In a revelation that has sent shockwaves through the chintz-upholstered corridors of the art world faster than a spilt G&T at a private viewing, a new book has outed David Hockney as a painter of a ‘peaceful, gay paradise’ during the very years homosexuality was still a criminal offence. Yes, you read that right. While Her Majesty’s government was busy treating buggery like a public nuisance, Hockney was merrily daubing canvases with enough lavender-tinted homoerotica to make a Daily Mail reader spontaneously combust.
The book, a tome so incendiary it should come with a fire extinguisher, reveals that the Bradford-born artist’s sun-drenched Californian idylls were not merely a celebration of chlorinated azure and sculpted torsos. They were a middle finger, a two-fingered salute to the Sweeney-era Britain that had criminalised his very existence. While the rest of the UK was still pretending that homosexuality was a foreign import like garlic or decent wine, Hockney was painting a world where the only thing illegal was a bad tan line.
Let us pause and savour the sheer audacity. Hockney, the man with the platinum crop and the spectacles that look like they were stolen from a startled owl, was creating a visual manifesto for a world that had not yet been legalised. His pool paintings, with their chlorinated shimmer and rippling bodies, were not just aesthetic exercises. They were a blueprint for a society that had not yet been hammered into law. While poor Alan Turing was being chemically castrated for the crime of being himself, Hockney was painting a utopia where the only crime was failing to appreciate a complementary colour scheme.
The book’s author, a scholar with the tenacity of a terrier and the archival instincts of a bloodhound, has unearthed letters and diary entries that confirm what many had long suspected: that Hockney’s gay paradise was a deliberate act of defiance. ‘I wanted to show what life could be like,’ Hockney allegedly wrote, ‘if we stopped treating love like a parking violation.’ The paintings were not merely escapist. They were political. They were a raised eyebrow at the moral majority, a flick of the wrist at the forces of darkness.
And what a paradise it was. For those who have not had the pleasure of gazing upon Hockney’s ‘A Bigger Splash’, imagine a world where the sun always shines, the water is always warm, and nobody ever has to pretend to be something they are not. It is a world without double entendres or whispered confessions, a world where the only thing hidden is the punchline. To think that this vision was being conjured up while the Wolfenden Report was still a twinkle in a reformist’s eye is almost too delicious for words.
The timing, as they say in the trade, is impeccable. Just as the moral pendulum threatens to swing back into the dark ages, along comes a book that reminds us how far we have come. Or how little, depending on your postcode. Hockney’s paradise, it seems, was not just a personal fantasy. It was a clarion call for a world that was waiting to be born.
So raise a glass of something chilled and preferably alcoholic to David Hockney. The man who painted a paradise while the rest of the country was still composing angry letters to the Telegraph. His art was a garden of earthly delights in a climate of institutionalised frost. And this new book is the shears that have finally trimmed the hedge of historical amnesia.
Now, if only someone would write a book revealing that MPs have been painting pictures of a ‘functional parliamentary system’ while Britain crumbles around them. But that, dear reader, would be a fantasy too far even for this correspondent.
