Six decades after David Hockney painted A Bigger Splash, his most famous painting, reproductions have become a visual motif in gay domestic life. I’ve seen framed posters, prints and postcards of the work – which captures the moment after a person jumps off a diving board into an otherwise still cyan blue swimming pool – in countless gay households. In my flat, it appears on a cushion cover that I bought after seeing the real thing at Hockney’s 2017 Tate Britain retrospective.
It’s fitting that A Bigger Splash is now emblematic of this pioneer. As an out gay artist who depicted same-sex desire in his work long before male homosexuality was partly decriminalised in England and Wales, Hockney and his paintings challenged the homophobia within the artistic establishment and beyond. And he did so not through the use of highly sexualised imagery, like the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, or with the activist themes of painter Keith Haring, but by reshaping our ideas of beauty, intimacy and desire. That’s how he made the biggest splash.
In 1961, when a student at London’s Royal College of Art, Hockney painted one of the earliest expressions of queer identity in British art. We Two Boys Together Clinging is a childlike painting that shows two figures embracing – and perhaps kissing. The title, which is unavoidably written across the painting, stems from a poem by Walt Whitman that had long been embraced by gay readers for its characterisation of physical closeness and companionship between men. It’s a reference that only some viewers would understand, which was obscure enough to avoid censorship laws at the time. » | Louis Staples | Sunday, June 14, 2026
More on David Hockney here, here, here, and here.
