When David Hockney returned to Los Angeles in the 1960s, he painted a world of shimmering pools, lithe bodies and unfiltered joy. It was a declaration: here, love between men could be a splash of colour rather than a shadow. Now, decades later, a new wave of exhibitions and public installations is reimagining that vision for a generation that never knew the sting of Section 28. The question, of course, is what we do with paradise once it is no longer forbidden.
The revival of Hockney’s ‘gay paradise’ aesthetic coincides with a broader cultural reckoning. Museums from London to Bradford are dusting off his early portraits and poolside scenes, not as relics of a closeted past but as premonitions of a present where queer joy is a state-sponsored good. At the Tate, an upcoming retrospective promises to frame Hockney not merely as a painter of sun-drenched idylls but as a cartographer of liberated desire. The irony is sharp: the same establishment that once ignored or sanitised such works now canonises them as national treasures.
What this means on the street is more nuanced. In Soho, a new queer arts hub has plastered Hockney’s ‘A Bigger Splash’ across its facade, inviting passers-by to see themselves in that turquoise oblivion. Young artists tell me they feel both inspired and burdened by his legacy. ‘He made it look easy,’ one photographer said, ‘but easy isn’t the word for what we’re fighting now.’ The fight has shifted from legality to visibility, from the right to exist to the right to be ordinary. Hockney’s paradise was radical because it showed gay men doing nothing more controversial than lounging, swimming, loving. That ordinariness was, and remains, the real rebellion.
Yet there is a danger in nostalgia. The cultural sector has a habit of polishing its queer icons until they glitter but no longer burn. Hockney’s raw edges his Yorkshire accent, his unapologetic camp, his refusal to be a martyr risk being smoothed into a sanitised brand. The new exhibitions promise to address this by including his lesser-known, grittier works: the darkroom nudes, the collage experiments, the portraits of friends lost to AIDS. It is a necessary corrective. Paradise was never just a pool; it was also an elegy.
Class dynamics play a quiet role here too. Hockney’s rise from a Bradford scholarship boy to a Californian celebrity mirrors a trajectory that remains elusive for most queer artists from working-class backgrounds. The institutions celebrating him are overwhelmingly white, wealthy and London-centric. As one northern gallery director told me, ‘We can recreate the pool, but can we recreate the conditions that let him swim?’ The question hangs in the air.
For now, the UK is wrapping itself in Hockney’s rainbow. School trips, town hall banners, a Royal Mail stamp. It is a remarkable shift from the days when his work was code-switched into ‘homosocial’ or ‘aesthetic’. But the real measure of progress will not be in the gallery gift shop. It will be in the quiet confidence of a teenager in Bradford who sees Hockney’s lovers on a poster and thinks, not ‘that’s brave’, but ‘that’s us’.
