“I think the world is beautiful to look at, but most people don’t see it,” David Hockney told the New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly, when she visited him at his home in Normandy. “The world is beautiful, and it’s also mad.” Hockney died yesterday, at the age of eighty-eight, after a seven-decade career that included painting, digital drawings, photography, theatre-staging, etchings, collage. He was an artist who certainly knew how to capture both the beauty and the madness. The nearly electric blue of his L.A. swimming pools, the joyful abundance of his interiors, the graphic greenery and striking pigments of his landscapes, the flattened yet deeply emotive portraits of the people closest to him—he was a master.

Born and raised, with four siblings, in Yorkshire, in Northern England, Hockney sold his first painting—a portrait of his dad—in 1954, for ten pounds. He was seventeen, and, after that sale, he just never stopped working. The New Yorker’s Anthony Bailey profiled Hockney in 1979, when the artist was forty years old and borrowing a pal’s apartment in New York, taking some time away from London (where friends and hangers-on had overpopulated his spaces) to design and paint the set for a production of “The Magic Flute.” Bailey’s piece is a remarkably intimate portrait of a working artist, vivid with details of his practice—a sable-hair brush dipping into a Campbell’s-soup can holding water, a German aria playing as he painted—and of his life. (His hair-dye color was called Winsome Wheat, and, his assistant told Bailey, “He spends a lot of time on work he shouldn’t be doing.”)

Hockney’s art is bursting with brilliant color, and his life was, too. He was a fashion icon, a gay icon, witty and bright. I asked Mouly—who became friends with Hockney in the early two-thousands, and, years later, worked with him on covers for this magazine—what she remembered best. Here’s what she said:

Bonding with David Hockney happened over finding places to smoke and eat and talk in peace. Ironically, his love of smoking felt like a manifestation of his love of life itself. After smoking bans took effect in the United States, we would meet in Paris, on cozy outdoor terraces.

He embraced every technology he could get his hands on—oil paint or iPad—with equal passion. He thrived during the pandemic: he spent it at his house in Normandy, well cared for and protected by his entourage, free of social obligations, chronicling, first, the arrival of spring, then an entire year. It was as if one could discover the world anew through his eyes.

There’s a reason Hockney’s work touched so many: he meant for it to. “Art is about correspondences—making connections with the world and to each other,” he once explained. “It’s about love in that sense—that is the basis of the truly erotic quality of art.”

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