Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Sdecades after David Hockney painted Big Banghis famous, cartoonish paintings have become a reflection of gay domestic life. I’ve seen posters, prints and cards for the job – which takes one minute after a person jumps from the board into the blue swimming pool – in countless gay families. In my bedroom, it appears on the cushion cover I bought after seeing the real thing Hockney’s 2017 Tate Britain retrospective.
It is fitting that A Big Splash is now the trademark of this pioneer. As a gay artist who expressed homosexual desires in his work long before homosexuality was introduced in England and Wales, Hockney and his paintings challenged homophobia within art and beyond. And he didn’t do this by using highly sexual images, like the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, or with the critical themes of the artist Keith Haring, but by reshaping our ideas of beauty, friendship and desire. This is how they made the big bang.
In 1961, a student at the Royal College of Art in London, Hockney painted one of the oldest works of British art. Two Boys Together We stick together it’s a child-like image that shows two people embracing – perhaps even kissing. The title, clearly written on the picture, comes from a Walt Whitman poem that has long been embraced by gay readers for its depiction of male relationships. It’s a phrase that only some viewers would understand, which was too obscure to avoid censorship laws at the time.
Hockney’s visual style continued Teeth Brushing, Early Afternoon (10pm) W11painted in 1962. As the title suggests, it features two figures – possibly but not men – brushing their teeth before going to bed. This seems normal, until you see the Colgate toothpaste tube shooting at each other. Again, there is an interest in how Hockney leaves little to the opinions of those “in the know” – while still maintaining his innocence in the minds of the masses. It is an early version of a genre of literature that will soon become established within queer culture, in terms of visibility. signs such as hanks and earrings were used to identify each other.
When Hockney moved to Los Angeles in 1964 – five years before the Stonewall riots in New York sparked the West Pride movement – he found more freedom to live openly as a gay man. His work portrayed California as a fun place of swimming pools, lush green lawns, palm trees and the Hollywood Hills. Her portraits of men – and intimate relationships – became ambiguous. In Peter’s book Getting Out of Nick’s Pool, we see a naked boy getting out of a swimming pool, and his bare cheeks are the scene of his drawing. An image like this – based on the archetypal twink as an image of male desire – was very controversial at the time. Some pictures, like from 1965 California shows two men on lilos, floating naked on the water, while Artist’s Portrait (Pool with Two Figures) it shows a clothed man looking down while a white man is swimming.
What has changed significantly in Hockney’s paintings is not only the depiction of male genitalia and desire, but domestic scenes: men bathing, bathing and brushing their teeth. This was a time when being gay was not thought of as a “knowledge” but was defined by bodily functions. In the UK, they are criminalized by mixed privacy and courtesy laws, which prohibit kissing or holding hands in public, as well as “buggery”. There’s an obvious interest in the way Hockney’s paintings show sexuality without overtly showing it, but there’s also a love for them. They emphasized that same-sex friendship can be seen as beautiful – same-sex passion does not have to be bound by loneliness or tragedy, but can be full of joy.
Hockney provided an intersection between queer identity, art and the decorative arts. In the 1960s, Andy Warhol initially struggled to be taken seriously by the New York art scene, which favored “high art” (and straight) artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Hockney’s art was not only sexual, but shamelessly decorative, too, featuring colorful furniture and floral shower curtains.
He was influenced by the environment, and his close friendship with Ossie Clark – one of the famous fashion designers of the 60s and 70s Britain. After meeting as students at the Royal College of Artthe two had a platonic relationship that spilled over into their work. After Hockney received great praise for paintings that reconsidered the surface of the swimming pool as a canvas, where the flowing lines imitate the waves of the water, he proved that “decoration” should not be a dirty word, or keep “minimalist art” useless.
Unlike gay artists such as Haring and David Wojnarowicz, whose work combines art and politics, Hockney has always positioned himself as an artist. (Even in 1988, he did to threaten banning a major exhibition at the Tate in protest of Section 28.) Instead, his story is centered around the realization of gay identity in established spaces, both in the UK and around the world. From making big shows to breaking out sales recordsthey achieved success that no other gay artist enjoyed during their lifetime.
Visually, Hockney’s legacy rests on an aesthetic that is difficult to describe – where something just looks and feels, for lack of a better word, “a little gay”. Whether two men are floating in a pool, a wall full of pictures of his dachshunds or bright, saturated paintings of Yorkshire landscapes, there’s a sense of gayness – and a sense of freedom – that emanates from his work. He did this through the decades of his career, where he explored different styles and styles, from collage to video, printmaking, public art and iPad drawings.
This kind of recycling, which Hockney demonstrated throughout his life, is a goal – and a fantasy – that is deeply rooted in queer culture. That’s why his work is sustainable: Hockney not only saw the beauty of gay life, he shared it with the world.
