David Hockney

David Hockney (born July 9, 1937, Bradford, England, died June 11, 2026, London, England, age 88) was among the most celebrated and exhibited British painters of his generation, best known for his contribution to Pop Art and his vibrant scenes of California living. He drew for his school magazine and the city as a child, decided by age eleven that he would be an artist, and trained at the Bradford School of Art from 1953 to 1957. After two years of National Service as a conscientious objector, he moved to London to attend the Royal College of Art, where Francis Bacon was a visiting artist and where Hockney won the Gold Medal for painting in 1962.

After graduating he traveled to New York and met Henry Geldzahler at Andy Warhol's Factory, who became the first curator of contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a lifelong friend. His first solo shows, at Kasmin Gallery in London and the Alan Gallery in New York, both sold out, and with the proceeds he spent much of 1964 in Los Angeles, where he painted the first of his iconic pool pictures and began a lifelong attachment to the city, settling there permanently in 1978. At just 33 he received the first of several major retrospectives, at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1970. In 1982 his composite Polaroids, which extended Cubist ideas about perspective, were celebrated in a survey at the Centre Pompidou. In the 2000s he took up drawing on iPhones and iPads, a natural step from his earlier use of fax machines and copiers as tools for making art.

Hockney was the subject of major solo exhibitions at the Whitney, the Morgan Library, the Getty, Guggenheim Bilbao, the Musee de l'Orangerie, the Centre Pompidou, Tate, the Van Gogh Museum, and the Louisiana Museum, among many others. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn, the British Museum, and the Benesse Art Site in Japan, among many more. He remained prolific to the end of his life: 2026 alone included The Moon Room at Pace in New York and Galerie Lelong in Paris and a Normandy-focused show at the Serpentine North Gallery in London.

Hockney's standing rested on a rare combination of popular love and institutional weight, and the tension between the two ran through his criticism for decades. He was among the most visited artists alive: his 2017 retrospective at Tate Britain became one of the most attended shows in the gallery's history, and the 2025 Fondation Louis Vuitton survey, the largest ever devoted to him, drew enormous crowds. Major critics largely embraced the late work. The Art Newspaper gave the Paris retrospective four stars, and Jonathan Jones in The Guardian repeatedly championed his landscapes. A persistent counter-current, voiced in outlets such as ArtReview, questioned whether the joyful accessibility shaded into easiness, and his Hockney to Falco thesis on the optical aids of the Old Masters provoked sustained debate among art historians. The obituaries that followed his death in June 2026, from NPR to The Washington Post, settled the question in his favor, describing him as one of the most influential artists of the past century.

Hockney's market has two distinct layers. At the top, a small number of major canvases command the headline prices: Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) sold for USD 90,312,500 at Christie's New York on November 15, 2018, a living-artist auction record at the time, and The Splash (1966) sold for GBP 23.1 million (about USD 29.9 million) at Sotheby's London on February 11, 2020, more than eight times its 2006 price. Beneath that sits one of the deepest print markets of any postwar artist, which gives the name frequent, accessible liquidity.

Across the tracked repeat-sale history, 40 paired sales from 1997 to 2024, the picture is one of a mature, broadly stable market rather than a speculative one. As with most artists of his depth, period and medium matter: the canonical 1960s and 1970s California paintings sit at the top of the market, while later works, prints, and digital editions span a wide range of price and liquidity. The breadth of supply is what gives the market its depth, but it also means the specific work and period drive value far more than the signature alone.

There is no certificate of authenticity program for Hockney, and the catalogue raisonne is still being built out: it currently covers prints and late works, with the first painting volume reported to be released online in 2026. Until that volume is complete, the studio is the practical reference for verifying paintings, and the David Hockney Foundation does not authenticate works. Medium is the central due-diligence axis. A 1960s pool painting, a signed print from a large edition, and an iPad-based digital work all carry the Hockney name while occupying entirely different positions on price, scarcity, and resale, so the work, the period, and the edition matter far more than the name. Given the size and variety of his output, provenance and the studio's view of a specific work are the key checks.