David Hockney, giant of pop art and painter of light, has died at the age of 88.

British painting has lost one of its brightest figures. David Hockney died peacefully in London on June 11, 2026, a month before his 89th birthday, his agent Erica Bolton told AFP. Born in 1937 in Bradford, Yorkshire, into a modest family, he completed his military service as a medic before entering the prestigious Royal College of Art in London in 1959. The work of Picasso profoundly influenced him there: "Picasso could master all styles. The lesson I take from that is that you have to use them all," he said. Openly gay since the 1960s, at a time when it was still illegal in Great Britain, he left his country to settle in California in 1964. He had settled in Normandy in 2019 before returning to live in his native country in July 2023. In 2025, the Louis Vuitton Foundation dedicated an exceptional retrospective to him in which the artist was very involved despite health problems.

From Californian swimming pools to intimate portraits: a radiant and inexhaustible body of work

It was while flying over Los Angeles for the first time that David Hockney saw endless expanses of blue swimming pools. The image fascinated him and gave rise to one of the most famous series in contemporary art: the Pool Paintings. The best known, A Bigger Splash (1967), depicts a diver splashing under a bright Californian sky. "I loved the idea of ​​painting something that lasted only two seconds. It took me two weeks to paint this two-second event," he told France Télévisions. Portrait of an Artist (Swimming Pool with Two Figures) broke the world record in 2018 for the most expensive work by a living artist, selling for $90,3 million in New York. After the swimming pools, he turned to portraits of his loved ones, lovers, dancers, designers and artists captured in everyday situations, seeking to illustrate, according to Beaux-Arts, "the psychological relationship that unites the protagonists".

A hard worker between Yorkshire, Normandy and iPad

Far from the image of the idle dandy, Hockney defined himself as a worker. "An artist can be in favor of hedonism, but he cannot be a hedonist himself," he told the Guardian in 2015. He regularly returned to his native Yorkshire to paint the surrounding countryside with colors reminiscent of Fauvism, Cézanne, and Van Gogh. Always eager for new technologies, he adopted the iPad in his seventies to create new works. In Normandy, where he owned a house in Rumesnil in the Calvados region, he was known for his fondness for local produce (andouillette sausage, sweetbreads) and his habits at the café in Beuvron-en-Auge, according to the local mayor, as reported by France Télévisions. "Nature is the source of everything." "My joy comes from the way I look at the world," he told AFP in 2021. Behind his famous round glasses, this "happy smoker" allergic to "preachers" leaves behind an immense and inimitable body of work.