Voices: The three titans of art who shaped my life – and reshaped the world

In the space of four months, we have lost Georg Baselitz, David Hockney and Yayoi Kusama, and the art world feels emptier now. The titans are gone, leaving behind a deafening silence. These three giants did not merely paint, or sculpt, they explored boundless creative mediums to radically change and rebuild the way humanity perceives space, colour, and form.

Yet, beyond their very different aesthetic revolutions, they shared a rare fate as creators who dedicated their entire existences to the avant-garde, choosing to create masterpieces until – and with – their very last breaths. While millions of admirers now mourn their public legacies, for me the loss of David and Georg carries the sharp, intimate ache of personal absence. To have counted them as dear friends across decades is to have witnessed first hand the exhausting, exhilarating reality of a life wholly consumed by the act of creation.

True artists do not retire. They do not put down the brush or the chisel when the world tells them they have achieved enough. As David once said: “You don’t retire doing this.” The trio proved that art is not a career, but an existential necessity.

I did not know Yayoi as I knew David and Georg, but I long admired the audacity and persistence of her vision. She taught us that infinity could be captured within the precise boundaries of a single dot. Her relentless pursuit of cosmic love and self-obliteration through repetition was never a mere stylistic choice; it was a profound psychological lifeline.

For Kusama, the canvas was a shield against the chaos of her own mind, a radical space where vulnerability was transformed into monumental power. Even in her final days, facing the twilight of her life in Tokyo, her brush never wavered. She dissolved the heavy burden of human ego into the eternal, offering to a fractured world a sanctuary of pattern and light.

Her spirit remained entirely uncompromised, proving that the drive to create can transcend the limitations of the human body. To know David, however, was to be oriented towards pure light. He was truly Le Roi Soleil of the art world, a man consumed by an unyielding, joyful curiosity that lit up every room he entered.