Do we like David Hockney?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A long, decent, openly gay life with nothing nasty about others, held back by his contested claims on smoking and the virus.
Hockney was born in Bradford in 1937, the fourth of five children in what he called a “radical working-class family”. He sold his first painting, a portrait of his father, for £10 in 1957. He was a conscientious objector who did national service as a hospital orderly, then went to the Royal College of Art and on to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s.
He came out as gay while still at art school, and by 1961 he was painting queer desire in works like We Two Boys Together Clinging, when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. That took nerve, and it is a big reason queer readers claim him. He later spoke of losing about two-thirds of his American friends to AIDS, saying in archive footage “You think about them every day and then you stop it.”
The mark against him is smoking. In April 2020 he wrote to the Daily Mail asking “Could it not be that smokers have developed an immune system to this virus?” The charity ASH's chief executive, Deborah Arnott, called it risky advice for others to follow. It was a daft thing to float in a pandemic, but it was one letter and an opinion, not a campaign.
On the harm test, that is about it from what we read. He fought smoking bans for years, calling a blanket ban “the most grotesque piece of social engineering” and telling critics on Radio 4 they “destroy Bohemia”. In 2015 he told the Guardian gay people were boring because they “want to be ordinary – they want to fit in”, a cheeky provocation from an openly gay man who, PinkNews noted, supports gay rights. We found nothing from him against trans people, women, migrants or the planet, and that is a genuine gap rather than a clean bill of health.
His last year was a victory lap. In 2025 the Paris Metro pulled an ad for his Fondation Louis Vuitton retrospective because it showed him holding a cigarette, and he called the lawyers' distinction between photograph and painting “complete madness”. That show, David Hockney 25, ran to more than 400 works and was the biggest of his career. He kept working, including on the iPad, almost to the end.
The good stuff is mostly the art and the honours: the John Moores Painting Prize in 1967, Royal Academician in 1991, the Companion of Honour in 1997 and the Order of Merit in 2012. We opened no page detailing charity gifts, so we won't claim any. What the record does show is six decades of making unashamedly queer, joyful work in his own style.