The pool of modern art lies still: David Hockney dead at 88

The bright blue water is empty now.

David Hockney, who painted that water better than any man alive or dead, died Thursday at his home in London. He was 88. His publicist said nothing more. No cause. Just the fact.

The man who turned swimming pools into poetry could not swim himself. That irony would have pleased him. He liked contradictions. He was an Englishman who painted Los Angeles. A Yorkshire working-class boy who dined with queens. A figurative artist who rose to fame when abstraction ruled the roost and told anyone who would listen that the roost was full of chickens.

He was also one of the first great artists to paint gay love as simply love. No apology. No code. Just two men in a room, or by a pool, or on a sofa, looking at each other the way people look when they belong to one another.

In an era when that could still land a man in jail, Hockney put it on canvas and dared the world to look away. The world did not look away.

The Men Who Made the Movement

The Pop Art crowd always loved a good party. Andy Warhol threw the best ones. Twenty-four years dead now, shot by a woman who wrote a manifesto he probably never read.

Warhol, already the father of American Pop Art, bridged the gap between fine art and the street. His silk-screens of soup cans and celebrities, along with his work for the Velvet Underground, gave the counterculture a cold, knowing stare.

Warhol understood something Hockney never quite did: that repetition was its own kind of truth. Thirty-two soup cans. One hundred Marilyns. The same face over and over until the face meant nothing and everything at once. He died in 1987 after a routine surgery. Routine. For a man who spent his life making routine feel sinister.

Milton Glaser, a foundational graphic designer, made the era’s defining Bob Dylan poster and redefined advertising with colorful, fluid illustrations.

Roy Lichtenstein died in 1997. Pneumonia. He took the comic book and blew it up until you could see the Benday dots. The cheap printer’s trick became a signature. He painted crying girls and exploding planes and made us feel something we could not name. Was it irony? Was it sincerity? He never said. That was his genius. He let you decide.

James Rosenquist died in 2017. A billboard painter who learned to think big. His “F-111” stretches 86 feet. A fighter jet. A light bulb. A girl under a hair dryer. A mushroom cloud. He painted the American nightmare from the inside out. He knew what he was looking at because he had helped build it. He painted the ads before he painted the art.

Tom Wesselmann died in 2004. Heart surgery. He painted the great American nude and cut out her middle. Her breasts floated. Her lips stood alone. Her body became a landscape of absence. You looked at what was missing and understood something about what was there.

Claes Oldenburg died in 2022. He made a clothespin 45 feet tall. He made a spoon bridge with a cherry on it. He made the ordinary monumental and the monumental absurd. A lipstick in Times Square. A bathtub in a park. He wanted you to laugh and then think and then laugh again. That is harder than it looks.

Other artists chased the decade’s psychedelic whirl.

Wes Wilson, Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse, and Alton Kelley drew from Art Nouveau and Op Art to shape the look of the hippie movement. Their posters for the Fillmore Auditorium became icons of their own.

Peter Max pushed further, his cosmic, brightly colored designs carrying psychedelic art into the mainstream. He celebrated the 1969 moon landing in his signature graphic style.

They all fed the machine. Hockney just kept painting.

The Englishman Who Saw the Sun

Hockney outlived them all. He kept working. From a wheelchair. In failing health. He told a reporter last year that he would keep painting after the big Paris show closed. And he did. Because that was the thing about Hockney. He never stopped looking.

He was born in Bradford in 1937. His father fixed baby carriages and marched against the bomb. His mother sat for portraits and let her son see her. He went to art school. Declared himself a conscientious objector. Worked in a hospital instead of the army. Then went to London. Then New York. Then California.

California changed him. The light. The space. The pools. He painted them like no one else. The water so blue it hurt. The splashes were so real you could feel the spray. The bodies so present you could count the hours of sun on their skin.

His double portraits cut to the bone. Christopher Isherwood stares at Don Bachardy like a wolf at dinner. Henry Geldzahler perched on a sofa while his partner Christopher Scott seemed already halfway out the door. Fred and Marcia Weisman are standing in their garden like two trees that have grown too close and too far at once.

He experimented with photographs. Made collages that saw everything from every angle. Used fax machines, photocopiers, and iPads. He did not care about your rules. He cared about seeing. And he wanted you to see too.

“Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” from 1972 shows a man in a pink jacket standing at the edge of a pool looking down at a swimmer. The water is green. The hills are brown. The tension is unbearable.

The Quiet Radicalism of Looking

Here is what the obituaries will miss. Hockney’s great subject was not swimming pools or California or even beauty. It was attention. He paid attention to things. And he taught you to pay attention too.

His mother is knitting. His father is reading. A splash. A shadow. The way light falls on a man’s back at four in the afternoon. These were his subjects. These were enough.

He was conservative in his methods and radical in his life. He painted his lovers because they were there. He refused a knighthood because he did not want the fuss. Then he accepted the Order of Merit because the Queen herself offered it, and it would have been rude to say no. That is an English radical. That is Hockney.

He leaves behind his partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, two brothers, and a body of work that answers a question no one thought to ask: What happens when an artist decides to like the world instead of hating it?

The pools are still. The splashes have settled. But the paintings remain. And in them, the water is always warm. The sun is always shining. And someone is always about to dive in.