Soon after he moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s, the artist David Hockney was visited by his mother. As they drove back from the airport, far from her native Bradford, she gazed about her in apparent awe at the beauties of sun-kissed southern California. Then, as Hockney was fond of recalling, she turned and said: “I don’t understand it. Such lovely drying weather and no one’s got their washing out.” Mrs Hockney thus joined Mrs Warhol and Alan Bennett’s “Mam” as working-class mothers who delighted in their son’s success without ever quite understanding it.
Hockney, who has died aged 88, had been similarly awestruck when he first went to California in 1963, commissioned to make work for a show in New York. His response, though, was quite different. Looking down from a Pan Am jet, he marvelled at the blue glint of swimming pools and thought, “My God, this place needs its Piranesi.”
