Geordie Greig, who was close to David Hockney for more than 50 years, interviewed him countless times, sat for him and drove round the Hollywood Hills with him, pays tribute to his witty and wonderful friend
© Geordie Greig
Hockney, one of the most influential British artists, has died a month before his 89th birthday
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© Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times
© David Hockney; Photo credit: Richard Schmidt
Bradford-born painter, who made his name with sunkissed visions of California and never stopped breaking barriers, going on to become one of contemporary art’s most important figures, has died
• ‘David Hockney caught the look of the modern world’
• David Hockney’s life in pictures
David Hockney, the iconic British painter who cast a revolutionary gaze across 20th-century art, has died aged 88.
He made his name as a pop artist during the swinging 60s and was perhaps best known for his paintings of swimming pools that helped define the Los Angeles aesthetic. Works such as A Bigger Splash and Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) depicted hedonistic scenes of love, lust and loss taking place below the city’s sun-soaked skies.
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© Photograph: Aurélien Meunier/Getty Images
© Photograph: Aurélien Meunier/Getty Images
© Photograph: Aurélien Meunier/Getty Images
Capturing a world of colour, from the azure swimming pools and lithe, tanned bodies of LA to the Yorkshire fields of his youth, Hockney was one of the most prolific and revered artists of his generation
© PA
The French artists 1907 Nympheas painting could fetch between £30m to £40m according to Sotheby’s
© PA
Stuttgart, Alemania, 11 jun (Prensa Latina) Los estadounidenses Taylor Fritz y Frances Tiafoe y el checo Jirí Lehecka, tres de los principales aspirantes al cetro, salieron hoy por la puerta ancha en los octavos de final del torneo de tenis de Stuttgart.
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Researchers once dismissed ancient face pots and battle axes from northern Europe as purely local creations, with no broader significance. A new study published in the Danish Journal of Archaeology challenges that view. It finds that these objects from the fourth millennium BC were part of a wider cultural movement linking societies across Europe.
Sebastian Schultrich, an archaeologist at the ROOTS Cluster of Excellence at Kiel University in Germany, studied pottery and stone weapons from the late Funnel Beaker Culture, roughly 3300 to 2600 BC.
His findings suggest communities in northern Germany and southern Scandinavia were far more connected to the rest of the prehistoric world than previously recognized.
The face pots rank among the most striking artifacts of the period. Made primarily on the Danish islands around 3000 to 2900 BC, they feature raised eyebrow arches, a central nose, and circular eye markings.
Most have come from collective burial sites. For decades, researchers treated them as a uniquely local art form.
Schultrich argues they were a local response to a pan-European cultural impulse. Around the same period, anthropomorphic art was emerging in southern France, northern Italy, and the Paris Basin.
Stone carvings and stelae depicted human figures alongside daggers and axes. The near-simultaneous appearance of human imagery across such distant regions suggests a shared “spirit of the age,” one that each society expressed in its own distinct way.
Battle axes reveal a parallel story. The double-headed stone axes found across northern Germany and Scandinavia carry a distinctly regional character. But battle axes as a broader category spread across Western, Central, and Northern Europe during this period.
Schultrich draws comparisons between these axes and weapons like daggers and halberds found in Italian graves. Both types used copper or stone, appeared in rock art, and showed up increasingly in burial contexts from the mid to late fourth millennium BC.
The study also uncovers early signs of an Atlantic exchange network that predates the Bell Beaker phenomenon. Battle axes resembling French designs appeared in Galicia. Scandinavian flint axes reached the British Isles.
Pottery styles in Brittany echoed those developing in the Lower Rhine region. Schultrich describes these as loosely connected networks along the Atlantic coast, ones that would eventually grow into the broader Bell Beaker exchange system of the third millennium BC.
The Danish face pots and the eye motifs on Iberian pottery are most likely unrelated directly, Schultrich notes. But both reflect a broader cultural shift toward human representation in material objects.
The study adds to growing evidence that pre-Beaker societies built wide-reaching connections long before the migrations and cultural upheavals of the third millennium BC reshaped prehistoric Europe.
Major Robert "Madiar" Brovdi marked Ukraine's first official Day of Unmanned Systems Forces on 11 June 2026 with a single number. His drone branch claims 102,000 Russian soldiers killed or wounded over twelve months, alongside 360,000 enemy targets hit and 1.7 million combat sorties flown, the commander said in a Telegram address.
The number translates four years of homemade weaponry into industrial output. By Brovdi's own reckoning, drones from his Unmanned Systems Forces (SBS) now account for one in every three Russian soldiers falling on the battlefield, and at a unit cost he prices in hundreds of dollars apiece.
"We exchange the plastic and metal of a drone worth a few hundred dollars for the carcass of an occupier. And that is the best exchange rate in the world," Brovdi said.
Brovdi narrated the four-year arc of Ukrainian drone warfare in a single Telegram thread. In 2022, he said, the starting slogan was "artillery, shovel, drone" to locate, correct, hide. Then, in spring 2022, he taped a grenade to a commercial quadcopter and pushed video of the drop to social media.
"No weapon in human history has evolved so quickly. A wedding drone, no joke, performed well at the front, fundamentally and forever changing world doctrine," he revealed.
The unit he founded that month — Madiar's Birds — has since grown from platoon to brigade to a separate branch of the armed forces. The 414th brigade tripled in size in late 2024. On 3 June 2025, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made Brovdi commander of the entire SBS, replacing Colonel Vadym Sukharevskyi.
Madiar listed four target priorities for the year ahead: enemy manpower, sources of war financing, weapons production, and Russian air defense. The branch's reach now extends from frontline FPV strikes to deep-strike platforms confirmed beyond 1,700 kilometers inside Russia.
"The birds changed both the plan and the course," Madiar said.
Russian state TV calls him a "terrorist." A Russian court sentenced him in absentia to life in prison in March 2026 on charges of organizing a terrorist attack. Russian prosecutors have filed 46 counts against him in total.
The Center for European Policy Analysis calls him "a bearded talisman of Ukraine's defense" — a "swashbuckling, plain-spoken" commander whose journey ran from "besuited grain trader" to the top of the world's first dedicated drone branch.
Madiar's biography reads like Carpathian Tony Stark's: an ethnic Hungarian from Uzhhorod who ran one of Ukraine's largest grain traders, served on the Zakarpattia Regional Council from 2010 to 2015, and funded contemporary Ukrainian art through his BrovdiArt Foundation before walking into a recruitment office at the start of the full-scale war.
He closed his anniversary speech in his usual register: "And now to work, ladies and gentlemen, at all available depths, across all the hated enemy. The way we know how, with what we have, where we are."
© Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
Archaeologists working in southern Kazakhstan have documented more than 1,200 petroglyphs and a rare Old Turkic runic inscription in Burkhansai Gorge. This discovery sheds new light on ancient pastoral life, cultural traditions, and early writing in Central Asia.
The site lies in the Zhualy District of Kazakhstan’s Jambyl Region. Researchers say the rock carvings span several historical periods, from the end of the third millennium BC through the medieval era and later times. The current count is considered preliminary, and archaeologists expect additional discoveries as surveys continue.
Among the most significant finds is a short inscription written in Old Turkic runiform script. The five-character text has been interpreted as “Er atym Aba,” meaning “My name is Aba.” Researchers believe it may have been carved more than 1,000 years ago.
Researchers say Burkhansai Gorge preserves evidence of human activity across thousands of years rather than representing a single period of occupation.
According to Anatoly Shayakhmetov of the A. Kh. Margulan Institute of Archaeology, the petroglyphs are distributed across five groups that follow the course of a stream through the gorge. The carvings date to different periods, including the Bronze Age, Early Iron Age, Middle Ages, and later historical eras.
Archaeologists have also identified three burial grounds, known as Burkhansai 1, Burkhansai 2, and Burkhansai 3. The cemeteries are believed to date to the Early Iron Age and medieval periods.
The earliest carvings are estimated to be about 4,000 years old. Many depict goats, one-humped camels, and hunting scenes. Researchers say these images reflect communities that relied on herding and hunting while moving through mountain landscapes.
The combination of rock art and burial sites suggests the gorge served as more than a place for carving images. Researchers believe it formed part of a wider cultural landscape used by different communities over many centuries.
Researchers describe the runic inscription as one of the site’s most important discoveries.
Boris Zheleznyakov of the A. Kh. Margulan Institute of Archaeology said the text was written in the Talas script, a regional form of Old Turkic writing found across parts of Central Asia. He suggested the person who carved the inscription may have been marking his presence or association with the area.
The inscription was later examined by Old Turkic writing specialist Vladimir Tishin, who interpreted the text as “My name is Aba.”
Unlike large royal inscriptions that commemorate rulers or political events, the Burkhansai inscription appears to preserve the words of an ordinary individual. Researchers say that personal quality makes the discovery especially valuable.
The find also contributes to the study of Old Turkic literacy and the spread of writing traditions across Central Asia during the medieval period.
The discovery adds to Kazakhstan’s reputation as one of Central Asia’s richest regions for rock art. Researchers note that mountain gorges and river valleys often acted as long-term cultural archives where generations left carvings, inscriptions, and burial sites.
Southern Kazakhstan was historically connected to the Talas Valley, the Western Tien Shan, and the ancient Silk Road city of Taraz. For centuries, the region served as a meeting point for pastoral groups, traders, and settled communities.
Researchers say Burkhansai’s access to water, shelter, and travel routes may explain why evidence from so many different periods survived in one location.
Archaeologists are continuing to classify the petroglyphs, investigate the burial grounds, and search for nearby settlements that may help explain how ancient communities used the surrounding landscape.
Researchers also plan to publish a comprehensive study of the site and seek state protection for the archaeological complex.
For now, Burkhansai Gorge stands as a remarkable record of human activity spanning millennia. Its rock carvings reveal how people lived, hunted, and traveled through the region, while a simple inscription preserves the name of one person whose mark on the landscape has survived for more than a thousand years.
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Stuttgart, Alemania, 10 jun (Prensa Latina) El estadounidense Taylor Fritz y el kazajo Aleksandr Búblik, dos de los principales candidatos al título, debutan hoy en los octavos de final del torneo tenístico de Stuttgart.
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A painting found in a German family home has revealed how Nazi-era imagery may have been hidden beneath a more acceptable postwar scene. The work is linked to Erich Mercker, a Munich painter who lived from 1891 to 1973. Mercker had a successful career and painted several works during the Nazi period. Some included hidden Nazi symbols and political themes.
One of his known works, “Die Stätte des 9. November,” showed the Feldherrnhalle in Munich. The site carried strong meaning for the Nazi Party. It was tied to Adolf Hitler’s failed 1923 coup, also known as the Beer Hall Putsch.
After World War II, Mercker continued to paint the same Munich scene. But later versions appeared different. He removed soldiers, wreaths, and Nazi symbols. He also replaced the Nazi flag with the blue-and-white flag of Bavaria.
The works appeared under less politically charged titles, including “Feldherrnhalle” and “München am Odeonsplatz.”
Filmmaker and producer Dr. Thomas Schuhbauer found one version in his parents’ home. They had received it as a wedding gift in 1966.
At first, the painting looked like a postwar version of the scene. It showed the Bavarian flag and no clear Nazi symbols. But some details raised questions. The Nazi memorial at the Feldherrnhalle was still partly visible. That memorial was destroyed after Germany’s surrender in 1945. Reddish paint traces also appeared near the flag.
Schuhbauer contacted Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, known as HZB. He began working with Dr. Ioanna Mantouvalou, a physicist at TU Berlin and HZB. Mantouvalou specializes in X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, or XRF.
X-ray scans have revealed Nazi symbols hidden beneath a postwar painting linked to Munich artist Erich Mercker.
Researchers found a red Nazi flag, wreaths, soldiers and raised arms painted over beneath a later Bavarian scene. pic.twitter.com/qrkIfazLhm
— Tom Marvolo Riddle (@tom_riddle2025) June 9, 2026
The method lets researchers identify chemical elements in materials without damaging them. It can also reveal paint layers beneath the surface.
The XRF scans showed that Nazi imagery had been painted over. A red Nazi flag lay beneath the Bavarian flag. Researchers also found covered wreaths on the monument, soldiers in the scene, and raised arms of passersby.
The overpainted areas contained high levels of titanium white. That pigment did not appear elsewhere in the painting. A tube of oil paint labeled “Titanium White 10103 Schmincke” was later found among Mercker’s paint tubes.
Researchers said the evidence suggests that Mercker may have altered the painting himself. Some changes appeared rushed or careless.
The study, published in npj Heritage Science, also situates the painting within a broader postwar context. The authors noted that many artists faced little public criticism for their Nazi-era collaboration until well into the 1960s.
The painting now belongs to the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism. The case shows how science, art history, and family memory can work together. It also shows how political symbols can disappear from view without fully leaving the historical record.
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