They buried David Hockney yesterday. Quietly. Without a fuss. Without a single flaming pool, exploding cufflink, or garish double-decker bus full of beagles in pastel suits. It was, one imagines, precisely the sort of funeral he would have painted in 1972: a California pool, rippling with chlorinated grief, and a lone, unconvincing tree that looks more like a question mark than a weeping willow.
The man who gave us splash, who made swimming pools look like stained-glass windows for hedonists, who dressed in tweed and spectacles until the day he died, slipped away with all the fanfare of a Yorkshire drizzle. No state ceremony. No obsequious eulogies from Culture Ministers who last saw a painting in a gift shop. Just a handful of loved ones, a plain coffin (probably not a swimming-pool-blue edition), and a vicar who didn't mention the swimming pools.
But let’s be honest: the nation mourns. We mourn because Hockney was the last of the great British eccentrics. He was a man who painted his own handwriting, who insisted on painting the Yorkshire Wolds like a Californian, who never met a colour he couldn’t wear, and who, in his final years, started painting with an iPad. Yes, an iPad. The man who made cubism seem provincial was drawing digital daffodils at 80. That takes guts. Or dementia. But in his case, genius.
The absence is palpable. The art world is now a pale, beige vacuum. Tracey Emin is still making messy beds; Damien Hirst continues to pickle sharks in formaldehyde (and presumably his own reputation). But Hockney? He made joy. He made the mundane luminescent. He took a garden hose, a pot of paint, and turned them into a national treasure. And now he’s gone, and we’re left with a thousand imitators who paint swimming pools without the water, without the light, without the sheer, unapologetic glee.
At the funeral, there were no cameras. No drones. No Sky News helicopters buzzing overhead like mechanical flies. Just the soft, wet hum of Bradford drizzle. The cortege moved slowly, a hearse that looked less like a car and more like a museum piece. Inside was a man who, in his lifetime, had become a living landmark. And now he’s a dead one.
But here’s the thing: we don’t know how to mourn artists. We mourn dead celebrities because we think we know them. We mourn soldiers because they died for us. But artists? They die for art. And Hockney died for art. He spent his life on the edge of a swimming pool, looking at the light, and telling us: Look. Look again. Look at the water, at the shadows, at the way the sun hits a glass of gin. That’s worth something. It’s worth a quiet funeral. It’s worth a nation pausing, if only for a moment, to remember that not everything is a hashtag.
Goodbye, David. You made the world less boring. That’s all anyone can ask.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need a drink. Something clear, with a slice of lemon. Preferably poolside.