For this year’s Young Contemporaries exhibition, Hockney designs a poster and exhibits four canvases begun the previous year—Grand Procession of [NESTED]Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style, Flight into Italy – Swiss Landscape, Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style, and Figure in a Flat Style. Assembled as a group and labeled Demonstrations of Versatility, they attest to Hockney’s decision to not be pinned down to a single style.

Hockney bends the rules on a few of the Royal College of Art’s graduation requirements—refusing to complete a final assignment to paint a female model from life, instead basing Life Painting for a Diploma on an image in a male physique magazine; insisting that his friend Mo McDermott be officially hired as a model so that he can make Life Painting for Myself; and submitting a thesis on Fauvism so hastily written that his tutors consider it twice before [NESTED]passing it. Indeed considered exceptional, Hockney is awarded a Gold Medal distinction, which he receives wearing his gold lamé jacket to the ceremony.

He enters into an agreement with the dealer John Kasmin that Kasmin will, as of Hockney’s graduation, represent his work for the next three years.

After a trip to Florence, Rome, and Berlin with his friend Jeff Goodman, Hockney begins teaching at Maidstone School of Art in the autumn. He sets himself up with a studio in his new home at Powis Terrace in West London’s Notting Hill district, [NESTED]where among the first works he completes are The First Marriage (A Marriage of Styles) and Picture Emphasizing Stillness. 

Hockney’s work in the exhibition Four Young Artists: Maurice Agis, John Bowstead, David Hockney, Peter Phillips, which opens in midsummer at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, is noted as a standout by reviewers, and not easily pegged as “Pop art.” The Times notes: “Mr. David Hockney [is] a fantasist with an entrancingly original imagination in[NESTED] which quaintness and caricature are combined. He does not reflect the outer world so much as project an inner one, the wry poetry of which is translated in a technique which can be extraordinarily exquisite and sensitive. But his performance is as precarious as a tight-rope act: the balance is perfectly held.”