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n 1962, the Royal College of Art in London balked at awarding young David Hockney his diploma. Their complaint: Hockney hadn't made enough art based on a live model, nor done enough art historical study.

Hockney did ultimately graduate that year with a gold medal for work of outstanding distinction. The Royal College's objections seem more an ironic quirk of history than a crucial pivot that set the artist on his life's path. As ''David Hockney Portraits," the lively, ambitious, and, for its size, wonderfully intimate exhibition in the Museum of Fine Arts' showcase Gund Gallery demonstrates, painting and drawing from life are nectar to Hockney. And he constantly, delightedly debates with art history.

The exhibit, which the MFA organized with London's National Portrait Gallery, in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is the first museum show devoted to Hockney's portraiture. It glides on twin engines: Hockney's keen artistic intelligence and his abiding relationships.

On view, we have new lovers, ex-lovers, art dealers, collectors, friends, family, and Hockney's pet dachshund, Stanley. The artist's mother was a regular subject. Each, except perhaps Stanley, is a collaborator; the paintings represent the layers of connection between subject and painter. They convey not only the time it took to sit for the painting, but the time Hockney has known his subject.

Curators Barbara Stern Shapiro and Sarah Howgate have neatly devised an installation that elucidates Hockney's restless experimentation and the vitality of his social network. Set up chronologically, the show starts with portraits of Hockney's family, dances with several of his favorite subjects, and pauses to explore technical and perceptual forays Hockney has made through the years.

His interest in life drawing started early. A 1955 portrait of his father proves the 18-year-old already had a deft hand with a brush and a gift for capturing the nuances of facial expression.

Hockney came of age during the backlash against Abstract Expressionism that spawned Pop art, but Hockney is no Pop artist. He's too sincere. Like his Abstract Expressionist predecessors, he's concerned with his own gesture, with the primacy of the artist translating his vision to the viewer. Unlike them, he loves narrative.

His series of etchings and aquatints ''A Rake's Progress" (1961-63) plays on 18th-century satirist and engraver William Hogarth's series by the same name, following a raffish Hockney on his first trip to New York. He manages to sell a print to the Museum of Modern Art, then dyes his hair blond and squanders all his money.

Hockney hit his stride after he moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s. His palette famously took on a Southern California luminosity, a contrast to the overcast of his native Yorkshire. ''Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool" (1966) is less a portrait of Hockney's 17-year-old lover hoisting himself out of a swimming pool than it is an evocation of that light and the crisp lines of modernist architecture.

His double portraits, on the other hand, home in on his subjects with the acuity of a couples counselor. Portraits always have the implicit narrative we read in the sitter's expression. These psychologically fraught paintings of couples are ripe with stories, real and imagined.

Look at ''Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy" (1970-71), portraying fashion designer Ossie Clark, his wife, Celia Birtwell (a favorite Hockney subject), and their cat. Inverting traditional portrait stances, Hockney had Celia stand, formal in her long gown, while barefoot Ossie slouches in a chair. A window in the rear makes a gulf between the two figures. Brought together in a painting, they appear to bristle at their status as a couple; each seems to appeal to the artist (and the viewer) for complicity against his or her spouse.

The back story: Clark, a fashion designer known for the outrageous costumes he created for the likes of Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol, was gay. The marriage ended in 1974, after both spouses reportedly had affairs with other men. Clark and Birtwell were both friends of Hockney, so ''Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy" offers up not just the tensions of their marriage, but their triangulated constellation with the artist.

In the 1980s, Hockney, always a student of Picasso, tackled the multiple perspectives of Cubism, both in paint and photographs. ''The Scrabble Game, 1 January, 1983" is a photo collage of his own kin. Hockney insists the camera is incapable of showing time but the paint brush is a master of it. Nonetheless, he tried, using collage, to evoke how the eye roves, how people move and expressions change over a board game. With tiles facing out, the work invites the viewer into the thick of the game. This experimentation loosened his hand; his paintings grew more expressionistic; his sitter's personalities came across in the sway and blot of his brush.

An Ingres show at the National Gallery in London in 1999 provoked Hockney to suggest that the great painter had employed a camera lucida, a prism hung on a rod. It projects an image of the sitter directly onto the canvas that can be traced. His argument threw art historians into fevered debate. Hockney experimented with the technique himself, as seen here in a series of works on paper, ''12 Portraits After Ingres in a Uniform Style" (1999-2000), featuring National Gallery guards.

At the press conference for this exhibit, Hockney said that he must know someone well in order to make a good likeness. He had tea with each subject of ''12 Portraits" the day before the sitting, but he didn't know any of them well, and he said he doesn't know if he achieved a good likeness.

It's a fascinating series. He drew the heads in graphite, the bodies in colorful gouache. Hockney delineated the faces with great care; they are, indeed, beautifully done. But they come across as clinical. The expressions are more, if you will, guarded. That might be due to the camera lucida; more likely, it's the lack of intimacy. They make a mighty contrast to the other portraits here.

In 2002, Hockney returned to direct portraiture, experimenting for the first time with watercolor, crafting a swift, evocative series of double portraits. This has ultimately led him back to oils, which he has been using with the speed and dexterity he learned with the watercolors.

''David Hockney Portraits" concludes with a fantastic, light-handed series of oil portraits made in 2005. In ''Self-portrait with Charlie," he experiments again with the dynamics of relationship, letting his subject, cultural historian Charlie Scheips, observe the artist as he makes the painting -- inverting, or at least equalizing, the usual artist-sitter hierarchy. Like all of Hockney's portraits, it's an open-hearted portrait, and fervently inquisitive about who we are, how we see, and how we relate to one another.