David Hockney, Who Restored the Human Form to Art, Dies at 88
nytimes.com97 points by SirLJ 7 hours ago
97 points by SirLJ 7 hours ago
I wrote this on another submission here about his death :
Inevitable of course. He was getting on in years and starting to show his age. He's an artist I started to really appreciate about 10/15 years ago when visiting the one of his big Royal Academy shows in London. The works were very large, very colourful and monumental. But as well as the huge colourful paintings, his smaller, fine and fragile line drawings of the landscape were also inspiring. I think he got better as he aged and the past 20 years have been his best and most productive. Lovely guy as well. I'll miss him.
In addition to the above, he wasn't a grumpy technophobe. This was most apparent with his iPad usage but he was also someone who explored the way artists used technology in the past e.g. the Camera Lucida, an optical process of reflecting an image from in front of you onto a piece of paper. You trace it out. He wrote about this in a book called "Secret Knowledge" in 2001 [1]. He was always interesting in conversation.
[1] https://www.thamesandhudson.com/products/secret-knowledge
Originally on iPhone — he used an app called Brushes, by Steve Sprang.
Thanks. I'm sure Sprang loved having Hockney as a user! I must say that I am less fond of the digital art he made and much prefer the traditional, physical, paint on canvas.
Gift article link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/arts/design/david-hockney...
Awh man. This is so sad. His dachshund collection was my favorite -
I tried to visit your link but failed to verify I'm a human to CF. Bit ironic, innit?
imho the most interesting contemporary artist, by far. Besides his approach to new technologies and his views about art in general, his drawing skills were second to none.
Apart from just being so beautiful, so full of attention to nature and the world around us, his work also explored how photography can’t capture or communicate the seeing and feeling with two eyes. To that end, he embraced photography, attempted to express movement and volume using photo camera(s), his polaroid works are beautiful, and then he came back to painting. He wrote and spoke about his process and "seeing" the world a lot, I really recommend it if you are into visual arts.
His work with photography influenced my thinking in the 1980s. The ideas of viewing time and moving focus I think are significant in human experience.
He talks about it, and you can see some of these works in a YT vid here:
His embrace of new technology was interesting, in particular the fact he's been doing a lot of work on an iPad since 2010. You can see many of them here[1]. I went to an exhibition[2] of these a few years ago and was pleasantly surprised by them. Goes to show that it's the artist and the talent, not the tools.
[1] https://www.hockney.com/index.php/works/digital/ipad
[2] https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/article-david-hockne...
He was on the BBC messing around with a Quantel Paintbox[0] (although 1987 seems much later than I remember it being.)
[0] https://howard-hodgkin.com/resource/painting-with-light-quan...
What strikes me about that is how much "dead air" there is without background music and how much of a long-format that was for broadcast.
You just wouldn't get away with that on TV now, the closest thing is some twitch or youtube streams, but even they'd have relentless background music ( and donation/subscription thank you sounds ) and other media at the same time.
But an actual non-live, edited programme? This whole 90 minute programme would be edited down to a 10 minute segment with endless repetition and audio stings, even on the BBC.
To me this shows how much we've lost from the TV format and the ambition it once had. Somewhere since it has fallen into a weird combination of lack of ambition but with a self-congratulation, where programmes often restate what they are doing as being ground-breaking.
https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/david-hockney-a...
Currently on in the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park until the 23rd August.
I recently read his book Secret Knowledge on how many of the Old Masters may have used optics, and it's affected my thoughts every day I've looked at old paintings since then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Secret_Knowledge.html...
Thanks for the book tip. It sounds like a similar theory to that in the doc "Tim's Vermeer".
David Hockney has indirectly been incredibly important to me during a very difficult period of my life. Thanks to him I'm probably the only art student to ever win "Best Talk" at a conference for physics students.
Over half a lifetime ago now I tried studying physics. I failed miserably at it, and after a few years had to make the difficult decision of dropping out (it would take another 15 years before I would get the ADHD diagnosis that explained my struggles). This was nothing short of an identity crisis for me, on top of already struggling with my mental health for years, since becoming a scientist (or what childhood me thought a scientist was) had been a lifelong dream of mine.
Younger me decided to go all in on that identity crisis, I guess, since I switched to studying art. I was absolutely miserable during the first year, not knowing what I was going to do with my life and feeling like a complete loser. Oh, and my first serious relationship also ended on a very bad note around the same period. Those probably were the most depressing months of my life.
Around that time, friends from my former studies asked if I was going to join the International Congress of Physics Students again the next year. At first I declined, thinking it would just be a confrontation with my personal failures. I never even managed to get to the point of having a basic student project of my own to present a poster or talk about!
Then our art history teacher showed us a documentary about the Hockney-Falco thesis[0]. Which argued that the jump in realism shown by Renaissance painters was due to them secretly having access to optical aids like the camera obscura long before they officially were considered to be known to European cultures. A topic that bridged art and science.
And then, maybe as a response to being sick and tired of how I was feeling sorry for myself, I "decided" I that was going to hitchhike to ICPS 2008 in Krakow[1], meet another cute hitchhiker on the way to have a brief summer romance with, give the best talk of the conference using the HF thesis to illustrate differences between art and science, and then live happily ever after.
Absolutely ridiculous of course, but I needed a goal to keep me going. I'm actually quite introverted and used to be terribly scared of giving presentations, or anything that would draw attention to me really. Realistically I just hoped a few people would show up and enjoy the talk. But as a weird kind of self-help occupational therapy (and probably also out of fear) I went all-in on preparing the talk when not at school.
I tried to cram every sprawling thought on the topic into the talk, ending up with about 120 slides. I had 20 minutes for the presentation. Instead of doing the sensible thing of cutting down on content (did I mention I would get an ADHD diagnosis a 15 years later?) I ended up doing dry runs multiple times in the mirror with a clock, figuring out where it needed rewriting and reorganization slides to make the story flow better, and so on. Oh, and of course each slide had to have at least one joke too.
Hitchhiking from the Netherlands to ICSP 2008 ended up being a lot of fun, but no romance sadly. Then I ended up being really grateful to past me for obsessively preparing, because instead of a handful of friends showing moral support for the art weirdo like I expected, the auditorium was completely full. To my own surprise I wasn't scared because I had prepared my material so much. And the audience loved it, to the point of my talk being picked as best talk of the conference afterwards.
And as a cherry on top I met a cute Polish hitchhiker on the way home who also felt like having a brief summer fling :).
As for the "lived happily ever after" bit, obviously life still has its hardships, but yes, I'm generally happy with my life now. Because that personal success was the first time I started actually believing my life could get better, and it on average has had an upward trajectory ever since as a result.
So thanks, Hockney, you never knew me but in a way you probably saved my life, and it wasn't even with your art (love your collages though!)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080215014752/http://www.icps.a...
Abstract expressionism and its cousin, pop art, played an interesting role in Cold War-era cultural propaganda games:
https://www.artforum.com/features/abstract-expressionism-wea...
I'm largely unfamiliar with his work, but in reading the article and viewing a few works online, I was struck strongly by the resemblances between his work and that of Alex Colville, 17 years his senior. To say that Hockney "restored the human form to art" and to ignore, to not even mention, Colville, seems hagiographic and willfully ignorant.
I'm in no way asserting that Colville restored the human form to art either, just observing that Hockney was far for alone in using the human form to convey aspects of his meaning.
Please use non-paywalled links for general news, eg:
David Hockney: Art's great innovator whose vivid paintings made him a household name
The Times has an Arts section, art critics, professional obituary writers, and a wealth of background in the area.
The BBC article was written by a guy who has precisely two articles published on the BBC.
I don't think it's wrong to want to read the best article, not the cheapest.
The cheapest? You’re not British are you! ;-)
The BBC’s arts coverage outright humbles the Times and has for decades. (Also better obituary writers IMO, but YMMV). It’s absolutely the BBC I would come to, to read about Hockney, not a Murdoch newspaper.
But inexpensive they are not.
Sam Woodhouse is a senior BBC journalist and that article includes footage from an outstanding BBC arts programme interview by another senior journalist, Katie Razzall.
Hopefully the BBC will interview one of their own greats, Melvyn Bragg, about him. Bragg and Hockney were friends for half a century.
> The BBC’s arts coverage outright humbles the Times
The Guardian's coverage of music and arts culture is also worthy of top billing:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/jun/12/artist-...
"... Murdoch newspaper." ?
Perhaps you're referencing the New York Post rather than the Times.
This was a tiredness/bad short term memory error because I am British and the comment I referred to just said “the Times”. I do in fact know that the NYT is not Murdoch; the Times (of London) is.
My declining brain jumped the tracks.
FWIW my comment still seems pretty accurate even applied to the NYT. The NYT is without a doubt the better publication to share the short moniker, don’t get me wrong. For all its many contemporary faults, it’s the world’s greatest newspaper. But the BBC’s arts coverage puts it in the shade.
Or perhaps they know it has been owned by News Corp since 1981 - Murdoch owned
The BBC’s arts coverage
The link you provided was not to the BBC's arts coverage. It was to a BBC News article, again written by a generalist. The BBC does great things with the arts. I have been listening to BBC on shortwave since before you were born, and know it very often excels in that area. But this is not that. You are comparing two different things.
not a Murdoch newspaper.
The New York Times is not a Murdoch paper. That you believe this shows you know very little about the New York Times.
But inexpensive they are not.
Reading the article you linked to costs precisely $0.00 (£0). Reading the article from the Times costs money. Again, you are conflating the BBC as a whole with the BBC News web site.
Hopefully
Yes, hopefully. But that's not what we're discussing here. We're discussing the merits of the link you posted versus the link that was submitted.
In the eight days you have been on HN, your comment history shows that you have very strong opinions about the press. Opinions that are often equally wrong. That topic has been almost your entire comment history. I recommend you read and listen to other people more.
Oh, I made a tiredness error re: the NY Times, yes, sorry. (I have some memory issues, rather than being an idiot; the Times of London is Murdoch). In what was otherwise a simple and good-natured defence of the BBC on a topic they are quite good at.
For reference, I did not post the BBC link. That was someone else, wasn't it?
What the heck is the rest of this personal character demolition you are doing?
(Absolutely certain I haven't mostly been talking about the press, as it goes.)
Thanks for, er, the invasively rude "welcome". I am actually not that new to HN at all, so much as restarting after a long break from it. But you have fully reminded me why I put an old account beyond my own use so I couldn't continue to use it.
So maybe I will go again.
Stick around. The forum has some problems (like the confidently wrong commenter above), and needs curious, good faith folk to enliven the discussion.