David Hockney, the celebrated British artist best known for his paintings of California in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at the age of 88. Born in West Yorkshire in 1937, Hockney studied at Bradford School of Art before, via national service as a hospital orderly, moving to London, where he graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1962. He quickly moved away from abstraction and towards figuration – demonstrating a lack of concern for prevailing fashions or art-world snobbery that was still in evidence in the later years of his career, notably when he embraced the iPad in the 2010s to make large-scale digital drawings of Yorkshire landscapes in his signature high-colour palette. His move to Los Angeles in the mid 1960s gave him arguably his richest subject: the swimming pool, rendered in intense blues – most famously in A Bigger Splash (1967) – and often the setting for male nudity. With his shock of blond (later white) hair, distinctive round glasses, and a cigarette nearly always clamped to his lips, he developed a personal style which, like that of his friend Andy Warhol, made him as recognisable as his art. Hockney moved back to Yorkshire from Los Angeles in 2005. Martin Gayford’s interview with Hockney about Old Master painters and optical devices, which appeared in Apollo in 2010, can be read here.
Israeli airstrikes have caused major damage to the city of Tyre in south Lebanon, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Lebanon branch of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) has issued a statement condemning attacks on 7 June, stating that the ancient city’s entrance, administrative buildings and archaeological warehouses have been damaged. Following the capture of the nearby 12th-century Beaufort Castle, or Qalaat al-Chqif, by Israeli forces on 31 May, Lebanese culture minister Ghassan Salameh wrote to the director-general of UNESCO Khaled El-Enany calling for ‘urgent’ intervention, adding that ‘inaction […] would open the door to violations whose consequences for cultural heritage protected under international law would be impossible to remedy.’ On 9 June, UNESCO said it had ‘step[ped] up support’ after confirming damage to Tyre and Beaufort Castle and other protected sites such as the 12th-century Chama’ Citadel.
Three men who stole ancient artefacts from the Drents Museum in the Netherlands have each been sentenced to nearly four years in prison, Art Net reports. On 25 January 2025, the men broke into the museum in Assen, taking with them a 2,500-year-old golden Geto-Dacian helmet and three Dacian spiral bracelets from 50 BC. All were on loan to the museum from the National History Museum of Romania in Bucharest. After the heist, that museum’s director, Ernest Oberländer-Târnoveanu, was dismissed after refusing to resign, and the Dutch government paid Romania a reported €5.7m in insurance compensation. The helmet and two bracelets were recovered this April as part of a plea deal with the thieves, who were arrested shortly after the robbery. One bracelet is still missing.
Jewellery and watches worth an estimated €1m have been stolen from the Sant’Agostino auction house in Turin. Finestre sull’Arte reports that the heist, which took place on the night of 6 June or early on 7 June, took just four minutes. Missing items include a rare golden snuff box made in France during the reign of Louis XV and a ring decorated with a four-carat Colombian emerald. At the time of writing, no one has been arrested in connection with the robbery.
The Moderna Museet in Stockholm has appointed Tone Hansen as its next director. She will be the first director to lead the national museum of contemporary art – which also has a space in Malmö – as it begins its controversial government-led merger with Public Art Agency Sweden and the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design (ArkDes). Norway-born Hansen joins from the Munch Museum in Oslo, where she has been director since 2022. She will begin her new role on 1 September, taking over from Gitte Ørskou, who has led the museum since 2019.
