Never before having visited, Hockney moves to California, setting up his home and studio in Santa Monica. He is charmed by the denizens of Los Angeles, where he meets [NESTED]the writer Christopher Isherwood and his partner artist Don Bachardy, actor Jack Larson, screenwriter and director Jim Bridges, art dealer Nicholas Wilder, and master printer Ken Tyler.

Hockney takes up Polaroid photography for the first time, among myriad new experiences. The first painting he makes, Plastic Tree Plus City Hall, is done in acrylic—another change of habit. The strange environment, not to mention the unfamiliar way of life, invigorates his painting practice: he makes his first swimming pool paintings, as well as stylistically bold renderings of the Southern Californian landscape.

For the summer, Hockney teaches at the University of Iowa, then returns to L.A. after a road trip with Ossie Clark and Derek Boshier through the American West with a stop at the Grand Canyon. His first solo show in the U.S. opens in late September in New York at the Alan Gallery, and sells out. In the New York Times, Stuart Preston’s review speaks for the American audience’s enthralled, even rather shocked, reception of Hockney’s series of lithographs A Rake’s Progress, on view at the Museum of Modern Art: “Like Picasso (although unlike him in every other respect), Hockney is primarily not a painter but an image maker, both fun and funny in his deadpan, zanily satirical interpretations of modern life. Paint (or lithography) is just a way of putting his comments across. For they are intensely literary, meant to be ‘read’ like little stories, and very good ones they are. Hockney gets sizzling results in his new version of Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress, a series of prints which wickedly recount his misadventures in the USA, [NESTED]situations that only savage innocence and a wild sense of humor could lead to. This may not be ART but it’s artful and cunning. And solemnity is OUT.”