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The Guardian
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hockney in London review – hip, horny but still searching for his own style
Years before he was a modern art megastar, long before the cool pop perfection that would make him one of the most popular painters of the past century, David Hockney was a student. Some of his early works from this period have been brought together at a small but perfectly formed exhibition, curated by Louis Kasmin, grandson of John Kasmin, the dealer who first spotted Hockney. After leaving the Bradford School of Art, Hockney showed up at the RCA in 1959 ready to kick the art world's doors in. But this is not the Hockney the world knows now. There is no simplicity, no calm. There are no cool, flat planes of bright colour. Rather, young Hockney was a frantic, angry, tempestuous thing. And he was clearly slightly over-enamoured of the ultra-hip abstract expressionists in New York. These paintings, prints and drawings are full of vicious scribbles, irate marks and tempestuously flung paint. It's almost bewildering to see the guy known for the precise restraint of A Bigger Splash going all hyper-expressive and emotional. He was also almost unstoppably horny. A vast white phallus plunges into a huge splodge of brown in Erection; another pierces up into a plane of white in Shame. Men embrace chaotically in We Two Boys Clinging Together, while a figure thrums with angry static in Composition (Thrust), the word 'queen' angrily scrawled down its back. These are works filled with the excitement of burgeoning and, at the time still illegal, sexuality. Hockney was learning to embrace being a gay man, and the art here is a pretty good indicator of what he spent most of his time doing. Whatever spare hours he had away from this pastime he clearly spent immersing himself in all the modern art wonders London had to offer. It was his first time living in the capital, his first chance to lose himself in what its galleries had to offer. Hockney's modern aesthetic is so unique, so ubiquitous, so incredibly him, that it's a shock to see such glaringly obvious influences in his work. Twombly-esque scrawls, Bacon-y smudged figures, Rauschenbergian mess, Jasper Johns-like lettering. It's all a little derivative. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Nothing here feels like a rip off or cheap copy. Rather, it feels like synthesis, as if Hockney was absorbing all the big hits of modern art of his time, mashing them together and spitting out something new. Hockney found himself surrounded by competition, too, including the likes of Derek Boshier, Patrick Caulfield and Allen Jones who would soon help invent pop art. He had to raise his game. And his game was clearly not abstraction, which as this show progresses he largely ditches, and for the better. The prints of his take on A Rake's Progress are stark, political and confrontational, and then the last two rooms get even more figurative; a giant bespectacled demon (likely Hockney himself) stomps between New York skyscrapers, a woman dances herself into a blur, two semi-nude, barely there figures haunt an empty room, sitting on a filthy mattress. It's all assured and so confident, bursting with love and sex and partying. It might not be abstract, hard edged experimentation, but it's still undoubtedly something new. The temptation is to view this show purely as the first steps of an artistic giant, to look for hints in all this dark energy and chaos as to what he'd eventually become. That's fair enough, but it's also great art on its own merit, a portrait of youth, excitement, joy, hormones and sheer creative will. In the Mood for Love: Hockney in London, 1960-1963 is at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, London, until 18 July
The Guardian
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
David Hockney's rarely seen early works united in new London exhibition
When one of David Hockney's iconic swimming pool pictures sold for $90.3m (£70.3m) in 2013, he became the world's most highly valued contemporary artist. Now paintings, drawings and prints that he sold for a few pounds in the 1960s are being brought together for the first time in a new exhibition. John Kasmin, an art dealer who first recognised Hockney's potential in the early 1960s when the artist was studying at the Royal College of Art (RCA), told the Guardian that Hockney's prices then 'rarely ever went above 20 quid'. He was selling works for as little as £5. Before setting up his own gallery, Kasmin began displaying Hockney's paintings, prints and drawings from a back room of a London gallery because his then boss did not appreciate them enough to exhibit them. 'Yet it wasn't difficult to sell them,' Kasmin said. 'He was popular straight away.' He first came across Hockney in 1961, when the artist was so short of money for paint and canvas that he had turned to the RCA's printmaking department, which offered free materials. Kasmin, 90, recalls him as a shy young man: 'We got on straight away. I'm only three years older than him.' He went on to sell Hockney drawings for between £18 and £22 and to give him his first solo show in 1963 – a sellout exhibition with works priced at about £300 or £400. This month, Kasmin's grandson, Louis Kasmin, is staging an exhibition of Hockney's lesser-known early works. Titled In the Mood for Love: Hockney in London, 1960-63, it opens at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert in London on 21 May. Louis Kasmin said: 'Many of these [works] haven't been seen publicly in decades. Some of them were bought in the 1960s and have remained with their owners. Some have travelled privately between collections and dealers without featuring in exhibitions. 'As such, the works on display are the lesser known, but no less engaging, paintings from this period. For example, we have been fortunate enough to bring together the print The Hypnotist, the drawing study for the oil of The Hypnotist, and a painting called Figure Being Hypnotised. All three of these works relate to one of Hockney's most famous paintings, which is hanging in the Fondation Louis Vuitton Paris show, and have never been exhibited together.' Sign up to The Guide Get our weekly pop culture email, free in your inbox every Friday after newsletter promotion Hockney is the Bradford boy who set off for Los Angeles and found inspiration in the American dream, swimming pools and sunlight. His masterpieces include A Bigger Splash, 1967 – now in Tate Britain – in which he captured a shimmering turquoise pool under the intense light of the California sky. John Kasmin recalled that it originally sold for about £300: 'If it sold now, it might be £100m.' Supported by the David Hockney Foundation, the Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert show explores 'the making of Hockney, both the artist and the individual'. The exhibition catalogue notes that these early works, leading up to his departure for the US at the end of 1963, represent a critical period in Hockney's artistic evolution, bridging a gap between figuration and the burgeoning experimentation of the 1960s: 'These pictures … are filled with expressive figures, often depicting intimate scenes from his own life, such as portraits of friends, lovers, and himself. At the same time, his early use of vivid, flat areas of colour and innovative compositions hinted at the direction he would later take with his famous series of California landscapes and swimming pools.' The paintings include Two Friends (in a Cul de Sac), 1963, which features two naked men and reflects Hockney's exploration of his sexuality at a time when homosexuality was still criminalised in Britain. Louis Kasmin said: 'Lots of them have annotated backs saying '£8' or '£12' or '£17'.' He added: 'The works we have brought together have never really been hung side by side … Hockney's shows often have a famous work or two from this period, but never a real survey.'
