In a development that has sent shockwaves through the art world and momentarily distracted the nation from the price of eggs, David Hockney, Britain’s most celebrated living painter (now deceased), was laid to rest yesterday in a ceremony so understated it could have been mistaken for a particularly tasteful meeting of the Yorkshire branch of the Cryptocurrency Appreciation Society. The funeral, held at a small church somewhere unpicklable in the Airedale countryside, was attended by a smattering of celebrities, a brace of bewildered ducks, and a man who looked suspiciously like the ghost of Francis Bacon but turned out to be just a very hungover student from the Royal College of Art.
Hockney, who once declared that ‘art has to be a joy,’ clearly took his own advice to the grave. The proceedings were reportedly as muted as a librarian’s whisper, with no eulogies longer than the queue at the post office, and the only tears shed were by a floral arrangement that had been overwatered. The coffin, painted in a shade of swimming-pool blue that Hockney himself had patented in 1972, was carried by six men all wearing mismatched socks (a detail that would have delighted the artist, who famously loathed symmetry).
The Dean of the Royal Academy, who was there to mumble the obligatory platitudes, described Hockney as ‘a genius who painted with the joy of a child and the eye of a cartoonist.’ He did not mention the iPads. The iPads were there, however: a small display of Hockney’s later digital works, glowing sadly like forgotten screensavers in the candlelit gloom. One mourner was heard to say, ‘He could make a sunset look like a television test card, the bastard.’ It was unclear whether this was a compliment.
Hockney, who was 87, had been in failing health since the Conservative Party’s last manifesto, but his death still came as a surprise to the nation, which had assumed he was immortal. The funeral was so low-key that the BBC only received the tip-off after it was over, and then only via a cryptic note written on a napkin from a Margate Wetherspoons. The Prime Minister, who was reportedly too busy pretending to read an Economist article to attend, issued a statement via a series of emojis: a palette, a swimming person, and a thumbs-up.
But what of the art? Hockney leaves behind a legacy of colour, light, and the occasional double entendre. His paintings of swimming pools, with their shimmering surfaces and rippling distortions, are now expected to fetch even more astronomical sums, presumably to be paid in NFTs by people who think Banksy is a type of cheese. Critics are already sharpening their knives for the inevitable retrospective at the Tate, which will probably be called ‘The Joy of Not Being Dead Yet: A Hockney Revival’ and feature a room full of empty chairs and a single Yorkshire terrier.
The absence of a grand state funeral, according to a spokesperson for the Hockney estate, was ‘a deliberate choice to avoid the circus.’ Which is a polite way of saying: no Westminster Abbey, no royal tear ducts, no chance for the Archbishop of Canterbury to pretend he understood Cubism. Instead, the artist will be buried in a field of daffodils near his childhood home in Bradford, with a simple headstone that reads: ‘He Made the World Look Brighter, Even When It Was Raining.’
As the last mourners shuffled away, a single bird flew over the churchyard. It was a magpie. Pecking at a discarded iPad. For a moment, the sun broke through the clouds, and the whole scene looked exactly like a Hockney painting. He would have hated it. And loved it. And probably drawn it again on a napkin.
Goodbye, David. May your swimming pools always be heated.