PROCK STAR

As a new show dedicated to dandy art twin Patrick Procktor arrives, curator Ian Massey looks back at the tumultous life of one of the best-regarded British artists of his generation.

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In 1963 two artists opened their debut solo shows in London.

Such was the hype surrounding one of them, Patrick Procktor, a flamboyant 27-year-old graduate of the Slade School of Art, that three-quarters of his show at the Redfern Gallery in Cork Street had sold before it had even opened. The other was David Hockney. Both of them young and blessed with extravagant talent, they became firm friends - and the toast of the London art scene. "You couldn't really mention one without the other," said the art critic John McEwen of the two. "It was like Castor and Pollux. They were the dandy art twins of the art world." This week an exhibition devoted to the work of Procktor opens in London. Spanning the years 1962-2002, it features paintings, watercolours and drawings from one of the great lost talents of his generation. For few people now remember the Dublin-born artist who moved to England at the age of four.

At 6ft 5in, with a penchant for theatrical clothing and equipped with a rapier wit, he streaked like a comet through the creative circles of the 1960s. Yet he fell into critical neglect during the 1980s and after succumbing to alcoholism, lost almost everything in a catastrophic fire at his Marylebone flat in 1999.

He died homeless and virtually penniless in 2003.

Procktor was of the generation whose childhoods were marked by the austerity of the Second World War. But where the bleak domestic interiors of the so-called 1950s Kitchen Sink School were redolent of the era of postwar rationing, art in the 1960s was young, witty, colourful, glamorous, reflecting the optimism of the modern world.