‘Hyper-stylised, ultra-cool visions’: 10 ways David Hockney changed art

‘Kaleidoscopic’ … Pearblossom Hwy, from 1986, showing his merging of painting and photography. Photograph: The J Paul Getty Museum/The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA

He was the ultimate synthesist

David Hockney didn’t just appear out of nowhere like some fully formed artistic wunderkind. His work was a synthesis of so much that came before and was happening around him. He took the ideas of minimalism and abstraction, fused them with the traditions of portraiture, and filtered it all through the innovations in pop and conceptualism that were going on in the 1960s. He was heavily indebted to a lot of other artists, but he synthesised all those influences into something so simple, immediate, digestible and approachable that it became something new.