David Hockney, one of the great icons of 20th-century art, has died at the age of 88, as confirmed by his publicist and reported by AP. The artist, born in Bradford, who always rejected being labeled as a pop artist, became one of the most influential painters in spreading this style beyond British borders. David Hockney, raised in the north of England, began his training at the Bradford School of Art in the 1950s and it was in the late 1950s when he moved to London to continue his education at the Royal College of Art, where his work began to attract interest. It was there that the painter began to delve into his homosexuality, which became one of the subjects that would mark his work. Going to be a Queen for Tonight or Doll Boy are the titles of some of his early works when homosexuality still carried a prison sentence.
The sharply defined shadows from Hollywood movies of the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, which he encountered in his childhood, were also one of his inspirations. When he moved to California two decades later, those shadows disappeared to make way for dazzling light. These colorful representations are a fundamental part without which his status as one of the most famous artists of the 20th and 21st centuries would not be understood.
Before settling in California in late 1963, David Hockney visited New York, where he met Andy Warhol. But it was the desire to be part of an uninhibited society with a strong alternative culture that ultimately led him to stay on the West Coast of the United States. This is where his most recognized paintings emerged, depicting sun-kissed male bodies and Californian pools flooded with sunlight.
Beyond his paintings, Hockney was recognized for his own image: thick-framed glasses, platinum blonde hair, a gleaming golden jacket. The vivid image of the vibrant sixties embodied in the figure of a young artist who rebelled against conventions. First, as an abstract painter; later, completely abandoning that abstraction. "I spent the first twenty years of my life in the gloomy Gothic atmosphere of the north. Here I felt free," he said in a biography written by his friend Peter Adam.
One of his most famous paintings, Portrait of an Artist - showing a figure swimming underwater and a man gazing at the pool - sold for $90.3 million in 2018, becoming the most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction up to that point.
By the 1990s, Hockney began visiting his mother in Yorkshire more frequently, and a friend with a terminal illness encouraged him to paint local landscapes. From California, he moved to Bridlington, on the English coast of the North Sea. For a decade, he painted groups of bare winter trees, fields full of ripe crops, and paths extending towards the hills, making this the most productive stage of his career.