Homosexuality was, after all, still illegal in Great Britain then, not that it stopped Hockney from testing society’s limits while still enrolled at the Royal College of Art. The artist’s famous playful, homoerotic themes are certainly already there, but consider the time and place.
The famed British painter David Hockney is best known for his vividly colored portraits of life in Los Angeles-as well as, in recent years, his iPad art-which is precisely why the beginnings of his career in London in the 50’s and 60’s, as seen in the massive retrospective at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, are so interesting.