The news broke somewhere between a polite cough and the clink of a gin and tonic. David Hockney, the man who painted swimming pools so crisp you could almost taste the chlorine, has shuffled off this mortal coil at a frankly unreasonable 87. And what does the British art world do? It puts a stiff upper lip, polishes its monocle, and issues a statement so understated it might as well have been written on a post-it note.
Let this be a lesson to all you splashy, attention-seeking contemporary artists. Hockney’s leaving wasn’t a fireworks display. It was a slow fade, like a colour sunset from one of his own Yorkshire landscapes. No drama. No ransom note from death. Just a quiet, polite exit. The sort of exit you’d expect from a man who spent decades making the ordinary extraordinary.
But here’s the rub. The papers are calling it a ‘milestone’ and ‘the end of an era.’ Spare me your clichés. This is bigger than that. Hockney wasn’t just a painter. He was the last true champion of the visible world. While everyone else was busy sniffing their own conceptual exhaust fumes, Hockney was out there, proving that a splash of colour and a bit of perspective can still stop you in your tracks.
Think about it. He gave us the swimming pool as a state of mind. He gave us the Yorkshire Wolds as a fever dream of green and gold. He even gave us an iPad as a legitimate artistic tool, because of course he did. The man had more artistic range than a Swiss army knife in a crayon factory.
And now he’s gone. And what do we get in his place? A lot of hand-wringing about the state of British art. As if his passing signals some decline. Nonsense. Hockney was the exception, the singular comet. The British art world will continue its merry dance of conceptual mediocrity and supermarket-brand shocks, but it won’t produce another Hockney. He was a one-off. Like a polar bear in a tutu.
Where does this leave us? In a world of increasingly digital everything, where art is reduced to an NFT in a digital wallet or a splodge of paint sold by a man in a hoodie. Hockney showed us that the real world, the world of light and water and faces, still has wonders. He was a bulwark against the bleeding edge of nonsense.
So let’s not weep for David Hockney. Rejoice that he existed. But also rage, a little, because the world is a blander place without him. The swimming pools are empty. The light is dimmer. And somewhere, an iPad is gathering dust, its screen black, its stylus still.
Goodbye, you magnificent old bastard. You made art matter again. And that, in this day and age, is nothing short of a miracle. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a gin to drown. A double. With a twist of lemon. The only proper tribute.
