David Hockney dead at 87. The news ripples across a nation that has long since forgotten what genuine artistic innovation looks like. The man who painted swimming pools and California sunshine, who made the iPad his canvas and turned Yorkshire landscapes into electric dreamscapes, leaves behind a legacy that the modern cultural establishment will undoubtedly sanitise and trivialise.
Hockney was more than a household name. He was a living rebuke to everything that has gone wrong with British art. When conceptualism and empty provocation became the currency of the gallery scene, Hockney painted. He drew. He insisted on craft, on colour, on the sheer joy of making an image that could stop you cold. A generation of art students today cannot draw a straight line, let alone a swimming pool that shimmers with the heat of a Los Angeles afternoon. They produce installations of stacked cardboard and write manifestos about late capitalism. Hockney gave us the swimming pool. He gave us the double portrait of his parents, quiet and devastating. He gave us the Grand Canyon in all its impossible scale, not from a helicopter but from a hillside, pieced together from dozens of canvases because he refused to compromise on what the eye actually sees.
The reaction to his death will be predictable. The BBC will wheel out talking heads who will call him a treasure and a genius, but they will miss the point. Hockney was a contrarian in an age of conformity. He was a man who loved representation when representation was declared dead. He was a man who celebrated beauty when beauty was deemed reactionary. He was a Yorkshireman who never let London tell him what art should be.
Of course, the usual suspects will try to claim him. The progressive establishment will note his open homosexuality and his opposition to the Iraq War, as if those credentials alone make him a figure of the left. But Hockney was too individual for that. He voted for Brexit, for goodness' sake. He said the European Union was a bureaucratic nightmare that crushed the artist's freedom. That fact will be quietly forgotten.
Meanwhile, the art market will do its thing. The prices for his works will spike overnight. Investment funds and oligarchs will snap up the swimming pools, and the National Gallery will stage a retrospective that costs £30 to enter and feels more like a funeral than a celebration. Hockney would have hated the fuss. He would have preferred you look at one of his prints for five genuine minutes, rather than queue for a branded tote bag.
There is a deeper loss here. Hockney represented something that is disappearing from British culture: the idea that art can be popular without being shallow, that it can be intellectually rigorous without being pretentious, that it can be joyful without being naive. Today, culture is polarised. There is the highbrow, which is often unwatchable, and the lowbrow, which is often insulting. Hockney lived in the middle, where most people actually reside. His work was accessible but never simple. It invited you in without demanding you first get a PhD in critical theory.
Will anyone take up his mantle? The current art scene in Britain is dominated by politics, identity, and a kind of sourness that mistakes cynicism for depth. The young artists who would have been Hockney's successors are too busy making videos about systemic oppression or gluing teacups to the floor. They do not know how to mix colour. They do not know how to look at a tree until they understand its shape. They do not know that a great painting can change your life without changing the government.
Hockney's death marks the end of an era. But it also marks the end of a certain kind of artist: the one who trusts his own eyes, his own hands, his own pleasure. The one who makes art for the sake of art, not for the approval of critics or curators or the market. That kind of artist is now extinct. The rest are just performers.
Enjoy the swimming pools while they last. They will not be painted again.
