David Hockney obituary: The modern master from Yorkshire who became a popular favourite

No one else would have chosen a view from his bedroom window in Bridlington, or Polaroids of his mother on a day trip to Bolton Abbey, to represent part of a lifelong body of work. But no-one ever said David Hockney was a conformist.

It was never more apparent than in 1989, when his choice of medium for a stylized painting of his home city was the front cover of the Bradford telephone directory.

A force of nature, was what the Tate Britain curator Andrew Wilson called him when he put together what would be one of the last great retrospective exhibitions, nine years ago.

Encompassing 250 pieces in 13 rooms, it was bigger than almost any other at the Tate, and the love Hockney held for Yorkshire was the thread that bound it.

His impressions of the sweeping Wolds and the East Riding backwaters of Kilham, Garrowby Hill and Thwing, shared a room with his studies of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River. Two landscapes, one singular view.

He could see the Wolds from the window of the former guest house he owned in Bridlington until 11 years ago. His sister Margaret lived nearby, and taught him how to use the iPad on which he immortalised East Yorkshire as he saw it.

But Hockney, whose death at 88 was announced yesterday, had always been an innovator. In the 1980s, he famously embraced the fax machine, turning out art by the roll, and calling it “the enemy of totalitarianism, the return of handwritten letters”.

The Tate exhibition had been drawn from public and private collections. In one room hung Hockney's celebrated double portraits, the most striking and renowned of which he called Mr And Mrs Clark And Percy: the fashion designer Ossie Clark with his bride – and Hockney’s muse – the textile designer Celia Birtwell, and their cat. The subjects and the artist were as much children of the Sixties and of Britain’s creative flowering, as were The Beatles.

It is a fitting comparison, for in many ways Hockney was to art what they were to music.

He was an unlikely cult figure. The fourth of five children – his brother, Paul, was Lord Mayor of Bradford during the Silver Jubilee year of 1977 – he went from the city’s College of Art to London, where his introduction in Peter Blake’s Young Contemporaries heralded the arrival of British pop art.

In the Sixties his first visit to California – where he more recently retreated – inspired perhaps his signature works, a series of paintings of swimming pools in the then-new medium of acrylics.

Many, as a result, consider him a Los Angeles artist, but as Andrew Wilson at Tate Britain pointed out: “Especially after the period he spent in Yorkshire between 2006 and 2013, there is a renewed attachment, that is such a staggeringly important aspect of his work.”

Hockney’s unique way of seeing Yorkshire and the world through those distinctive circular spectacles and from beneath his familiar flat cap made him the world’s most prized living artist. A 1972 work from his California period, auctioned in New York for $90m, sealed the deal. No-one had ever paid as much for a painting by a living artist. It was called Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), another of his double portraits: a male figure in white trunks swims underwater, while the painter Peter Schlesinger, Hockney's former lover and another muse, stands fully clothed at the edge of the pool.

It was a canvas of light and colour, as instantly identifiable with its creator as the Mona Lisa was with da Vinci.

In fact, Hockney borrowed freely on the art of the past, from the Renaissance masters to the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock, but he refused to conform to anyone’s fashion.

As an art school rebel, he was initially denied a diploma, in part because he refused to complete an essay assignment, insisting he should be judged on his artwork alone.

At the start of his career, when the dominant strand in the avant garde was abstraction, he bucked the trend painting figuratively, often in bright colours with a primitivist style.

In later years, when some critics decried his embrace of landscape painting as a retrograde step, he made clear he “didn’t give a damn” about such carping.

Having grown up in what was still the industrial heartland of Bradford, he was enthralled by the light and freedoms of 1960s California, making the state his main home for 40 years.

In particular, as an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in England, he enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to explore his sexuality.

He produced a series of paintings featuring naked or semi-naked men which he later described as “homosexual propaganda”.

“I felt it should be done,” he said. “Nobody else would use it as a subject because it was a part of me. It was a subject I could treat humorously.”

Restlessly creative, he was fascinated by the opportunities for using technology to produce art: in the 1980s he made large-scale photo collages using Polaroid prints, while in the 2000s he turned to the Brushes app on his iPad.

His subjects ranged widely from still lifes and landscapes through to countless portraits of friends and family – and even his pet dachshunds – as well as stage designs for theatre and opera.

A lifelong smoker, rarely seen without a cigarette in hand, Hockney would regularly rail against the “little Hitlers” who sought to clampdown on the practice.

In his 80s, he even had badges made with the slogan “End bossiness soon” – he quipped that a demand to “End bossiness now” would be just “too bossy”.

David Hockney was born in Bradford on July 9 1937 into a working class family. His father Kenneth was an accountant’s clerk and a wartime conscientious objector who later painted Ban the Bomb posters for local peace marchers. His mother Laura was a Methodist and strict vegetarian.

He was no more than 11 and just out of Wellington Primary School when he decided he wanted to be an artist, an ambition not encouraged by his teachers at Bradford Grammar. But with the support of his parents, he entered the local art college.

From there he went to the Royal College of Art in London where he was mocked for his Yorkshire accent. For his part, he was not impressed by the abilities of his tormentors.

“I’d look at their drawings and think if I drew like that I’d keep my mouth shut,” he recalled.

There was a memorable run-in with the college authorities when he was warned that he could not graduate – in part because he had not done enough life drawings. He responded by producing Life Painting for a Diploma featuring a male nude copied from an American body-building magazine alongside an anatomical study of a human skeleton.

In the face of such an overwhelming talent the college backed down, awarding him the prestigious gold medal for painting – which he collected in suitably flamboyant fashion dressed in a gold lamé suit.

It was not the first time, nor certainly the last, that his image of himself would defy convention. In A Rake’s Progress, his pivotal suite of etchings produced between 1961-63 after his first sampling of the high life in New York, and inspired by the identically named series of 18th century prints by William Hogarth, he framed himself as a Hogarthian caricature, squandering himself on louche and luxurious living.

Clearly a superstar in the making, he featured in the famous Royal Society of British Artists Young Contemporaries exhibition of 1961 which showcased the work of the new wave of British “pop art” with artists such as Peter Blake.

While associated with the movement, which featured images from advertising and popular culture, his own style was somewhat different, drawing on expressionist elements reminiscent of Francis Bacon.

But it was his move to Los Angeles in 1964 that brought the decisive shift in his work that was to truly make his reputation. In contrast to drab, buttoned-up post-war Britain, he was from the start intoxicated by both the brilliant sunlight and hedonistic freedoms he found in California.

“The moment I got to America I thought ‘This is the place’,” he recalled. “I was drawn towards California, which I didn’t know… because I sensed the place would excite me. No doubt it had a lot to do with sex.”

After taking a job teaching drawing at the University of California at Santa Cruz, he began a relationship with Peter Schlesinger, then a student of 17.

It was in this period – influenced by the hard clean lines and vivid colours of American pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein – that he produced some of his most famous works.

Using the comparatively new acrylic medium, with strong, vibrant colours, he created a series of striking images of swimming pools – most notably Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, and A Bigger Splash – which seemed to encapsulate the allure of the state he called the “promised land”.

With art dealers clamouring to display and sell his works, he was able to rent a home in the Hollywood Hills, which he later bought and expanded to include a studio, as well as acquiring a beach house in Malibu.

He began experimenting with photo-collage techniques: his Pearblossom Highway, depicting a stretch of desert road, is made up of 850 Polaroids taken from different angles to create an effect which was compared to cubism.

In 1999 he gave up painting for two years as he explored his theory that old masters like Vermeer and Caravaggio had used mirrors and lenses, in a primitive forerunner of photography, to draw accurately from life.

He acquired a camera lucida which he taught himself to use and was soon producing very fast, very accurate pencil portraits of friends, family and himself – although he always denied the technique was a form of “cheating”.

In the 1990s he began returning more regularly to Yorkshire where he was encouraged by a friend to start capturing the local surroundings, which he initially did from memory, completing his painting of Garrowby Hill in 1998.

Despite his years in the States, he insisted he had always felt “very English”.

“I’m from the peasantry, frankly,” he said. “But it makes you connect with the land and because I found this subject, at my age it’s terrific, you stick with it and get turned on.”

He eventually returned full-time, setting up home in Bridlington, while going out to paint the surrounding Wolds using both oils and watercolours.

His works from this time included the enormous Bigger Trees Near Warter, an oil painting more thanu 12 metres wide, made up of 50 panels, which he completed in 2007.

In 2012, an exhibition at the Royal Academy focusing on his Yorkshire landscapes, entitled A Bigger Picture, was a smash hit attracting 600,000 visitors, effectively confirming his status as the country’s best-loved living artist.

It also highlighted his growing use of technology – not only his iPad but also a series of films produced using 18 cameras which were displayed on multiple screens.

Tragedy struck the following year when his 23-year-old assistant, Dominic Elliott, died after drinking a household drain cleaner at Hockney’s home, having first consumed a cocktail of drugs and alcohol.

Hockney, who had become increasingly deaf, had slept through it, unaware of what was happening, the inquest was told. In the aftermath he returned to California.

Having once declined the opportunity to paint Queen Elizabeth II, he claimed he was “too busy” painting England – “her country”, he nevertheless found time to design a stained-glass window at Westminster Abbey in tribute to her.

Unveiled in 2018, it marked her love of the countryside with a scene of Hawthorn blossom from his native Yorkshire. “I hope she’ll like it,” he said.

When Covid-19 struck in 2020, he retreated to an isolated farmhouse in Normandy where he set up a studio. With typical chutzpah, he also took the opportunity to advocate the benefits of his beloved smoking – suggesting it could ward off the disease.

At age 87, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris trumped even the Tate to mount the most expansive exhibition yet of his art, with more than 450 works – the majority from the preceding 25 years – filling the entire museum.

His health was, however, by this stage in serious decline and he required round-the-clock nursing care. He nevertheless remained resolutely upbeat. He once said his loss of hearing had actually sharpened his work – “If you lose one sense, you gain other senses, and I feel I could see space clearer.”

He never lost his love of painting, continuing to work for four to six hours a day.

“I’m happiest when I’m painting,” he said. “If I can paint every day I don’t care about anything else.”