John Kasmin remembers a trip with David Hockney in 1965

John Kasmin, the dealer who discovered the artist David Hockney in the Sixties, remembers selling his first drawings for £7.

By Ellie Pithers 06 September 2013 • 7:00am

John Kasmin remembers a trip to Minneapolis with David Hockney, 1965 Credit: Photo: courtesy of john kasmin

This is me and David Hockney looking at a slide projector, joking around at a hotel in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In those days, when you wanted to look at photographs in colour you put a tiny 35mm slide inside one of these gadgets. I had my own gallery and travelled with transparencies of recent work by the artists I represented. The $10 bill must have been a joke: he’s offering me $10 for whatever he’s looking at in the viewfinder.

We were in Minneapolis as part of a British crowd visiting for an exhibition of the new London painting scene at the Walker Art Center. There were about 10 of us, including Allen Jones, Joe Tilson and Richard Smith. It was so cold none of us had ever experienced anything like it – 40 below. On the morning of the day this photograph was taken we had been ice-fishing, a Minnesota hobby where they cut a hole in the ice, sit with a bucket of Bloody Mary and hope to catch a fish, with a local collector. We were all quite merry by the afternoon, when the picture was taken, and were waiting for the evening show to open.

Hockney and I were pretty thick. In 1960 I flipped for a picture of his called Doll Boy, which cost £40 in a student show, Young Contemporaries. It was a strange picture, between abstract and figurative, that won my affection straight away. It hit me the way a dress must hit a girl: you think, 'God, that’s it!’

I sent him a letter at the Royal College of Art, where he was a student, inviting him to tea. He had black crew-cut hair and National Health glasses and was frightfully shy and very poor. I liked what he was doing so I tried to get him represented by the gallery where I worked, the Marlborough. They found the work a bit sloppy and silly, so I started selling the odd drawing on his behalf for seven or eight pounds and not taking a cut. When I set up my own gallery in 1963, Hockney was one of the first people I arranged to represent.

The reaction to his first solo show, in 1963, was terrific. He became a star at college; he was something of a rebel. When he won £100 for a print, he spent it on a trip to New York. He came back blond, self-confident and more flamboyant. He didn’t pass his exams at the Royal College because there was an element he wouldn’t do – write an essay or something – so he decided if he couldn’t have a gold medal he would have a gold lamé jacket. Pranks like that made everyone fall in love with him. He had an engaging, delightful nature, but it wasn’t calculated – he was cheeky rather than wicked.