Let us dispense with the usual obsequious nonsense. David Hockney, who has just shuffled off this mortal coil at 87, was not merely a painter. He was a bomb thrown into the stuffy drawing room of British art, and its shrapnel is still embedded in our national psyche.
Consider the state of British painting before Hockney. It was a grey, rain-sodden affair, full of Francis Bacon’s screaming popes and the grimy urban landscapes of the Kitchen Sink School. Colour, if present, was a guilty pleasure, a sign of poor taste. Then came Hockney, a ginger chap from Bradford with a Brylcreemed quiff and a love of swimming pools. He painted the Californian sun with the audacity of a man who had never seen it before. His pools are not just water; they are Cubist collages of light, texture, and desire.
But Hockney’s true genius was his timing. He emerged just as Britain was shedding its postwar greyness, when the Sixties promised a revolution in everything from music to morals. And he painted that revolution not as a political tract but as a sun-drenched celebration of life. His portraits of Celia Birtwell, his double portrait of Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, these are not just paintings; they are history books in acrylic. They capture a moment when Britain briefly believed it could be glamorous, spontaneous, and free.
Of course, the art world sniffed. ‘Too illustrative,’ they muttered. ‘Too popular.’ As if popularity were a sin. The same snobs who fawn over a bleached shark in formaldehyde are quick to dismiss a man who can actually draw. Hockney could draw like a Renaissance master, and he proved it with his photocollages, his iPad drawings, his stage designs. He was a technical magpie, always plucking new tools, from Polaroid to Photoshop, and bending them to his will. This is what the intellectual decadence of contemporary art despises: the idea that an artist might be understood, might be enjoyed, might even be loved.
And yet Hockney was also a contrarian. He railed against the ‘decline’ of figurative painting, insisting that the human face and the natural landscape were still the most profound subjects. He returned to Yorkshire in his later years, painting the same hedgerows and hawthorn trees that Turner had painted, but in a garish, almost psychedelic palette. It was as if he was daring us to see the English countryside not as a pastoral cliché but as a riot of line and colour.
What, then, is Hockney’s legacy? He made painting vivid again. He reminded us that art does not have to be a chore, a puzzle, or a witticism for the initiated. It can be a window onto joy. In an age of irony and cynicism, Hockney’s optimism is almost embarrassing. But his career stands as a rebuke to the idea that art must be difficult to be valuable. Look at his ‘A Bigger Splash’ and tell me it does not make your heart leap. That is not naivety; that is mastery.
We shall not see his like again. The art world is now too fragmented, too cynical, too obsessed with the new. Hockney was the last of a line: the artist as public intellectual, as celebrity, as national treasure. He understood that to be a British painter is to wrestle with a legacy of landscape, light, and eccentricity. And he did so with a grin that said: ‘Yes, this is all absurd. But isn’t it glorious?’
Rest easy in the California sun, David. You painted a better world for us, and we shall be forever grateful.
