David Lynch, Visionary Filmmaker and Artist Who Embraced Mystery, Dies at 78

David Lynch, the visionary filmmaker and artist who mined the strange and restless depths of the soul, has died. He was 78.

His death was announced on social media on Thursday by his family, who did not provide a cause. Last year Lynch announced that he had developed emphysema, a chronic lung condition, due to years of smoking.

“There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us,” the Lynch family wrote on Facebook. “But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.’ It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way.”

An artist of epochal scale, Lynch necessitated a genre of his own: “Lynchian,” used to describe his opulent, mysterious, and monstrous yet recognizably human creations. Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986), and Mulholland Drive (2001) are among his greatest achievements in film, characterizing his signature synthesis of horror, sensuality, and gallows humor. His foray into television, Twin Peaks (1990–91, and later given a sequel series in 2017), which Lynch co-created with Mark Frost, is a pastiche of melodrama, detective fiction, and a peculiarly American small-town eccentricity. A dedicated fanbase is still teasing secrets from the cult classic, with no conclusion in sight.

“Anybody lucky enough to grow up during the prime Lynch years—the ’80s and ’90s—had the architecture of their brain significantly rebuilt by his genius,” Marc Glimcher, the president and CEO of Pace Gallery, which represented Lynch, told ARTnews. “What an unbelievable loss of a pure creator. He turned insanity into philosophy.”

David Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana, in 1946. While he was a student of painting at the Boston Museum School and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the late 1960s, he developed his first “moving painting,” in which animations are projected over two or three-dimensional still artworks. In Lynch on Lynch, a book of interviews between Lynch and filmmaker Chris Rodley, he described learning the basics of stop motion animation and cinematography from the staff of a camera shop in downtown Philadelphia. His breakthrough short movie-sculpture-painting, Men Getting Sick (1960), involved casting his own head in plaster, and applying more of the glop to the screen.

Over the next five decades, he maintained a porous practice spanning painting, printmaking, music and sculpture. Famed gallerist Leo Castelli gave Lynch a solo show at his SoHo gallery in 1989; a cursory glance at the paintings in Lynch’s studio had Castelli sold. “This man knows what he’s doing,” Castelli recalled thinking. Artforum called the show of paintings, many of which starred grotesque reflections of suburban America, “eye-opening.” Roberta Smith, in a New York Times review, called the paintings “familiar, unoriginal, and slick.”

But only in recent years had his painting and sculpting garnered the same popular attention as his filmography: a 2012 essay about his studio work in Hyperallergic was titled “David Lynch’s Art Doesn’t Suck.” His paintings were the subject of a retrospective at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, his alma mater, in 2014. A feature-length documentary about his art practice, David Lynch: The Art Life, was released in 2016.

People “don’t really take painters seriously if you’re known for something else. You’re supposed to only do one thing, right? But now things have changed,” he told ARTnews in 2018 upon a Los Angeles exhibition of paintings featuring Kafkian metamorphosis made, in part, from watercolor and cigarette ashes.

He told ARTnews that he didn’t know much about contemporary art (“I like childish, bad painting”), and in the same breath cited a lifetime of inspirations, including Robert Henri’s book The Art Spirit, which was gifted to him high school. The book argues that creation is inextricable from humanity, despite the enigma of inspiration.

In a career defined by fluidity, mystery was the only constant in his work. Lynch famously told an interviewer that Eraserhead, a film about the frazzled single father of a grotesque infant, was his most spiritual film.

When asked to elaborate, Lynch replied, “No.”