David Hockney’s first solo show, which opened in London in 1963, was Pictures With People In, a defiantly figurative title for the poster boy of a new and challenging school of painting, “Pop Art”. He had recently left the Royal College of Art and nearly without his degree, for refusing to draw a nude from life – a requirement – but in the end they awarded him a gold medal.
That year also saw Hockney’s first appearance in Vogue, a group portrait with fellow painters Howard Hodgkin, John Howlin and Ian Stephenson. Vogue called them “The Impact Makers”. Three of the four arrived soberly dressed, one of them, Hodgkin, in a black suit, folded his arms and stared glumly ahead. Stephenson and Howlin looked equally ill at ease. Only Hockney, standing apart from the others, appeared unperturbed. Already blonde-haired care of “Champagne Ice” – “You see, I came home slightly drunk one evening and saw an advertisement on TV which said that blondes have more fun” – his raffish personal style set him further apart: a pale-blue seersucker blazer and fuchsia-pink tie. And then there were those emblematic, owlish spectacles with rims as large as bicycle wheels.
Hockney, born in Bradford in 1937, was the second youngest and the most famous of the four, the most used to being photographed, the most publicly lauded. Just ahead of him lay California, its swimming pools and “A Bigger Splash”, and later on opera and stage sets, “Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy”, Stanley the dachshund, multi-print Polaroid film collages and research into the properties of lenticular devices, eye-boggling iPad pictures and late-in-life “fully immersive” exhibitions. But for now he leant on a large canvas, insouciantly smoking a cigarette.
In 1964 he decamped to Los Angeles. “I used to think London was exciting,” he explained, “Well, it is compared to Bradford; but compared with New York or San Francisco, it’s nothing.” But London would not let him go so easily. He found himself part of its cultural elite, a leading player in “Swinging London” – no matter that he was on the far side of the world. Still, for all his time on America’s West Coast he never lost his Northern accent, which made him almost unintelligible to Vogue’s Cecil Beaton, but as his friend and contemporary RB Kitaj observed: “Northern England is his native strength – and he knows it.”
By then in his sixties, Beaton, a star at Vogue for decades, found in Hockney and his colourful entourage natural successors to the “Bright Young Things” of the ’30s. “I find myself completely at ease with him and stimulated by his enthusiasm, for he has this golden quality of being able to enjoy life,” Beaton said of the younger man. In 1968 he photographed Hockney for Vogue in his west London flat, completing the first and one of the best known of his magisterial double portraits, “Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy”. The great English novelist had been an exile in Los Angeles since the Second World War, and Hockney sought him out the minute he arrived, an admirer of Isherwood’s gay-themed texts and sexual openness.