The Brooklyn Rail

Raves about the grand David Hockney 25 retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (on view until August 31), which I will not have an opportunity to see, have been wafting over the English Channel and across the Atlantic all spring and early summer. But there is an exquisite amuse-bouche in London that sets the stage for the show on the Avenue du Mahatma Gandhi, and it even includes a work featuring that Indian independence leader. This display at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert includes some nineteen paintings and thirteen works on paper and prints plus a set of the sixteen etchings comprising Hockney’s superb 1961–63 update of William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress (1735). In the Mood for Love: Hockney in London, 1960-1963, represents four of the five years Hockney worked in his native Britain before pursuing his own independent aesthetic in Los Angeles and rocketing into international contemporary art stardom.

The catalogue features a commanding and informative essay by Marco Livingstone, the septuagenarian art historian who has been writing well about Hockney for decades. As sexuality is the key theme of the show, Livingstone’s text deftly explores how the artist encoded and expressed his gayness in repressive Britain. It is accompanied by a conversation between gallery sales associate Louis Kasmin and his grandfather, John “Kas” Kasmin, who discovered Hockney in 1961 at the galleries of the Royal Society of British Artists (RBA), began representing him the following year, and gave him his first solo exhibition at his newly formed Kasmin Gallery in 1963—the commencement of a three-decade relationship.

There are a number of visually thrilling and playful student works from Hockney’s Royal College of Art (RCA) days in the show, including the etching Myself and My Heroes (1961), a triptych featuring Walt Whitman and the aforementioned Gandhi alongside a timid, bespectacled “David” in a cap. The Cha Cha that was Danced in the Early Hours of 24th March 1961 (1961), a large and ebullient oil painting from this period, is also on view. But two pictures that dealt with Hockney’s future in America and his past in England stood out the most and signaled his future path.

In I’m in the Mood for Love of 1961, Hockney responded to his first trip to America, and the freedom he experienced in New York City in a picture whose title references a pop song. The artist seems to channel various references: the uneven bifurcation of Mark Rothko’s works; the drips and accidents of paint application reminiscent of Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly (and to some degree the latter’s palette); and the spreading colors saturating the canvas that suggest Helen Frankenthaler. These are mixed with the Francis Bacon-like blurred figuration of Hockney’s early period. A gigantic, mischievously devil-horned, broad-mouthed, toothy character with the artist’s familiar wire-rimmed eyeglasses teeters deliriously on the edge of a slightly off-perpendicular groundline between two priapic, bollard-like skyscrapers. The space above is painted black and below is the unprimed canvas. Typography at bottom reads “July,” and on a line below, “ 9,” in black and red respectively, like the page of a desk calendar (and denotes the artist’s birthday), but he loosely drew and painted a “7” and an “8” to the left of the “9.” At the lower right is “N.Y.” in small black block letters and a “10” in red. He painted “new york.” in script below the figure. Per Hockney’s penchant for wordplay, there are various scrawls and fake stenciled letters throughout: “42” at left (code for the initials “DB” based on the number of the letters in the alphabet, or “Doll Boy,” a reference to the artist’s unrequited love for pop singer Cliff Richard); the double entendre “to QUEENS / UPTOWN” on the figure’s outstretched and seemingly directional left arm; “NO SMOKING / B.M.T.” on his right hip (referring to the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation subway lines from before the MTA’s formation in 1968); a large spectral block “P” floating at upper left; and “Orbachs is only for sissies / who go in drag,” alluding to the department store, written in hesitating black print on the figure’s chest next to a heart symbol. The whole celebrates the release Hockney experienced in New York, which was more sexually permissible in contrast to London at the time. The skyscraper at right, with its apex loosely recalling the Empire State Building, features a couple in silhouette in one window.

A superb tondo painting, The Last of England? (1961), whose neo-Victorian flat gold inner frame mat reads “THE LAST OF ENGLAND? / Transcribed by David Hockney 1961,” channels the artist’s memories of British Victorian art from venerable Cartwright Hall in the West Yorkshire city of Bradford where he was raised. The “transcribed” source image, Ford Madox Brown’s essential Pre-Raphaelite modern life picture The Last of England (1852–55) in Birmingham, fulfilled an assignment at the RCA to rework a famous painting. Brown’s picture interrogating the politics of encouraged and enforced emigration to Australia concentrated on the bitter feelings of a host of characters impelled to leave England on a ship. In the center is a young couple with a baby hidden beneath the wife’s cloak, modeled by Madox Brown and his wife Emma. And in the upper left background is a dentally-challenged criminal shaking his fist at the white cliffs of Kent. Of Brown’s ten characters, Hockney retained these three in his exceptionally sketchy transcription, countering the fastidious realism of Pre-Raphaelitism. It is difficult not to see the artist as a stand-in for Madox Brown at left, identified by “4.8.” at the bottom, numbers corresponding to the sequence of his own initials in the alphabet. He embraces the figure on the right, whose initials at the bottom identify him as “DB.,” in another “Doll Boy” reference.

Two years after painting this dour but connective revival of a Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece about moving abroad, and that epic scene of aspirational New York/America, Hockney visited New York again. And in 1964 he left London for Los Angeles, instigating a British cultural invasion that paralleled that of rock and pop acts swarming the US throughout the 1960s. This influx of fine artists included Frank Bowling, Anthony Caro, Allen Jones, R.B. Kitaj, and Andrew Forge, and then a generation later Cecily Brown, Nicola Tyson, and Matthew Ritchie. But it was Hockney, in his response to the possibilities of America and with his exceptional art historical awareness, who broke the ice.