At 87, David Hockney is hardly hurting for major retrospectives. There’s 400 of his works hanging in Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton right now. But tucked away in St James at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert is something that hasn’t been attempted before.
In The Mood For Love: Hockney in London 1960-1963 brings together some of the great artist’s earliest works, made while he was still a student at the Royal College of Art up until he left for America. The sun-drenched colours of California would come later. This palette is London postwar grey grime, with splashes of red, white and blue.
Hockney, an out gay man when homsexuality was still very much illegal, painted his crushes and his comrades. He was as disinterested in women as subjects as he was sexually. Penises feature heavily, from abstract tumescent shapes standing proud on the canvas to cheekily scrawled pencil dicks on figurative works.
References to queens, queers and drags are scrawled on the paint, sometimes in tiny letters. In Shame (1960) one phallic representation in oils spunks the title word in shades of seminal fluid onto a backdrop of sheet white, but you have to get close to the canvas to make it out. Is it a secret, or a bawdy joke? His ribald sense of humour is always on surface; in Heaven Perpendicular (1960-61) he arranges the words in cartoon lettering so the pun is obvious, “dicular” running in bubble letters down the side of a big red willy.
The humour and the overt queerness in Hockney’s work quickly won him fans and early collectors, especially in the London arts scene. His first dealer, John Kasmin, sold them at a swift clip in the region of £8 to £15 (still in the low hundreds if you calculate for inflation). The young artist was often too skint to buy proper paints and canvas, so some of these early works are rendered scrappily in ink or pencil on paper.
Many of these pieces haven’t been seen in public, let alone together, since they were in Hockney’s hands. Curator Louis Kasmin, Kasmin’s grandson, has reunited them with a combination of heart and academic rigour. Some paintings have been re-dated in the process of putting the show together; a study for one of the canvases he showed at the 1962 Young Contemporaries exhibition was found casually hanging in one collector’s kitchen.
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There are 15 paintings in the show, but just as exciting are the drawings and prints, some studies for larger works. The large oil painting for The Hypnotis (1963) is currently in Paris, but here there are three smaller studies and prints hung together. It’s a fascinating insight into the creative process, and an archive that was snapped up before it could be assembled. While the colours may not have been dialled up yet, Hockney’s talent and humour are on full display.
Casual Hockney fans and fanatics alike will see something new here. When I visited before the opening, Hockney himself was still due to have a look-round. Maybe it will feel like a (re)discovery for the artist too.
In The Mood For Love: Hockney in London 1960-1963 at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, 21 May - 18 July 2025, hh-h.com
