David Hockney passed away on June 11th at his home, one month shy of his eighty-ninth birthday. From the swimming pools of Los Angeles to the iPad, seven decades of work followed a single rule: painting the things he loved.

As he landed on his first flight to Los Angeles, David Hockney looked out the window at hundreds of swimming pools sparkling in the sun. It was 1964, Britain had just emerged from rationing, and chlorinated water there was not a luxury but a habit. From that dive would emerge his most famous theme and "A Bigger Splash"—one of the definitive images of the late twentieth century—with the white spray frozen on the blue and the diver never appearing. Hockney passed away on Thursday, June 11, at his home in Great Britain, "peacefully," according to his spokeswoman Erica Bolton, exactly one month shy of his eighty-ninth birthday.

He was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, on July 9, 1937. During the bombings, the family took refuge under the stairs, clutching their Bibles, and the wartime paper shortage confined his early drawings to the kitchen floor and church hymn books. At the Royal College of Art in London, he was the star student and the most stubborn. He refused to write the only essay required for his diploma, failed his final exams, and the ensuing uproar forced the institution to backtrack, granting him his degree and even the Gold Medal. It was his classmate, the American RB Kitaj, who gave him what Hockney called the best advice he ever received: to ignore everyone else and simply paint the things he loved.

What he loved, in the early 1960s, was still a crime in Britain. "We Two Boys Together Clinging," painted in 1961 when he was a sophomore and titled after a Walt Whitman poem, predates the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the United Kingdom by six years. He himself would later describe those early works as propaganda for a subject no one had ever publicised. In his paintings, gay domestic life is not a manifesto but rather the everyday life amidst ordinary moments, of an intimacy that the mainstream didn't show. It's difficult today to measure just how radical he was.

In California, he abandoned oil for acrylic, flat and luminous like the light he had sought, while retaining the Yorkshire accent that Americans adored. Peroxide blonde, round glasses, and a flat cap. The figure who had ignited the art world in the 1960s, a leading figure of Pop Art, still filled museum halls more than half a century later. Swimming pools, the sun, male bodies, including the most famous—and beloved—that of <a href="https://www.lofficielitalia.com/arte/peter-schlesinger-sculpture-artista-mostra-acne-paper-palais-royal-libro" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Peter Schlesinger</a>. Paradise rediscovered in America became his most recognisable subject, and half a century later the market would certify it. In 2018, “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” sold at auction for $90 million, an all-time record for a living artist.

He refused a knighthood in 1990 and was furious to discover he had been made a Companion of Honour without his knowledge, but he accepted the Order of Merit in 2012, believing it to be a personal gift from Queen Elizabeth II that it would have been rude to decline. The only real tribute he appreciated, however, came in 2007 from the Tate Britain. During his seventieth birthday party, the London institution's smoke alarms were turned off for ten minutes, just enough time to allow him a cigarette. He never stopped working. He drew on his iPad with the same ease with which he had practiced engraving, lithography, opera set design, and even stained glass—as the UK's most important living artist, he was allowed to decorate one in Westminster Cathedral—during the lockdown he painted "A Year in Normandy," a 91-meter panoramic frieze, and at 87, he opened the largest exhibition of his career in Paris, at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. He leaves behind a companion, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, and two brothers, as well as a vision of painting as the supreme form of happiness.

David Hockney, Master of Colour and Light, Dies at 88

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