The art world honours David Hockney, 'who flew the flag higher than any other British artist'

The art world has acknowledged the life and legacy of David Hockney who died at home 11 June, aged 88, with artists, curators and museum directors paying tribute to a man who was a “genius in practically every medium”, reports the BBC.

The artists’ artist

A plethora of artists have paid homage including Tracey Emin who said on social media that Hockney was a “great artist and a wonderful man who, with the power of art, changed the perception of Britishness. A proud chain-smoking homosexual who flew the flag higher than any other British artist.”

The writer and ceramicist Edmund de Waal pointed to a “wonderful series of 20 mixed-intaglio colour etchings [from 1976] taking Picasso’s The Old Guitarist [1903] and riffing off Wallace Stevens’ textured intertwined exploratory poem, The Man with the Blue Guitar [1937].” De Waal says he read the poem again, thinking of Hockney and “his great generosity, his looking back and handing on, transformations”.

The Guardian meanwhile asked artists to sum up Hockney’s achievements. Marlene Dumas said: “Hearing the news of Hockney’s death made me quite tearful. I went back to the poems of CP Cavafy and the etchings that Hockney made in the late 1960s as a homage to them … and then I got really sad. Hockney inspired the young me in many colourful ways, but the most important for me was discovering an artist that could make such touching work with simplicity and tenderness about love.” Mark Wallinger adds: “I would say he’s the best draughtsman since Picasso. He really did know how to look—and you looked with him.”

Plaudits from museums and curators

Tristram Hunt, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (V&A), posted his own take on Hockney’s famed 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), showing himself standing by the pool edge peering at the water. The V&A said in an Instagram post that “from photo collages, perspective manipulation to explorations of digital and 3D technologies, to set and costume design for opera and iPad paintings, he constantly embraced new ways of looking and making images”.

In a post on Instagram, The Courtauld Institute of Art in London wrote that Hockney often visited the collection and exhibitions including its Monet and London: Views of the Thames show in 2024. Elena Crippa, the senior curator of contemporary art, said in the statement that Hockney “played a uniquely important role in how we look and think about the world through images”.

Nicholas Serota, the chair of Arts Council England, said in a statement: "He was full of humility about his achievements but his work was admired across the world, with nearly a million visitors to his exhibition in Paris last year [at the Fondation Louis Vuitton], and his legacy is immeasurable. He was, quite simply, a great artist."

LGBTQ legacy

Several commentators have highlighted the important of Hockney as an LGBTQ trailblazer who celebrated same-sex love and affection at a time when homosexuality was illegal in the UK (sex between two men over 21 ”in private” was decriminalised in 1967). Against this backdrop, Hockney’s works—including his 1963 painting Domestic Scene, Los Angeles showing one man in a shower while another man washes his back—were seismic.

"For a lot of people growing up now, especially a lot of the gay youth, including myself, you can look at his paintings and assume they're lovely, pretty pictures,” the curator and cultural strategist James Marshall told the BBC. "But they're also a strong act of protest at a time when showing queer lives as normalised or domesticated was very much avoided."

Hockney came out as gay while still at the Royal College of Art in London in the late 1950s. “He was a pioneer; his work was a bold platform for gay visibility even before partial decriminalisation in 1967. His 1961 work, We Two Boys Together Clinging, created while still at the Royal College of Art, was inspired by Walt Whitman’s homoerotic poetry,” Andrew Given, the director of the Queer Britain Museum in London, wrote in The Independent.

The Guardian, meanwhile, was more forthright in its appraisal; critic Eddy Frankel wrote, “He celebrated his horniness” and “helped pave the way for a lot of other gay artists to feel free to express themselves too”.