‘His last kiss to the world’ / David Hockney’s return to Yorkshire triggered a glorious reawakening

David Hockney. My Parents, 1977. Tate Gallery

‘His last kiss to the world’: David Hockney’s return to Yorkshire triggered a glorious reawakening

When the artist came home from LA, it seemed like a retirement. But it heralded an astonishing new chapter. Our critic remembers their thrilling dinners together – and the dazzling new works that arrived in his inbox every morning

Jonathan Jones

Monday 15 June 2026


I

t was springtime in Paris and I was floating among young green leaves and white blossom – but I was not in a park. I was on an upper floor of the Fondation Louis Vuitton delighting, wallowing in several of David Hockney’s iPad paintings of his garden in Normandy. In one room, this green oasis was shown by the light of the silvery moon: the darkened chamber was alive with shining white lunar discs, blue clouds and the shadowy fingers of tree branches.

He outlived four of his doctors’ / What was behind David Hockney’s lifelong love of smoking?

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British painter David Hockney poses at the Pompidou Centre in Paris on September 26, 2017 in front of one of his painting, a work made of an assemblage of various paintings, that he donated to the museum. Photo by STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN 

He outlived four of his doctors’: what was behind David Hockney’s lifelong love of smoking?

His passion got him into scraps with the Paris Metro and numerous other bodies. Was it a social crutch? A Freudian response to his father? And why did he take such delight in writing to the Guardian about it all?

Zoe Williams

Saturday 13 June 2026

David Hockney’s last self-portrait that went on show while he lived, in 2025’s Paris retrospective, has a Droste effect: the figure holds a picture in which the figure holds a picture. Between the fingers of one hand, a paintbrush; of the other, a cigarette. He could have been smoking and smoking and smoking into infinity. That’s the elemental truth of the work, and even while that turned out not to be literally true – he died this week, aged 88 – he gave it his best shot.

English Painter David Hockney / Photo by mikel roberts

David Hockney: 40 Images That Prove He Was Always a Tastemaker

BY ANNA CAFOLLA AND ELLIE PITHERS

June 12, 2026

David Hockney was “a proper dandy,” as his friend, Christopher Simon Sykes, once remarked—and the picture of a very English kind of elegance. The revolutionary British artist has passed away aged 88.

Obituaries / David Hockney

 

David Hockney working on one of his Woldgate Woods series in east Yorkshire in 2006. Photograph: Jean-Pierre Goncalves/Tate Britain/PA

Obituary

David Hockney obituary

Ceaselessly inventive painter whose best known works were inspired by the light and colour he encountered in 1960s California

Charles Darwent

Friday 12 Jun 2026 13.35

Soon after he moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s, the artist David Hockney was visited by his mother. As they drove back from the airport, far from her native Bradford, she gazed about her in apparent awe at the beauties of sun-kissed southern California. Then, as Hockney was fond of recalling, she turned and said: “I don’t understand it. Such lovely drying weather and no one’s got their washing out.” Mrs Hockney thus joined Mrs Warhol and Alan Bennett’s “Mam” as working-class mothers who delighted in their son’s success without ever quite understanding it.

 

Francis Bacon

BOOK OF THE DAY

Francis Bacon: A Self-Portrait in Words by Michael Peppiatt review – glimpses of a demon-driven genius

This article is more than 1 year old

Despite the painter’s lack of ‘epistolary fluency’, this collection of his writings – from drunken interviews to begging letters – offers some insight into his working methods and private life

Peter Conrad

Mon 6 May 2024 

Francis Bacon composed his autobiography in paint, not words. His portraiture laid bare the skull beneath the skin, the beast pregnantly housed inside the human form, and all of the figures he painted – copulating men, hybrid monsters, bystanders at a crucifixion, many of them trapped in chrome cages or sadomasochistic cellars – were fractured images of himself. The verbal self-portrait that Michael Peppiatt has assembled could never match that lacerating self-scrutiny; in his correspondence, his scrappy memos for paintings and his repetitive interviews, Bacon hid behind evasive banality or wilful obscurity.

Previously unseen Lucian Freud etchings to be published for first time

An early version of Reclining Figure. Freud reportedly struggled with the foreshortening of the head.

Photograph: Lucian Freud Archive

Previously unseen Lucian Freud etchings to be published for first time

This article is more than 3 years old

Definitive study will include early versions of the revered 20th-century artist’s most famous creations

Dalya Alberge
Sunday 24 April 2022

Previously unseen etchings that Lucian Freudrejected or reworked are to be published for the first time as part of a definitive study that will document every print he ever created.

Lucian Freud painting denied by artist is authenticated by experts

 

Lucian Freud, who denied that he had painted Standing Male Nude. 
Photograph: Hulton Deutsch

Lucian Freud painting denied by artist is authenticated by experts

The artist insisted he did not paint Standing Male Nude, but three specialists have concluded it is his work

Dalya Alberge
Sun 28 Nov 2021 07.00 GMT

Almost 25 years ago, a Swiss art collector bought a Lucian Freud painting – a full-length male nude – at auction. He then received a call from the British artist, asking to buy it from him. The two men did not know each other, and the collector politely refused, as he liked the picture.

David Hockney / The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

David Hockney

DAVID HOCKNEY

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

For nearly 60 years, David Hockney (British, born 1937) has pursued a singular career with a love for painting and its intrinsic challenges. A major retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art—the show’s only North American venue, opening November 27, 2017—honors the artist in the year of his 80th birthday by presenting his most iconic works and key moments of his career from 1960 to the present. Working in a wide range of media with equal measures of wit and intelligence, Hockney, has examined, probed, and questioned how to capture the perceived world of movement, space, and time in two dimensions. The exhibition David Hockney will offer a grand overview of the artist’s achievements across all media, including painting, drawing, photography, and video. From his early engagement with modernist abstraction and mid-career experiments with illusion and realism, to his most recent, jewel-toned landscapes, Hockney has consistently explored the nature of perception and representation with both intellectual rigor and sheer delight in the act of looking.