David Hockney, the great star of the Piccadilly Lights and all round the world this last May (“Sunrise at Sunset” I called it, has often stated there is no longer a Bohemia like he used to know – a lot to do in his mind with bans on smoking and perhaps even a new puritanism that seems to be infecting the world at this time. Well I would, with all due respect to the master, maintain it is not quite as simple as that. certainly as far as the visual arts are concerned, indeed  in culture generally, every new generation, in each place where young artists live and work, will form its own new Bohemia. This is one definition of the Zeitgeist – the Spirit of the Times – a largely German philosophical concept and composite word, that has now entered the English language just like Kindergarten/ Garden for Children!

In spite of the terrible nationalist misunderstandings that underline Brexit, London remains still a great cosmopolitan largely tolerant mega city – beautifully so, and  it still attracts artists to live, work, interact with each other, support each other too. Since 1945 at least many such groups of artists and their hangers on  have come and gone – one thinks of worlds around Francis Bacon Lucian Freud and the Colony Room; Richard Hamilton, David Hockney and Allen Jones walking up and down the Kings Road in the Swinging Sixties, the Sculptors who gathered around the Lisson Gallery up the Edgware Road and the Nigel Greenwood Gallery in Sloane Square in the Seventies – Gilbert and George, Richard Long, Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley and others, only to be succeeded in the happy Hoxton Square Days by the YBA’s, lead by Damien, Sarah, Tracey, Angus, The Chapman Brothers and a host of others.