Previously published at wordsofwhitenoise.wordpress.com

‘The modern man I sing’ – goes Whitman’s famous dictum, and much of the work on offer in this thin slice of David Hockney’s early work sings something of a similar tune. Indeed, the notion of modernity – both in the sense of a shifting social landscape emergent in the mid to late 1960’s, (the period from which most of the work here dates), and the demands made on visual artists to negotiate the high modernism of the early twentieth century, informs much of the work made available here at the Walker Art Gallery until 16th March.

At the start of this free exhibition we find the artist caught in an emergent phase, young and grappling with the question of quite how to relate himself to the furious artistic powers surging through that period of history, Hockney is witnessed stepping out from his strong background in draftsmanship developed at the Bradford School of Art, into the pure serene of the Californian sun, and his own famous adaptation of the Pop Art sublime.

It is important to recognise from the outset that what we are offered here is only the briefest snapshot of a transformation that spans a movement from ephebe into artist, and while this collection of work is entirely worth visiting, it very much leaves one asking for more; its brevity ultimately seems a little disappointing.

Of the 40 works collected here, there are significant works in Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool, and We Two Boys Together Clinging, with the latter acting as a focus around which the exhibition develops. The numerous preparatory works which ultimately point towards some of the definitive canvases in Hockney’s ouvre remain tantalisingly insufficient; like the scribbled manuscript of an unfinished poem there is always an interest to be taken in the methodologies of a creative mind at work, but there is a point after which we crave the realisation of the final piece.

What we are really given here is some small cleft of insight into the trajectory of Hockney’s career. The bold, scrutinous pen and ink pieces describe the confidence of the young painter’s talent, and the inclusion of some work in the Art Brut style embodies an interest in the collision and corollaries of art and literature, exploring themes of existence within the contemporary metropolis, and Hockney’s own homosexuality.

As a part of Liverpool’s Homotopia Festival 2014, the artist’s sexuality is given direct prominence with a selection of works that particularly highlight the influence which poets like Whitman and Cavafy had on Hockney during this period of his formative artistic life. We find a man intent on developing the codified sexual tensions latent in the earliest work out into more ostensible and (politically) open statements of sexual celebration.

The exhibition culminates in the glinting surface textures of Hockney’s swimming pool series, tracing an arc of development which always inhabits the early confidence of technical precision, via an almost abstract expressionism, back into the charms of a relaxed naturalism, eventually refining itself in the depthless subjectivity of a Pop Art stylistic.

There is a blank idealism in Hockney’s glazed Californian sky, one perhaps offset by a numinous multiplicity in his attempts to capture the liquidity of water’s movement; it is a context in which the human figure is revealed as both beautiful and troubling – an altogether modern man.

Ben Marshall