David Hockney

Galleria Lucio Amelio, Naples

Milan, Palazzo della Ragione, Arte e Omosessualità: da Von Gloeden a Pierre et Gilles. L’amicizia Amorosa, July - November 2007, p. 98

Peter Schlesinger (pictured here) and David Hockney met at UCLA the summer of 1966 when Schlesinger enrolled in a drawing class taught by Hockney.  They became friends and eventually lovers. Schlesinger became Hockney’s primary and most well-known model and muse.  Schlesinger modeled for some of Hockney’s most well-known works, including Sur la Terrasse, 1971, and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972.

Hockney’s first used his photographic images as references for paintings, and by early 1982, the photographs he had taken filled roughly 120 albums.  To Hockney, these were merely 'scrap-books of travel memories plus ideas for paintings, nothing more than that' (David Webb, Portrait of David Hockney, p. 201).  In 1976, Ileana Sonnabend showed Twenty Photographic Pictures at Sonnabend Gallery, marking the first time any of Hockney’s photographs were ever shown in a gallery setting. Following Hockney’s debut  at Sonnabend, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris both presented exhibitions of Hockney’s photographs.