David Hockney depicted a 'peaceful, gay paradise' when homosexuality was a crime

Here is the latest breaking news from around the world: David Hockney depicted a 'peaceful, gay paradise' when homosexuality was a crimeJust now Share Save Add as preferred on GoogleAnna LamcheandJosh Parry ,LGBT and identity reporterAFP via Getty ImagesDavid Hockney's We Two Boys Together Clinging was shown at a retrospective of the artist's work at the Tate Britain in 2017One of David Hockney's early paintings depicts a couple wrapped in an embrace. Painted in 1961, this picture may sound like it captures a relatively traditional romantic scene. But at the time, it was a radical piece of work.

That is because the couple in the painting are both men, and in 1961 it was still illegal to be gay in the UK. Hockney, who has died aged 88, painted We Two Boys Together Clinging as a second-year student at the Royal College of Art. Homosexuality was only partially decriminalised some six years later, in 1967, when the law changed to allow sex between two men "in private", so long as they were both over the age of 21.

The Details

The 1961 painting, inspired by a Walt Whitman poem of the same name, was an early statement of intent by an artist who would go on to become a defining figure of British – and LGBT+ – culture. Over the next decade, Hockney continued to break social taboos by celebrating same-sex relationships in his art - often by depicting the quiet, everyday moments of gay domestic life. There is an underground quality to some of Hockney's early work.

His pictures are reminiscent of graffiti: spiky, expressive and defiant, rendered in bold lines and block colours. "He was really pioneering as somebody who was unashamedly proud of his queerness before the legalisation of homosexuality in '67," says Dominic James Bilton, the co-leader of the Queer British Art Network. In these early paintings, Hockney "showed and made work on same-sex relationships and desire and sexuality" at a time when "not a lot of people were doing that".

Hockney's style changed radically a few years later, after he travelled to California for the first time in 1964. There he painted his famous swimming pool pictures. In one 1966 painting, Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool, a nude man climbs from the water of a swimming pool, his back to the viewer, head turned as though in conversation with someone just out of frame.

What Experts Say

The 1963 painting Domestic Scene, Los Angeles shows one man in a shower while another man washes his back. "Those works are so queer, so sensual and sexy and playful and joyous," Bilton says, adding they also show the "domesticity" and "dull aspects of gay relationships". Hockney was "normalising same-sex relationships...

that we take for granted", Bilton suggests, adding the artist showed that gay people "are just normal people... doing normal stuff, looking at our partners and thinking: 'oh, you're beautiful'".

The story has become one of the most prominent items on the global agenda.