David Hockney\u2019s last self-portrait that went on show while he lived, in 2025\u2019s 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\u2019s the elemental truth of the work, and even while that turned out not to be literally true \u2013 he died this week, aged 88 \u2013 he gave it his best shot.<\/p>\n
The painting is titled Play within a Play within a Play and Me with a Cigarette, and it got him into a scrap with the authorities of the Paris Metro, who said a photo of it couldn\u2019t be used to advertise the show, since it contravened regulations \u2013 it is a pretty common rule that you\u2019re not allowed to glamorise smoking lest you influence the young. \u201cThe bossiness of those in charge of our lives knows no limits,\u201d he said at the time. \u201cArt has always been a path to free expression and this is a dismal [decision].\u201d<\/p>\n
double quotation markHockney often mentioned what apparently killed his dad: chocolate biscuits<\/p>\n
Bossiness was his b\u00eate noir \u2013 he often wore a badge that said: \u201cEnd bossiness soon.\u201d Whether or not the work really did glamorise the habit is an open question since, although nattily dressed in houndstooth, Hockney didn\u2019t exactly look in rude health.<\/p>\n
There is a wonderful photo of him at the Royal College of Art in 1962, thick set, dressed in a shirt and tie like a kid just arrived at grammar school, covered in paint, deep in concentration, smoking. He didn\u2019t have a great time at the RCA, where peers mocked his Bradford accent. \u201cI\u2019d look at their artworks,\u201d he said later, \u201cand I\u2019d think, well, if I drew like that, I\u2019d keep my mouth shut.\u201d<\/p>\n
One on the go \u2026 Hockney with a beloved cigarette. Photograph: David Newell Smith\/The Observer<\/p>\n
Arguably, if you looked at smoking as a social crutch, you could trace his lifelong addiction to this early alienation. Freud might say it was a reaction against Hockney\u2019s father, who loathed the habit years before medical science supported him. Hockney Snr died of a heart attack and, although the two were terribly close, David Hockney often mentioned the chocolate biscuits that apparently killed him.<\/p>\n
The smoking could have been an act of artistic self-fashioning, to join the ranks of other celebrated smokers \u2013 Picasso, Monet \u2013 to whom Hockney paid homage as fag forebears. But if you saw it as he did, you wouldn\u2019t be looking for reasons. He smoked because he really loved smoking, and he did it all the time.<\/p>\n
For most of his smoking life, his only foes were doctors, telling him to stop: he loved to outlive them (he saw off four). He came out in the 1950s, after seeing an exhibition by the Russian ballet impresario Diaghilev, of which he said later, \u201che was homosexual and absolutely accepted it, and I thought, that\u2019s what I will do, just accept it.\u201d He reflected later on our increasingly tolerant attitudes towards diverse sexualities, but mainly to contrast them with the oppression of smokers. \u201cI\u2019ve always known I was gay, but I know it\u2019s a minority. Most men want to fuck women, it\u2019s all they think about. So if it\u2019s a minority, you\u2019ve got to be tolerant. You shouldn\u2019t go on about smoking because it\u2019s a bit intolerant. To tolerate something, it means you may not like it.\u201d He famously kept 2,000 snouts at home \u201cfor emergencies\u201d.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t until the early 2000s, when the campaign started to ban smoking in pubs, that Hockney really started putting his shoulder behind it as an inalienable right. He staged a protest at the Labour conference circa 2005, flanked by posters saying \u201cDeath comes to us all\u201d (this was at the high point of clashes over the Iraq war, so Tony Blair arrived with more or less the same message, albeit from a different direction).<\/p>\n
Lighting up \u2026 Hockney stops for a puff. Photograph: David Sillitoe\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
Hockney wrote to the Guardian constantly, always with the same message. In 2004, he was querying the medical certainty around this very certain thing: \u201cCould the medical profession give an explanation for Mrs Thatcher\u2019s life? Her husband puffed away on Senior Service, and she must have had some of it second-hand. He dies at 86, and she is still going. Please explain.\u201d In 2007, by which time the ban had come into force, he lamented<\/a> the \u201cmean and unpleasant land\u201d England was becoming, comparing it unfavourably if a bit randomly to \u201cthe Festspeilhaus in Baden Baden, during the intervals of Tristan and Isolde, [where] I found a smoking lounge\u201d.<\/p>\n