It is said that the painter David Hockney's obsession with swimming pools began when, on a flight from London to Los Angeles, he was surprised by the number of blue spots breaking up the greyness of the city. The Californian sun hit the water patches, which shimmered upwards. That blue and shiny beauty fascinated him, but it also led him to think about his country. In the sixties, in England, having a private swimming pool was a great luxury. In the star city of California, it seemed like a normal thing. Swimming pools presented themselves to him as clear evidence of the American dream. A socioeconomic indicator, but also a promise of the freedom and enjoyment that he, as a homosexual person, had not found in the country where he was born.

The major retrospective that Tate Britain dedicated to David Hockney in 2017 –I had the enormous privilege of seeing it in a small group, without worrying about the huge crowds it caused– had something of a celebration and, at the same time, of an early farewell. It was an exhibition that not only reviewed six decades of work: it aimed and succeeded in teaching the ins and outs of an artist who had turned vitality into a form of resistance. Hockney, already on the verge of turning eighty, painted every day with the urgency of someone who knew that time is finite, but who still has things to say and/or who questioned himself and strove to try to say new things.

True to his essence until the end: just over a month ago, the British artist David Hockney, who died this Friday at the age of 88, received the actor Ian McKellen in his studio, as McKellen himself published on his Instagram. Although Hockney had been using a wheelchair for some years, and in the photo he looks quite thin, he maintained his style, with a suit with colored checks and his characteristic horn-rimmed glasses. Hockney dressed as he painted. Furthermore, seeing Hockney and McKellen together implies seeing reunited two of the most important figures in 20th-century British culture, and two unquenchable icons of the gay community, who began working when homosexuality was still a crime in the United Kingdom.