All you need is love

Drawings, prints and the ‘weirdly shaped’ and ‘unbelievably brave’ paintings from David Hockney’s early years fill an exhibition conceived by and for people who adore his work

- Carla Passino

LOVE fills the latest David Hockney exhibition in London: the love the artist has for other men, the love that dealers and art historians feel for a painter who has never stopped surprising them and the love of a grandson for his grandfather. ‘John Kasmin, my grandfather, met Hockney in the early 1960s and was the first person to promote his work properly,’ says Louis Kasmin, who has curated the show for art gallery Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert.

Mr Kasmin Snr—‘Kas’ to those who know him—represented Mr Hockney until the 1990s, so the artist has always been in both his life and that of his grandson. Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert director James Holland-Hibbert is also a great admirer of the artist, so, continues the younger Mr Kasmin, ‘we thought it would be a really enjoyable project if Kas, myself, [art historian] Marco Livingstone, who has fantastic knowledge, and James could all clash heads and bring the show together’. Because all four men have a soft spot for Mr Hockney’s work from the very early 1960s, they decided to celebrate it with an exhibition that is academic, but also true to the ‘wackiness and imaginative nature’ of that particular period of the artist’s career. ‘In the Mood for Love’ was born.