Britain’s last truly great painter has slipped away, and the global art world—what remains of it—has responded with a predictable flood of tributes. David Hockney, who died at 87, was given a ‘low-key funeral’, as though the man who turned swimming pools into cathedrals of light would have wanted any other exit. But beneath the respectful headlines lurks an uncomfortable truth: we have lost more than an artist.
We have lost a cultural temperament. Hockney was the last of a breed—a painter who believed in joy, in colour, in the sheer, intoxicating pleasure of looking at the world. He was born in 1937, in the grey rigor of Bradford, and spent his life fleeing that greyness.
His early works—the lovers, the splashes, the California sun—seemed almost heretical in postwar Britain. Here was a Yorkshire lad who refused to be gloomy, who painted happiness when we were supposed to be serious. And he was right.
The Victorians understood something we have forgotten: art is not therapy. It is a celebration of what it means to be alive. Hockney never lost that.
Even as he experimented with iPads and photocollages, the core remained: look at this, isn't it wonderful? In an age of institutional therapy and grey curatorial statements, that insistence on pleasure is almost seditious. His funeral was low-key because he would have hated the fuss.
But we should fuss. We should mourn not just the man, but the civilisation that produced him. For Hockney was a British anomaly: a modern classicist, a formalist with a pop heart, a man who loved the National Gallery as much as he loved sex and swimming.
Our artistic establishment today churns out worthy projects about identity and trauma. Hockney painted a double portrait of his lover sleeping and called it 'A Bigger Splash'. That says everything.
His death leaves a silence that all the obituaries in the world cannot fill. Where is the next painter who will dare to be happy? Where is the next artist who will draw a better line from Quex Road to the Getty?
The tributes are right: he was a giant. But giants don't grow on trees. They grow in cultures that value beauty over grievance.
And that culture, I fear, has drowned.