LOS ANGELES, June 14 -- David Hockney got off a plane in Los Angeles in 1964, looked at the swimming pools and the palm trees and the men he could finally paint as men, and decided he was home. He spent the next six decades proving it. The English painter who turned a city most American artists found vulgar into the most identifiable subject in postwar art died Thursday at 88, leaving behind a body of work that did more to define how Los Angeles looks to the rest of the world than any actual Los Angeles native ever has.

Hockney's death was confirmed by his publicist Erica Bolton, who said he died "a few weeks short of his 89th birthday," the Associated Press reported. He was born July 9, 1937, in Bradford, England, an industrial mill tow...