David Hockney has died aged 88, leaving behind a legacy of defiant joy – and an exhibition in London that even sceptical art critics cannot tear themselves away from.
In 1961, six years before homosexuality was even partially decriminalised in the UK, Hockney – then a second-year student at the Royal College of Art – painted *We Two Boys Together Clinging*, inspired by a Walt Whitman poem. The painting shows two men wrapped in an embrace. At the time, it was a radical act: being gay was still illegal.
“David Hockney, who defiantly celebrated gay love in art when it was illegal, has died aged 88.”
“He was really pioneering as somebody who was unashamedly proud of his queerness before the legalisation of homosexuality in '67,” said Dominic James Bilton, co-leader of the Queer British Art Network. Hockney “showed and made work on same-sex relationships and desire and sexuality” when “not a lot of people were doing that”.
After travelling to California for the first time in 1964, Hockney’s style transformed. He painted the swimming pool pictures that made him famous. In *Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool* (1966), a nude man climbs from the water, his back to the viewer. In *Domestic Scene, Los Angeles* (1963), one man showers while another washes his back. Bilton called those works “so queer, so sensual and sexy and playful and joyous”, adding they also show the “domesticity” and “dull aspects of gay relationships”. Hockney was “normalising same-sex relationships… that we take for granted”.
Decades later, during the 2020 pandemic lockdown, Hockney turned to an iPad to create *A Year in Normandie* – a series of 130 paintings of views near his home in Normandy. The work, now showing at the Serpentine Gallery, depicts the seasons in luminous, almost neon colours, and was inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, which Hockney visited every fortnight in his first year living in Normandy. The exhibition plunges viewers into darkness, with a stripe of landscape running around the wall, appearing to be in 3D.
“It is the usual David Hockney because he always brings joy,” one art lover told UnHerd. “I’ve been here a couple of times. The first time I left happy, the second time I left very happy,” another beamed. Even a visitor who whispered “It is not breaking any boundaries, but it is giving people what they want” could not deny the pull.
A critic’s internal monologue – “pretty flowers, pretty trees, pretty paths, pretty skies, pretty half-timbered houses… pretty inane” – was overwhelmed. “Except… except… except I can’t stop looking at them. And the more I look at them, the more I like them. Even though I am trying not to!” Hockney, it seems, trolls us with prettiness even in death.