They Can't Cancel Spring

    I was a late bloomer when it came to a deep appreciation for fine art and classical music. I mean, I knew who the greats were, and I sort of knew what I liked and what I didn’t, but there was no touching of the soul, as it were. I needed to take baby steps! As time went on, I slowly realized why my father had put rudimentary head phones on my mother’s stomach when she was pregnant with me, with Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, and Brahms playing!  That’s a true story! My poor mother… The fine art part of the equation took a little longer, but that too, soon became a touchtone for the soul. Which brings me to David Hockney. I had never heard much of him before...well, until the pandemic.

    David Hockney died last Thursday at his home, one month short of his 89th birthday. The tributes now arriving from every corner of the cultural world are well deserved. The obituaries will recall the California pools and that famous bigger splash, the Yorkshire hillsides, the round spectacles and peroxide hair, the 2018 auction in which “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” fetched $90.3 million and made him, for a time, the most expensive living artist on earth. They will trace the long arc from a clerk’s son in working-class Bradford, England to the most famous artist in the world. All of that is true, and none of it is what I want to remember today. 

    I want to remember the Spring of 2020. The world was shutting down. Schools went dark, houses of worship locked their doors, ballparks fell silent, and museums—the very institutions built to hold beauty in common—closed indefinitely. Hockney, then 82, was isolated at La Grande Cour, his 17th century farmhouse in Normandy. And from that farmhouse, he sent the world a drawing, made on his iPad, of four bright daffodils pushing up through a flat gray late-winter field. He gave it a title that became a promise: “Do Remember They Can’t Cancel The Spring.” He shared it with museums in London and Denmark, and it raced around the planet faster than almost anything else produced that grim month, carrying a message no public-health dashboard was built to deliver: Hope. 

    He did not stop there. Working every day through the lockdown, Hockney produced 116 iPad paintings charting the unfolding of spring, a series the Royal Academy exhibited in 2021 as “The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020” before it traveled to Bozar in Brussels and beyond; a nearly 300-foot frieze drawn from the larger Normandy project later hung at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, a room away from Monet’s water lilies. The works were printed large and hung chronologically, so that visitors walked through the season itself. And when the Fondation Louis Vuitton mounted the largest exhibition of his career in 2025, the phrase was emblazoned in neon across its facade. With his friend Martin Gayford he published a book whose title doubled as a creed: Spring Cannot Be Cancelled. 

    It is worth pausing on what an octogenarian with a tablet accomplished in those months, because it speaks to something we are struggling to name. The pandemic suspended the associations that normally form us: schools, congregations, museums, ballparks, classrooms, dinner tables. We were drowning in information—case counts, models, briefings, doom scrolled by the hour. What we lacked was formation: the practices that shape souls rather than merely inform them. Hockney offered that. He performed a public act of friendship for millions of strangers, directing our attention away from the screen’s churn and toward something true and patient happening just outside the window. 

    The world has moved on from those years, and understandably so. Serious questions about how the pandemic was handled—the duration of school closures, the costs of lockdown, the candor of our institutions—remain insufficiently examined, and an honest accounting is overdue. Those questions deserve sunlight, not amnesia. But an honest accounting cuts both ways. Like many things in lie, if we are obligated to reckon with what failed, we are equally obligated to remember what was good: the neighbors who sang from balconies, the teachers who improvised, the congregations that found one another on screens, the little leagues that clawed their way back onto the field, and the artist in Normandy who got up every morning and bore witness to the stubborn return of life. Gratitude belongs in the record too. 

    Hockney liked to say that his work was about the need to “love life.” That is not a sentiment; it is an argument, and he made it for seven decades across paint, Polaroid, fax machine, and stylus. While not a father, I think often about what we transmit to the next generation, and what Hockney transmitted in 2020 was a lesson no curriculum contains: that even when the institutions falter and the world grows dark, the obligation to attend to what is beautiful, and to share it, does not lapse. It deepens. That is l’dor v’dor (from generation to generation) in its plainest form; not the handing down of facts, but the handing down of attention. When my friends grandchildren ask what those years were like, I will tell them about the closures and the fear. I will also tell them about the daffodils. 

    It was more than apropos that he died in June, with the year tilting toward summer. The Spring of 2020 arrived as he promised it would, and because of him, millions of us actually saw it—on our phones, in our kitchens, in the depths of an anxious season. The least we owe his memory is to keep looking. 

    David Hockney carried the fire and instinctively knew The Blessing: More Life Into A Time Without Boundaries. 

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com