I Want the World to Stop and Stare Whenever It Sees Me

"It was, perhaps, his father’s inefficiency and dilettantism that led Hockney, as if by negative example, to embrace a life of unremitting industry. He was still a student at the Royal College of Art in London when he began producing accomplished paintings—an improbably eloquent mélange of male nudes, red hearts and brushy passages of sky blue—that caught the attention of the influential art dealer John Kasmin. Hockney’s ascent was swift, and no one was more gratified than his mother, an observant Methodist who read the Bible every day. Over the years, he sent her roses on her birthday and frequently returned to his native Bradford to take her shopping for gloves and suits she could not otherwise afford. 'Always feel flat when David has gone—but it has been lovely,' his mother noted in her diary after he offered to send her and her husband on a trip to Australia. 'I did ask if the trip was to cost him more than he expected, but he said not to worry—"money is to use."'"

In The New York Times, Deborah Solomon reviews Christopher Simon Sykes's David Hockney: The Biography, 1937-1975: A Rake’s Progress.