shifts and restlessly inventive experiments, are really no mystery," historian Simon Schama wrote last year, per the AP. "His work is admired—loved is not too strong a word—by the millions who, worldwide, flock to see it because it presupposes an expectation of pleasure."