Physique was in fact America’s leading beefcake magazine, its pages populated by thousands of buff men in the nude-including Arnold Schwarzenegger-that Mizer photographed in his home in L.A. (See: his 1962 painting of two men performing oral sex on each other-with Colgate tubes standing in for phalluses.) Increasingly, Hockney’s allusions became more explicit, especially as he began paying homage to Physique Pictorial, a “fitness” publication that the photographer Bob Mizer launched in in 1951. Homosexuality was, after all, still illegal in Great Britain then, not that it stopped Hockney from testing society’s limits while still enrolled at the Royal College of Art. The artist’s famous playful, homoerotic themes are certainly already there, but consider the time and place. The famed British painter David Hockney is best known for his vividly colored portraits of life in Los Angeles-as well as, in recent years, his iPad art-which is precisely why the beginnings of his career in London in the 50’s and 60’s, as seen in the massive retrospective at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, are so interesting.
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