David Hockney

If European Pop Art were a mountain, the British painter David Hockney (b. 1937) would be at the pinnacle, and would be sharing the rarefied air with Erró, Peter Blake, R.B. Kitaj and Eduaro Arroyo. Early in his career Hockney culled ideas from graffiti, cartoon drawings, newspaper pictures and the like, using them in motifs related to his exploration of homosexual life. Since the late 1960s he has lived mostly in the Hollywood Hills area of California and been identified with the 'easy life' of sun, swimming pools and gorgeous male bodies. The light and decorative modulations in blond colours, the controlled abstraction and subtle spatial displacements we find in Hockney’s works convey a laid-back mood of 'Never Never Land' and do not readily divulge the underlying, deliberate pictorial discipline.

The roughness and exaggeration in the painting Cleaning Teeth, Early Evening (10 pm) W11 (1962) recall cartoon drawings and scribbles on the walls of public restrooms. This picture is a key work from Hockney’s early period. The actual situation, two men in a ‘69’ position with toothpaste tubes standing-in for phalluses, and the title, 'Cleaning Teeth, Early Evening', suggest something both piquant and jocular. The 1960’s sexual revolution went hand-in-hand with liberalization in art, and it finally seemed permissible for artists to include ‘low cultural’ visual expressions in their works. This surely accounts for some of what we see here, but if we look more closely, the cartoonish and humorous impression gives way to a sense of foreboding. The aggressive mouths and the chains on the scrawny blue figure suggest that the two figures are engrossed in a game of brute force.

A work painted one year later, Two Men in a Shower (1963), might be assumed to be one of Hockney’s Hollywood pictures, but it was actually painted while he still lived in London. After a short visit to Los Angeles in 1961, Hockney painted a pictorial series that reveals his enthusiasm for the sexually liberated life and the wealthy, carefree lifestyle he encountered in California. This was obviously what inspired him to install a shower in the kitchen of his small London flat. It enabled him to depict nude men doing whatever came naturally.

The scene of two men in a shower is pared down to the bare minimum. Hockney has distilled his means in order to create an evocative space around the figures. During this period but also after moving to the USA, his method has involved weaving together multiple pictorial perspectives and spaces, allowing us to wander (visually) back and forth in time and space. We are aware of being in a constructed world, one remembered or dreamed. Hockney frolics in ornaments and fuses them into the picture’s world, in this case, the shower curtain. Curtains are a leitmotif in Hockney’s production, especially the monumental stage variety, and folding blinds also fascinate him: 'They are always about to hide something, or about to reveal something.' So also with Two Men in a Shower.

HBU