David Hockney, or David Mockney, for the purposes of this article, is having a show at the Tate Britain. He’s got all he asked for – fame, artistic pre-eminence, glamour – how does someone live with all that? It must be a weight on the soul, as well as a blessing.
To quickly catalogue his oeuvre, he began his career in the late 1950s, at the Royal College of Art, doing prints (one of his last three major exhibitions in London was of his printmaking at Dulwich Picture Gallery), Alan Davie-inspired abstracts, and self-avowed “gay propaganda” works of playful self-discovery. In the early 1960s he moved to America (like WH Auden, whom he admired) and became a painter of swimming pools and the cruel nostalgia of summer (The Rooms, Tarzana for instance, of which more anon).
