“As important as the boys and the pools and the light,” a memoirist writes, “the most important thing was becoming the driving.” It would inspire an obsession with moving focus into the future.

El gran pintor David Hockney —fallecido este jueves— debió de sentir la misma sorpresa, ambivalencia casi, que nos invaden a los europeos al llegar a LAX, el aeropuerto de Los Ángeles. Hockney llegaba muy pronto además, a mitad de la década de los sesenta. Llegaba a una ciudad contradictoria y fascinante —la que sigue siendo— que fluctuaba entre Hollywood y su paseo de la fama y las protesta de UCLA, una universidad muy activa políticamente en aquellos años, como ahora, a la cual estuvo muy vinculado.

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British artist and painter David Hockney, one of the most celebrated art icons of the 20th and 21st centuries, died at the age of 88. Jeffrey Brown has a look at his life and legacy.

Whether in Los Angeles, in his native England or traveling the world, the artist always reinvented the world he saw, with psychological insight.

David Hockney, a treasured British artist whose paintings of shimmering pools and colorful iPad drawings became icons of contemporary art, has died, his publicist said Friday. He was 88.

The painter David Hockney’s clothes roared with mirth and maximalism.

© Nathanael Turner for The New York Times

La noticia de la muerte de David Hockney me ha sentado como la muerte de un amigo. No lo conocí personalmente nunca, pero he estado siempre muy unido a su obra, desde que yo era muy joven. Por eso lo conozco profundamente y su visión me ha afectado directamente. Hockney siempre fue un hombre luminoso que abrió muchos nuevos caminos en el arte. Él estableció la transición entre el mundo de la abstracción y la figuración, creó un puente del que toda mi generación ha bebido de una manera muy profunda. Y yo más que nadie.

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© Luke MacGregor (Reuters)

In May 2021, while the world was still trying to recover from the Covid pandemic, British artist David Hockney presented his exhibition The Arrival of Spring. Normandy, 2020, dozens of hours of meticulous work he devoted to capturing — on his iPad using the Brushes app — the essence of the changing seasons while the world was confined by tragedy. True to form, he did not give up on either innovation or joy.

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His colorful figurative paintings were both conservative and iconoclastic, defying the dominant abstract schools of the mid-20th century.

The curator Norman Rosenthal knew the artist for over 60 years and still discovered something new when they collaborated on a final blockbuster show.

© Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times

Polaroids and photocopiers also gave the artist possibilities for creating in forms vastly different from his paintings.

© David Hockney; Photo credit: Richard Schmidt

Bradford-born painter, who made his name with sunkissed visions of California and never stopped breaking barriers, going on to become one of contemporary art’s most important figures, has died
• ‘David Hockney caught the look of the modern world’
• David Hockney’s life in pictures

David Hockney, the iconic British painter who cast a revolutionary gaze across 20th-century art, has died aged 88.

He made his name as a pop artist during the swinging 60s and was perhaps best known for his paintings of swimming pools that helped define the Los Angeles aesthetic. Works such as A Bigger Splash and Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) depicted hedonistic scenes of love, lust and loss taking place below the city’s sun-soaked skies.

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© Photograph: Aurélien Meunier/Getty Images

© Photograph: Aurélien Meunier/Getty Images

© Photograph: Aurélien Meunier/Getty Images