The wold is enough … Hockney painting in Woldgate Woods, East Yorkshire. Photograph: Jean-Pierre Goncalves de Lima View image in fullscreen The wold is enough … Hockney painting in Woldgate Woods, East Yorkshire. Photograph: Jean-Pierre Goncalves de Lima David Hockney ‘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 Mon 15 Jun 2026 06.00 CEST Last modified on Mon 15 Jun 2026 12.00 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google 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.
It was early April last year and this was the opening of David Hockney 25, a blockbuster show, curated with his close involvement, covering his entire career – but with an emphasis on his work this century. What a bold and bloody-minded spectacle it was, insisting that Hockney’s later pictures of straw bales and ponds are just as good if not better than his famous early swimming pools and sexy portraits. And what a triumph! With extraordinary aplomb, Hockney made his point. You went from gazing in awe at some of his greatest early paintings, basking in their Californian and swinging London light, to suddenly standing in Yorkshire fields in the early 21st century, taking in views of emerald hedgerows and purple trees. And it all suddenly made sense.
Ping! Another email, another sunrise in vivid electric yellow as I drank my coffee One of my most treasured memories was a quiet dinner in a house in west London after a trip to the National Gallery. Not any old trip to the NG but an after-hours one in which Hockney, my host, used his special privilege as a modern master to go there when he liked: the only other visitors that evening were the painter Leon Kossoff and his family. Now I sat at dinner with a man who had been one of my heroes since I first saw an image of A Bigger Splash in my childhood encyclopedia. We had crisp tangy fresh lychees for dessert – first time for me – accompanied by Hockney’s passionate views on art. He elaborated on his book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, which came out at the start of this century. We had been to see a Caravaggio exhibition in which he saw clues that this hyperreal 17th-century artist used a kind of camera obscura.
View image in fullscreen Glam-age star … in the 1970s film A Bigger Splash. Photograph: Circle Associates/Kobal/Shutterstock I wasn’t convinced. I wasn’t even sure why it mattered. Instead, I was trying to fathom this amazing man and look for traces of the Hockney whose glam-age, yet eerie social world is hauntingly evoked in Jack Hazan’s semi-dramatised documentary A Bigger Splash. When I recognised one of the people from the film moving about the house, I was thrilled.
Hockney in the 21st century went out of his way to be different from his famous 20th-century self. He seemed more interested in art history and theories of perspective than in male beauty or Hollywood hedonism. Well, perhaps not entirely. The very first time I spoke to him, he delivered a striking statement on the power of human beauty: “When you see a really beautiful person, it’s like a door opens …”
He also preferred the country to the city, hay bales to swimming pools. The next time I met him was in Bridlington, Yorkshire, where he was living in an old-fashioned house whose interior he’d painted in powerful California colours with a sunny conservatory. Upstairs a tiny bedroom served as his studio – or more like a store for his latest paintings, because he was doing the real work out in the actual Yorkshire landscape, with his easel set up en plein air like a French impressionist.
It was hard to adjust to this determinedly unglamorous Hockney. The first time I ever saw him in the flesh, he still had peroxide blond hair: he was taking a bow at a revival of his opera set for Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress at Sadler’s Wells. I was up in the gods, applauding furiously. Soon, though, he stopped designing ballet and opera productions due to his deepening deafness, and let his hair become its natural grey. One Hockney seemed to have died, only to be replaced by another.
View image in fullscreen Spring’s here … Play within a Play within a Play and Me with a Cigarette (2025). Photograph: Jonathan Wilkinson/David Hockney Yet if I’d thought about it harder, that production of Stravinsky might have...