David Hockney, Who Celebrated LA Pools And Gay Love, Has Died At 88
David Hockney, the British painter whose sun-bright Los Angeles swimming pools became some of the most recognisable images in modern art, has died at 88. His publicist said he “passed away peacefully at home on 11 June 2026, one month short of his 89th birthday,” in a statement to the BBC.
A cause of death was not given. He is survived by his partner, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima.
The pools that made him a star
Hockney bought a home in Los Angeles in 1964, and the city’s light, blue water and tanned bodies handed him his signature. A Bigger Splash and the wider pool series turned a Bradford-born outsider into an art-world superstar.
In 2018, his 1972 canvas Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold for US$90.3 million at Christie’s in New York, a record at the time for a living artist. The man standing at the pool’s edge in that painting is widely read as his former lover, Peter Schlesinger.
He painted gay love when it was still a crime
Long before the auction records, Hockney was doing something braver. He came out at 23, years before Britain decriminalised homosexuality in 1967. His 1961 painting We Two Boys Together Clinging, its title taken from a Walt Whitman poem, put male affection on the canvas while gay sex was still illegal in England.
He once described that early work as “homosexual propaganda” and he was not apologising for it.
Love, loss and a lasting partner
His romances ran straight through his art. He met Schlesinger in 1966, when the young American enrolled in Hockney’s summer class at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The two became lovers, and the slow end of that relationship shaped some of his most tender portraits.
Hockney showed a generation of gay men their own lives reflected back in full colour, at a time when that took real nerve. He kept working to the last, even swapping brushes for an iPad. The pools will outlast us all.
