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When one of David Hockney’s iconic swimming pool pictures sold for $90.3m (£70.3m) in 2013, he became the world’s most highly valued contemporary artist. Now paintings, drawings and prints that he sold for a few pounds in the 1960s are being brought together for the first time in a new exhibition.
John Kasmin, an art dealer who first recognised Hockney’s potential in the early 1960s when the artist was studying at the Royal College of Art (RCA), told the Guardian that Hockney’s prices then “rarely ever went above 20 quid”.
He was selling works for as little as £5.
Before setting up his own gallery, Kasmin began displaying Hockney’s paintings, prints and drawings from a back room of a London gallery because his then boss did not appreciate them enough to exhibit them.
Composition (Thrust), 1960. Photograph: Royal College of Art, London
“Yet it wasn’t difficult to sell them,” Kasmin said. “He was popular straight away.”
He first came across Hockney in 1961, when the artist was so short of money for paint and canvas that he had turned to the RCA’s printmaking department, which offered free materials.
Kasmin, 90, recalls him as a shy young man: “We got on straight away. I’m only three years older than him.”
He went on to sell Hockney drawings for between £18 and £22 and to give him his first solo show in 1963 – a sellout exhibition with works priced at about £300 or £400.
This month, Kasmin’s grandson, Louis Kasmin, is staging an exhibition of Hockney’s lesser-known early works. Titled In the Mood for Love: Hockney in London, 1960-63, it opens at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert in London on 21 May.
I’m in the Mood for Love, 1961. Photograph: David Hockney/Royal College of Art, London
Louis Kasmin said: “Many of these [works] haven’t been seen publicly in decades. Some of them were bought in the 1960s and have remained with their owners. Some have travelled privately between collections and dealers without featuring in exhibitions.
“As such, the works on display are the lesser known, but no less engaging, paintings from this period. For example, we have been fortunate enough to bring together the print The Hypnotist, the drawing study for the oil of The Hypnotist, and a painting called Figure Being Hypnotised. All three of these works relate to one of Hockney’s most famous paintings, which is hanging in the Fondation Louis Vuitton Paris show, and have never been exhibited together.”
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Hockney is the Bradford boy who set off for Los Angeles and found inspiration in the American dream, swimming pools and sunlight. His masterpieces include A Bigger Splash, 1967 – now in Tate Britain – in which he captured a shimmering turquoise pool under the intense light of the California sky.
John Kasmin recalled that it originally sold for about £300: “If it sold now, it might be £100m.”
Supported by the David Hockney Foundation, the Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert show explores “the making of Hockney, both the artist and the individual”.
David Hockney’s Two Friends (in a Cul-de-sac), 1963. Photograph: David Hockney
The exhibition catalogue notes that these early works, leading up to his departure for the US at the end of 1963, represent a critical period in Hockney’s artistic evolution, bridging a gap between figuration and the burgeoning experimentation of the 1960s: “These pictures … are filled with expressive figures, often depicting intimate scenes from his own life, such as portraits of friends, lovers, and himself. At the same time, his early use of vivid, flat areas of colour and innovative compositions hinted at the direction he would later take with his famous series of California landscapes and swimming pools.”
The paintings include Two Friends (in a Cul de Sac), 1963, which features two naked men and reflects Hockney’s exploration of his sexuality at a time when homosexuality was still criminalised in Britain. Louis Kasmin said: “Lots of them have annotated backs saying ‘£8’ or ‘£12’ or ‘£17’.”
He added: “The works we have brought together have never really been hung side by side … Hockney’s shows often have a famous work or two from this period, but never a real survey.”
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