{"id":731901,"date":"2026-06-12T12:03:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T12:03:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/731901\/"},"modified":"2026-06-12T12:03:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T12:03:10","slug":"celebrated-british-artist-david-hockney-dies-aged-88","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/731901\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrated British artist David Hockney dies aged 88"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Analysis\"Hockney gave us revolutionary depictions of gay domestic lifepublished at 12:21 BST<\/p>\n

12:21 BST<\/p>\n

\"\"Josh Parry
LGBT and identity reporter<\/p>\n

Hockney\u2019s depictions of homosexual life were nothing short of revolutionary.<\/p>\n

In an otherwise conservative era, he broke social taboos by celebrating gay relationships through his art.<\/p>\n

He often depicted the quiet, everyday moments of gay domestic life at a time when such scenes were just not seen in the mainstream.<\/p>\n

And what made it so revolutionary? He started doing it at a time when being gay was still criminalised in the UK.<\/p>\n

In 1961, as a second-year student at the Royal College of Art, six years before homosexuality began to be decriminalised, he painted ‘We Two Boys Together Clinging’, named after a Walt Whitman poem.<\/p>\n

He later went on to describe his early works as \u201cpropaganda of something I felt hadn’t been propagandised as a subject: homosexuality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dominic James Bilton, co-leader of the Queer British Art Network, told the BBC: \u201cWe\u2019ve lost one of those people who were making changes in society before it was socially and culturally acceptable to be gay.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe pioneered queer British art before it was fashionable to do so, before contemporary society built upon it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve lost a giant of queer British art that subsequent generations have been inspired by and built upon and there\u2019s not many people we can say that about.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hockney gave us revolutionary depictions of gay domestic lifepublished at 12:21 BST 12:21 BST Josh ParryLGBT and identity…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":731902,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75],"class_list":["post-731901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=731901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/731902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}