IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE

Learn David Hockney Before the Swimming Pools

The first time I came across this In the Mood for Love era of David Hockney was by an art publication, back when I was an art student. The line caught my attention because it already felt familiar — from Louis Armstrong, a track that turns up on every jazz essentials playlist, and from the must watch Wong Kar-wai's film about the longing and restraint. The same words caught me again, this time as the title of a painting series I didn't know before.

David Hockney beside The Cha-Cha that was Danced in the Early Hours of 24th March 1961 (1961), in his studio at the Royal College of Art.

The connection is real, even if it isn't tidy. Hockney took the title of a 1961 painting straight from that 1935 song -In The Mood For Love-. Wong Kar-wai reached for the same words decades later. None of them quotes the others, and the film never plays the song. But they share one thing, desire felt fully and kept at a distance, and that is the mood the David Hockney was working in.

Before the swimming pools, before California and the light that made him famous, he was a student in London art school, painting things he wasn't supposed to say out loud. The three years between 1960 and 1963, his time at the Royal College of Art, are where he became himself. They were also the bravest years he had. When homosexuality was still a crime in England then. He was a working-class boy from Bradford, openly gay before that was safe, and he put desire directly into the work — part of it in the open, part of it in code.

His first college paintings were rough abstractions, more interesting for their energy than their subject. What changed him, -as It appears on his own autobiography David Hockney by Nikos Stangos- was a simple piece of advice from his friend R.B. Kitaj: paint what you actually care about.

The paintings that followed — I'm in the Mood for Love, We Two Boys Together Clinging, Doll Boy, Adhesiveness — are scrawled and deliberately crude, somewhere between graffiti and a love letter. He was reading Whitman, poets of intimacy between men, and he let them into the work. He also hid things in plain sight. In We Two Boys Together Clinging he used a simple cipher, turning initials into numbers: 4.2 is Doll Boy, from Cliff Richard song -Living Doll-, the pop singer he was infatuated with. Across his own figure he painted one word, never. The longing and its answer, in the same painting.

Adhesiveness, 1960. The title is Walt Whitman's own word for love between men. The two interlocking figures are coded in numbers — 4.8 is Hockney, 23.23 is Whitman — so the embrace is with the poet himself.

I'll be honest about the paintings themselves: These aren't his finest paintings, and I don't think they're trying to be. They're young — rough, unfinished, closer to charged sketches than settled works — and the real polish only arrives later, in California. That's not a flaw, though. It's what it looks like to watch someone become himself. And in their own way these may be his most honest paintings, and certainly his bravest. Everything he became known for is already here: the text inside the image, the restlessness, the refusal to keep his life and his work apart.

David Hockney peacefully passed away in June 2026, at 88. By the end the crowds came for the late work, the sun, the iPad landscapes, the easy pleasure of it. Fair enough. But the small, scrappy rooms between 1960 to 1963 read differently now. A young man came from Bradford and a borrowed line of Whitman, the word never across his own portrait, painting his love where it wasn't allowed to be. That was the brave part. The light came after.