David Hockney, Who Restored the Human Form to Art, Dies at 88
Source: New York Times
David Hockney's "Self-Portrait With Red Braces" (2003). He remained unfailingly productive almost to the end of his life. David Hockney, photograph by Richard Schmidt
David Hockney, Who Restored the Human Form to Art, Dies at 88
His colorful figurative paintings were both conservative and iconoclastic, defying the dominant abstract schools of the mid-20th century.
By Holland Cotter
https://www.nytimes.com/by/holland-cotter
June 12, 2026
Updated 7:33 a.m. ET
David Hockney, the English artist whose deftly designed and suavely colored paintings turned trans-Atlantic attention to figurative and narrative art beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s after decades in which abstraction had dominated, died on Thursday at his home in London. He was 88. ... His publicist, Erica Bolton, confirmed the death.
A native of Yorkshire, Mr. Hockney lived for many years in Los Angeles, long enough to refer to himself as an "English Los Angeleno" and to create images that, for many viewers, captured the sun-soaked atmosphere of that city as surely as Joan Didion did in prose. And although his art was conservative in an era that also gave rise to Conceptualism, he was progressive in at least one way: He was one of the first widely popular artists of his time to make work with undisguised gay content and one of the few to take a public stand against the censoring of homosexual imagery.
His death came nine months after the close of a sprawling retrospective exhibition of his work at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. But even at that point, he was not finished. Working out of his studio in London, using a wheelchair, his health failing, he continued to paint. ... "I just go on with my work," he told The New York Times before the show opened in April 2025. "When I come back from Paris, I'm going to carry on painting."
And so he did, continuing to produce a virtuosic, graphic-based, fundamentally illustrational art that existed largely outside shifts in contemporary market fashion; that reproduced well in print and digital media; and that, in a succession of major institutional shows, attracted popular attention over six decades.
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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/arts/design/david-hockney-dead.html
Hat tip, Joe.My.God.
https://www.joemygod.com/2026/06/iconic-uk-gay-artist-david-hockney-dies-at-age-88/
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