For the second year in a row, Hockney’s work is featured in Young Contemporaries at the RBA Galleries in London, an exhibition that spotlights emerging artists of note. It is organized this year by Peter Phillips, who brings the Pop-inflected paintings of his fellow students at Royal College of Art to the fore. The review of the exhibition in the Times notes a disruption of the status quo: “Among the paintings it is noticeable that abstraction, and particularly the improvised, American-style abstraction, is ‘out,’ and that a new manner, sharply flavoured with the signs, slogans, and mordant humour of metropolitan life, and emanating mostly from the Royal College of Art, is ‘in.’ Mr. Phillips, with his colourful, heraldic evocations of press-button machines and amusement arcades, is its chief representative, aided and abetted by Allen C. Jones, Barrie Bates, David Hockney and Peter Kaye (the last three of whom introduce a weird, satirical element).”

Young Contemporaries results in a steady stream of visitors to the RCA, who look on at Hockney’s paintings in progress, including The Cha Cha That Was Danced in the Early Hours of 24th March 1961, We Two Boys Together Clinging, and Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style. Among those drawn to Hockney’s work at this time is Mo McDermott, a textile design student from Manchester who meets Hockney and becomes one of his favorite models. In McDermott’s recollection, “I told him I loved his paintings, but he was very shy. He realized I came from the north and told me he did too. Then I told him I’d been modeling at St Martin’s and he asked me if I’d model for him.” Hockney also meets the dealer John Kasmin, then working for Marlborough Gallery in London, who personally acquires Doll Boy from 1960.

Hockney is painting so much that he can’t consistently afford to buy materials. Fortuitously, he discovers he has a facility for etching, a highly affordable medium at the RCA given that the graphics department provides the materials free of charge. Among his early prints is Myself and My Heroes, which offers the line “I am 23 years old and wear glasses” and includes a self portrait (in army cap) along with the figures of Walt Whitman and Mahatma Ghandi. 

With the money from a Guinness Award for etching and a painting prize at the John Moores Exhibition, as well as from a commission to decorate the SS Canberra ocean liner along with several other RCA students, Hockney[NESTED] visits New York for the first time. He stays with fellow student Mark Berger and his parents on Long Island. One of the first stops Hockney makes is the Museum of Modern Art, where curator William S. Lieberman buys one of each print Hockney shows him. Lieberman is so impressed with the work that he sells all of the remaining prints for Hockney. Lieberman also introduces Hockney to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where Hockney begins works on a new etching, My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.

In the evenings back on Long Island, Hockney and Berger watch television. One of the commercial appeals, an advertisement for Lady Clairol hair [NESTED]dye, catches Hockney’s attention: “Is it true blondes have more fun?” Hockney immediately becomes a blond and achieves his signature appearance.

Back in London that autumn, he begins a series of etchings based on A Rake’s Progress by William Hogarth (British, 1697–1764), supplemented with his memories of New York. The influence of Hogarth will become increasingly significant with the 1975 production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress.

A raised curtain, a recurring motif throughout Hockney’s body of work over the coming decades, appears for the first time in A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style. He begins the painting while thinking about Constantine Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” written in Greek in 1898. Hockney is among a new tide of advocates for Cavafy’s poems, which openly address homosexual desire and were long dismissed as sentimental.

On his first visit to Italy, after an initial ride through the Alps in the back of a van without a view, Hockney’s spirits are uplifted at the Uffizi in Florence, where he sees a large, cross-shaped crucifixion scene by the Sienese Gothic painter Duccio (died 1319). It is the strange van experience, however, that he chooses to depict [NESTED]in a painting, Flight into Italy – Swiss Landscape, completed in 1962.