David Hockney, the British artist who died aged 88, was a swirling, explosive star who brought a brightness to life unlike any other Briton of his age. His dazzling array of images — from exquisite pencil portraits to huge brightly coloured canvases of landscapes, from watercolours to iPad works — changed the way we see the world. Just as we cannot see French landscapes without being unconsciously affected by Monet and Cézanne, so California and the Yorkshire wolds are changed in the eyes of the rest of us by Hockney.
Hockney was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, and studied at the Royal College of Art in London. In 1961, while still a student, he painted one of the earliest expressions of queer identity in British art: *We Two Boys Together Clinging*, a childlike painting of two figures embracing, with a title taken from a Walt Whitman poem — obscure enough to avoid censorship laws at the time. His winking, coded approach continued in *Cleaning Teeth, Early Evening (10pm) W11* (1962), which shows two figures brushing their teeth, with suggestive toothpaste tubes shooting into each other’s mouths. As one art critic put it, Hockney left very little to the imagination of those “in the know” while maintaining a claim of innocence for the masses.
“Explains David Hockney’s art, queer coding, and his enduring legacy.”
Hockney moved to Los Angeles in 1964, five years before New York's Stonewall uprising launched the western Pride movement, and found greater freedom to live openly as a gay man. His work portrayed California as a fantasy land of swimming pools, immaculate green lawns, palm trees and rolling Hollywood hills. *A Bigger Splash* (1967), his most famous painting, captures the moment after a person jumps off a diving board into an otherwise still cyan blue swimming pool. Six decades later, reproductions of the work have become a visual motif in gay domestic life — appearing on framed posters, prints, postcards and even cushion covers. As an out gay artist who depicted same-sex desire long before male homosexuality was partly decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967, Hockney’s paintings challenged homophobia within the artistic establishment and beyond. He did not use highly sexualised imagery like Robert Mapplethorpe or activist themes like Keith Haring; instead, he reshaped ideas of beauty, intimacy and desire.
Hockney was also one of the hardest-working artists you could ever meet. In 2002, he showed a visitor cabinet after cabinet stuffed with notebooks containing hundreds of beautiful, instant drawings and watercolours. Late in 2025, he was still hard at work in his studio, surrounded by medical apparatus and attended by a nurse, painting recent acrylics and talking about art theory. He would say an artist needed three things: the eye, the hand and the heart — two were not enough. His innate ability to draw, comparable to Rubens, Ingres or Picasso, gave him a head start few could dream of.
His current exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London, *A Year in Normandie*, shows the changing year in Normandy as seen through 130 iPad paintings made in 2020 during the pandemic lockdown. The work is displayed in a darkened gallery with a stripe of bright landscape paintings running around the wall, so luminous they look like neon and almost 3D. It tells a story of the seasons, from winter snow through spring blossoms to autumn rain and back to snow. One art critic noted that despite an instinct to dismiss it as 'pretty inane', she could not stop looking at it. Another visitor said: 'It’s the usual David Hockney because he always brings joy.'
For UK readers, Hockney’s legacy is profound. He not only shaped British pop art but also gave visibility to queer artists and gay life at a time when homosexuality was still illegal. His work continues to attract huge audiences — his 2017 Tate Britain retrospective was a blockbuster. And his insistence that art is about joy and celebration, about looking harder and noticing more, cuts through the theoretical nonsense that often burdens the art world.
Q: How did David Hockney depict queer desire in his art? Hockney used coding and visual clues rather than explicit imagery. Early works like *We Two Boys Together Clinging* (1961) used obscure references to avoid censorship, while *Cleaning Teeth* (1962) showed suggestive toothpaste tubes. Later, in California, he portrayed gay life more openly through tender portraits of men and iconic pool scenes.
Q: What was David Hockney’s most famous painting? *A Bigger Splash* (1967), a painting of a swimming pool capturing the moment after a person dives in, is his most iconic work. Reproductions of it have become widespread in gay domestic culture.
Q: What is the exhibition *A Year in Normandie* at the Serpentine Gallery? It is a display of 130 iPad paintings that Hockney made in 2020 while living in Normandy, showing the landscape through the seasons. The paintings are arranged around the walls of a darkened gallery, creating a luminous, immersive experience.
What happens next: Hockney’s death comes as his *A Year in Normandie* exhibition runs at the Serpentine Gallery; his legacy will continue through his vast body of work and his influence on how we see the world. The Bayeux Tapestry, which inspired the display format, is due to be exhibited at the British Museum from September 2026.