The Interview David Hockney Never Gave

Reported by Vogue.

David Hockney died at his London home this week, and the art world lost the last of a certain kind of giant — the kind whose fame was so total, so uncontested, that when an artist friend flew in from Dublin and the conversation turned to the greatest living painter, there was barely a pause before his name filled the room. Except now, of course, he isn't living. And according to Vogue, neither is Calvin "Tad" Tomkins, the legendary New Yorker profile writer who spent decades chronicling the giants of contemporary art and died just months before Hockney.

The two men came close to having the conversation that should have existed — two titans, six-plus decades of art-world history between them, talking about all of it. A Zoom call last spring, arranged around Hockney's monumental exhibition "David Hockney 25" at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, gave them roughly an hour together. Tomkins, legally blind and long done with the marathon labor of formal profiles, had resisted the idea for years. What materialized instead was something quieter: a witness moment. Hockney in a bespoke plaid suit from his favorite Cannes tailor and a turquoise sweater, chain-smoking without interruption — lighting each cigarette directly off the last, no matches — while Tomkins observed.

The Pin on the Lapel

What Hockney said in that conversation was exactly what you'd want from him. Asked about the button fixed to his suit lapel — End Bossiness Soon — he explained his deliberate word choice with the precision of someone who'd spent a lifetime thinking about how things are seen. "I was going to put 'End Bossiness Now,' but then I thought that is in itself too bossy," he said. It's a small story, but it's so completely him: the wit embedded in the logic, the visual joke with genuine philosophy underneath it. He continued painting until the end — landscapes, portraits of family and friends — and showed entirely new work as recently as last November at London's Annely Juda Gallery.

Tomkins, for his part, did produce one final piece of writing that transcended everything — a diary of his hundredth year, published in The New Yorker, that generated more response than anything in his long career. On his birthday, he reportedly said with something close to childlike disbelief: "I'm back, it's a new century, and I'm famous." He died on March 20th, still working, finishing his book Centenarian, due out in February.

The freewheeling conversation between two old men — about art and life and what it meant to move through both for over sixty years — never actually happened. The window closed too fast, as windows do. What remains is Hockney's work, Tomkins's words, and the particular grief of the almost. Greatness doesn't wait for the timing to be right.

Read the original at Vogue.