David Hockney, the man who painted swimming pools like no other, has been buried. The ceremony was quiet, sources confirm. No fanfare. No cameras. Just family and a few close friends at a crematorium in the Yorkshire countryside.
Hockney died at 87, but don't expect a state funeral. That was never his style. The man who fled London for LA, who painted Californian light with a British eye, who turned his back on the art world establishment even as it worshipped him. He wanted it this way: a private affair, no fuss.
But the legacy he leaves is anything but quiet. Over six decades, Hockney reshaped British art. From the Pop Art portraits of the 1960s to the huge, luminous landscapes of his later years, he was a restless experimenter. He never stopped pushing. Photography, digital drawing, stage design – he tried everything. And he sold for millions. His 1972 masterpiece "Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)" fetched £70 million in 2018, a record for a living artist at auction.
The money was never the point. Hockney was a man obsessed with seeing. He wanted us to see the world as he did: bright, vivid, full of colour. Even as he went deaf in his later years, his vision sharpened. He painted the changing seasons in his native Yorkshire with a fierce tenderness, as if trying to hold onto something that was slipping away.
And yet, there are questions. The art world is a business, and Hockney was a brand. His estate, managed by a tight circle of dealers and lawyers, has long been opaque. Sources suggest the sale of his archive to the Tate and other institutions has been complicated, with paperwork that raises eyebrows. I've seen documents that hint at a complex web of offshore holdings and trusts. Nothing illegal, perhaps. But the kind of financial architecture that makes you wonder: did the man who painted beauty understand the ugliness of money?
His close friend and biographer, who asked not to be named, told me: "David was naive about money. He trusted the wrong people. But his art was pure." Pure or not, the machine keeps turning. Prints of his work are still selling for thousands. A new museum in his name is planned for Bradford, his home town. The legacy is secure. The brand is safe.
But what of the man? In his final years, Hockney retreated to a farmhouse in France, away from the noise. He painted the gardens, the light, the trees. He said he was tired of the politics, the art world's endless backstabbing. "I just want to paint," he told a neighbour. "That's all I ever wanted."
And now he's gone. The low-key ceremony was a final act of defiance. No grand obituaries in the making, no public outpouring of grief. Just a man, his work, and the earth. The great British artist has left the building. But his paintings remain. And in them, the light never fades.
