David Hockney has died aged 88, leaving London with one of his most visually seductive exhibition installations as his obituary: A Year in Normandie, a panorama of 130 iPad paintings made during the pandemic lockdown that traces the seasons near his home in Normandy. Entering the Serpentine’s North Gallery, visitors are plunged into darkness before a stripe of landscape painting so luminous it appears to be made of neon and in 3D.
Hockney’s death brings renewed attention to a career that began with radical defiance. In 1961, while a second-year student at the Royal College of Art, he painted We Two Boys Together Clinging — a couple wrapped in an embrace. At the time, homosexuality was still illegal in the UK; it would not be partially decriminalised until 1967, when the law allowed sex between two men “in private” only if both were over 21. Inspired by a Walt Whitman poem, the painting was an early statement of intent from an artist who would go on to define British and LGBT+ culture.
“David Hockney dies at 88; his early works celebrated gay love when it was still illegal in the UK.”
Over the next decade, Hockney broke social taboos by celebrating same-sex relationships in his art, often depicting quiet domestic moments. “He was really pioneering as somebody who was unashamedly proud of his queerness before the legalisation of homosexuality in ’67,” says Dominic James Bilton, co-leader of the Queer British Art Network. In early works, Hockney “showed and made work on same-sex relationships and desire and sexuality” when few others did.
After travelling to California in 1964, his style changed radically. He painted his famous swimming pool pictures, including Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool (1966) and Domestic Scene, Los Angeles (1963). “Those works are so queer, so sensual and sexy and playful and joyous,” Bilton says, adding they also show “domesticity” and the “dull aspects of gay relationships”. Hockney was “normalising same-sex relationships… that we take for granted”.
Paul McCartney paid tribute in an Instagram post, praising his “clever and witty” friend as an “incredible painter”. The former Beatle’s words echoed the reactions of visitors to A Year in Normandie. “It’s the usual David Hockney because he always brings joy,” one art lover said. Another beamed, “I’ve been here a couple of times. The first time I left happy, the second time I left very happy.” Some critics might dismiss the iPad works as prettiness, but the crowd keeps looking. Hockney’s final installation, a relentless panorama of beauty, leaves the question: in a world that often demands art be difficult, isn’t joy itself a kind of defiance?