joseph scissorhands: In the Mood for Love: Hockney in London, 1960-1963

David Hockney - The Cha-Cha that was Danced in the Early Hours of 24th March 1961

"What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing. You wouldn't be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought." - David Hockney

David Hockney's early work is among my favourite of his ouevre. I enjoy the delicate dance between loose figuration and both painterly and hard-edge abstraction with added letters and numbers representing personal ciphers. It was a joy then to visit Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert's gallery once again in St James's to view this intimately scaled show of Hockney paintings completed whilst still a student at the Royal College of Art and more, before he would leave these shores to forge a new life in America. Its modest scale is in direct contrast to the huge career-long retrospective survey of the 87 year old artists' work running concurrently at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Many of the paintings on display here at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert are being exhibited together for the first time. Hockney was an out gay man and happily gives an insight into his lifestyle in these paintings at a time before homosexuality was decriminalised in 1967. Images of phallic shapes, young men, drag queens and paintings with titles such as Erection, Thrust and The Love Paintings are executed with a bawdy sense of humour and certainly announce his sexual proclivities unapologetically. This boldness won Hockney many fans who snapped up the paintings from his then dealer John Kasmin who spotted Hockney's artistic potential at this early stage. Kasmin's grandson Louis, incidentally was responsible for curating this show. Hockney would go on to be a great colourist and their are certainly hints of this here with flashes of vivid reds, pinks and oranges in the paintings. His love of the printmaking process is also very much in evidence with a magnificent suite of his Rake's Progress etchings dominating one wall of a gallery. Visitors to the exhibition can also see the excellent Myself and My Heroes, The Diploma and The Hypnotist etchings. It is interesting to note that Hockney only turned to print whilst at the RCA because he'd run out of money for canvas and paint and the RCA printmaking department offered free materials. Drawing has always been a constant for Hockney. His observational and recording skills are second to none. Drawing is the true talent that underpins his art and is evidenced in the etchings here and in many of the paintings also. He would go on to demonstrate his mastery of line in later, more representational figurative drawings in the next decade. This is an interesting show in that many of the works are lesser-known and show a young Hockney having moved to the capital from Bradford fully engaging in the gay lifestyle as well as immersing himself into the artworld of the period absorbing ideas from contemporary art of the time before he would go on to fully develop his own style in California.