Where the artist sat, in a large apartment high above the street, he could see the river, framed by buildings and the gray December sky. On his drawing board, standing beneath the window and tilted toward him, lay a rectangular sheet of white cardboard, roughly three feet wide and a foot and a half tall, on which, with quick brushstrokes, he was painting fire—his sable-hair brush dipping in a Campbell’s-soup can that held water, travelling to a plastic palette on which was squeezed red gouache, twirling there to pick up color, and then moving over to the cardboard to deposit the paint. Short strokes of the sable, licking the cardboard: red darts of flame. The morning air outside rattled from traffic crossing the high bridge over the river from island to island, but only some of this noise entered the apartment, filled as it was with its own sound—the German words of an operatic aria (“The fires within me burning/ Consume each vital part”). The artist smiled as, listening, he leaned back in his chair and regarded the flames. His skin was pale, with a translucence to which beard shadow drew attention. His chin was firm; his eyes were sharp behind large glasses; brown roots were disclosed under a thatch of hair dyed a color called Winsome Wheat. He said, still coolly perusing the fire, “Maurice, love, we’re running out of vermillion.”
From the depths of the room, from behind a model theatre standing on a table, a voice replied, “We need some more indigo, too. I’ll go down to Sam Flax’s in a while.” This was from an equally pale young man, the artist’s studio assistant, who was making a tiny model of an Egyptian temple.
The record ended, and they worked on happily. (Such absorption must be happy!) Then the phone rang; it was on a table near the artist, but the assistant came to answer it. “It’s Henry,” he said. “For you.” The artist talked on the phone for a minute or two about eating turkey. While he talked, listened, and occasionally laughed, he went on painting; he leaned back between flurries of brushstrokes to consider the work. When he hung up, he said, “Henry’s coming over around five, for tea.”
The word “tea” prompted the assistant to say, “I’ll make some now.” When he returned, he carried two cups of strong tea with milk and no sugar—a mud-colored liquid from which steam rose. The artist worked on, though the phone rang often now and other people appeared: a good-looking middle-aged black woman bearing a mop, with which she dusted under the artist’s feet, smiling as he showed her the flames; a young man called Michael, putting on an overcoat, who stuck his head round the door to say goodbye; and an elevator man with a parcel of cigars. And still the flames grew, until they looked like bright, burning teeth. And beyond the opposite buildings, seen through the window, the gray waters of the river swirled.
SCENE AND CHARACTERS
The river is the East River. The street is Sutton Place. The opera is “The Magic Flute.” The artist and his assistant are working on the sets and costumes for a production in May, 1978, at Glyndebourne, England. Both artist and assistant are English. (The tea is Twining’s English Breakfast.) The assistant’s name is Maurice Payne. The artist, David Hockney, wears a white shirt with a faint double brown stripe, sleeves half rolled up; a bright-red loose-weave straight-bottomed tie; black trousers, with broad gray vertical stripes, that are held up by yellow braces (the fly flap at the top unbuttoned and some red and gray paint spots here and there); no shoes; and one green sock and one brown sock (the green sock has a hole in the toe). He will shortly don a white floppy cotton cap with a peak that looks like the sort of thing worn by French golfers at the turn of the century. He is forty at this point, and gives little sign of realizing that he is a man walking a tightrope between once upon a time and happily ever after.
8-C
The apartment, which has six and a half rooms and is on the eighth floor, belongs to a friend who lives in Europe much of the year. The friend has lent him this apartment—8-C—for four months. There is an air of camping out in the apartment, which the maid, who works for Hockney’s friend, does her best to dispel. The dining room has been used only once for dinner. Tea leaves frequently clog the strainer in the kitchen sink. All the furniture of the living room, where Hockney and Payne are working, has been put in storage. The floor is bare parquet. On the walls Hockney has put up his own things: a Dry Dock Savings Bank calendar, for writing down engagements; a sheet of paper with the telephone numbers of close friends; five postcards of Egyptian art in the Metropolitan Museum; color reproductions of a Whistler beachscape in the Frick Collection and of a St. Sebastian by Antonello, with arrow shafts sticking out of thigh and torso and his sale garment a pair of tight, surprisingly modern-looking briefs; a large plan and elevation of the Glyndebourne stage; a clipping from the New York Times of a by no means wholehearted review by Hilton Kramer of an exhibition of Hockney’s work (seven paintings, nineteen prints, and eighteen drawings at the André Emmerich Gallery); and a large piece of white paper on which he has written in red felt-tip the whereabouts of various scenes in “The Magic Flute”—for example, “Act II, Scene 1, a garden, grove of palms; Scene 2, porch of the temple; Scene 3, a garden by night.”
On a marble mantelpiece are stacked six copies of “The Blue Guitar,” a book of etchings he recently made to accompany the Wallace Stevens poem. A dying yellow rose in a silver vase stands between some boxes of film for his four cameras and a framed eight-by-ten color photograph, taken frontally, of Michael wearing nothing. Seven different recordings of “The Magic Flute” are piled beside the stereo, including one, conducted by Toscanini, that he paid forty dollars for the week before and says is awful—“It sounds as if it were recorded by his mother.” Among many books scattered around are Susan Sontag’s “On Photography,” a biography of Samuel Pepys, the catalogue of a Cézanne show at the Museum of Modern Art, a Wodehouse novel, and “Collected Shorter Poems of W. H. Auden,” which falls readily open at page 276—a poem called “Metalogue to the Magic Flute,” which Hockney likes reading aloud, in an accent of broad Yorkshire tinged now and then by Manhattan. Close at hand are a stopwatch, for timing the scenes, and a Panasonic electric pencil sharpener. Under the table supporting the model stage are numerous big art books, in which, browsing, he finds inspiration in details from Venetian and Florentine paintings—for example, some rocks in a work by Benozzo Gozzoli in the Medici Chapel, Florence, which have helped him with the landscape in Act I where the Queen of Night appears. However, it is a Kool cigarette ad in Rolling Stone which has influenced the waterfalls in the flood scene of the “Flute.” Hockney doesn’t underestimate his audience’s intelligence, and he thinks that one or two people at Glyndebourne, given a moment to reflect, may look at the cascades and say to themselves, “Golly, menthol green.”
He dips the brush in the water and dries it on a cloth. He puts it in a jar, hairs up. He then takes a fatter one.
“DIE ZAUBERFLÖTE”
Hockney was sitting next to John Cox, the Glyndebourne director of production, at the opening night a few years ago of Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” for which Hockney had done the sets and costumes, when Cox—at once passing the time during a scene change and making his move before a standing ovation and curtain call came for the designer—said, “Fancy doing another one?”
Cox was aware that Hockney was probably Britain’s most successful artist, whose pictures fetched higher prices than those of any other living British painter, and that Glyndebourne, in terms of money, paid peanuts. However, he also knew that Hockney was opera-crazy. He plays opera records while painting and opera cassettes while driving, often matching the music to the landscape (Offenbach while entering Paris, “Tannhäuser” while driving through the Alps). Hitchhikers, whom he frequently picks up, are to be seen getting out of the back of his BMW, where they have been sitting between the speakers, with their hands over their ears and their heads presumably ringing. Cox felt that Hockney was the right person for “The Magic Flute.” The opera has “a combination of lightness, magic, and idealism,” Cox says. “It has in it a belief in the perfectibility of man and the worthwhileness of striving for it. David moans quite a lot about our failures to get somewhere, and that only proves he believes it’s possible.”
Hockney (who said yes on the spot) did his homework. He went to Salzburg to visit the Mozart museum and to see a marionette version of the opera. In the British Museum reading room, he read up on eighteenth-century Freemasonry. (The libretto often alludes to Freemasonry’s then liberal doctrines and to its struggles with clericalism and Hapsburg power.) The opera is set in ancient Egypt, and Hockney looked into eighteenth-century Egyptology and some of its misconceptions. He found in Vienna an engraving of the period which showed five pyramids at Giza instead of three. He decided to use the traditional legerdemain of flying scenery—drop curtains—which most stage designers consider old-fashioned, but which strikes him as exciting. And then he decided to paint the scenery in New York, a city at first glance neither very Egyptian nor very eighteenth-century, although—as he is quick to tell you—Lorenzo da Ponte, the librettist of other Mozart operas, eventually became a professor at Columbia University. (Karl Ludwig Gieseke, one of the two librettists of “The Magic Flute,” was made professor of mineralogy and chemistry in Dublin.)
MONEY
Hockney used to be considered quite nonchalant about money, even when he was poor. These days, he says, “I never feel rich at all, but I don’t feel skint, either.” He thinks of himself as a gypsy, a perpetual art student—though one who now possesses a more or less limitless credit card. He was born and grew up in Bradford, an industrial city in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where his parents were somewhere on the borderline between working-class and lower-middle-class, interested in good education for their children, not able to afford as much of it as they would have liked. David and an older brother, Paul, got scholarships to Bradford Grammar School; Paul had to get a job at sixteen, but state grants saw David through art college in Bradford and London. He sold his first painting—a portrait of his father—for ten pounds in 1954, when he was seventeen; and while he was at the Royal College of Art in London he began to sell work regularly, first to fellow-students for a few pounds or some groceries, then outside customers. He made an agreement with John Kasmin, a young London dealer, while he was still at college, and a year after graduating he had sold a series of etchings for five thousand pounds. He has never looked back.
Perhaps because he lives abroad so much, Hockney is often thought to be a tax exile from Britain. The fact is that he is a British taxpayer. However, to minimize his taxes, quite legally, he has set up two companies—one in Britain and one in Gibraltar—to receive overseas-earned income. His brother Paul, who is now a Bradford city councillor and is a past Lord Mayor of the city, is his accountant. Kasmin is still his dealer; an unwritten agreement to handle Hockney’s paintings and drawings has tacitly replaced any written contract. (The first contract was for six hundred pounds a year and gave Kasmin the right to sell Hockney’s work throughout the world except—lightening the seriousness of the document—in Greenland, Zanzibar, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, and the Scilly Isles.) Kasmin says, “Hardly a week goes by when someone doesn’t try and steal him away.” Although he once suggested to Hockney that he find another dealer (Kasmin, a former poet, was having dreams of seeing his obituary written in terms only of his being Hockney’s dealer), their friendship remains close. It was through Kasmin that Hockney acquired André Emmerich for a dealer in New York. Paul Cornwall-Jones has published Hockney’s etchings since 1963. His firm, Petersburg Press, handles twenty-three artists, including Jasper Johns, Henry Moore, and Claes Oldenburg, but Hockney accounts for a disproportionate amount of its business.
In the past, Hockney tried to duck the entanglements of money, but he now seems ready to face the fact that, as Paul Cornwall-Jones puts it, “he’s part of the art market, whether he likes it or not.” Kasmin says, “David likes to think of himself as a bit of an old-fashioned Socialist. He feels guilty about the high prices of his work.” Kasmin’s art business has recently been combined with the American firm of Knoedler and moved to more spacious premises, in Bond Street. At Emmerich’s, on Fifty-seventh Street, the carpets, the receptionists, and the discreet atmosphere suggest consideration given to the fact that money once bound for Wall Street now finds art and antiques a good thing (and European money, too; two buyers at a recent show of Hockney’s were German). Hockney’s larger paintings now fetch at his dealers’ somewhere between fifty thousand and a hundred thousand dollars (of which Hockney gets roughly fifty per cent); demand for his work exceeds supply. His drawings are now priced between five thousand and ten thousand dollars. As for his etchings, “The Blue Guitar” was published not only in book form but in sets of twenty etchings—an edition consisting of two hundred sets, plus thirty-seven sets of artist’s proofs. The dealers sell these at about nine thousand dollars per set. Of that sum, minus certain production costs, the artist receives half. Hockney loves making etchings and still thinks of it as a popular-priced medium. But, faced with the fact that even his etchings are expensive now, he says, “I don’t know what you can do about it. You can tell the publisher to sell them more cheaply, but then someone will buy them up, corner the market, and sell them again, making a lot of money, which neither you nor the publisher will get. You’re trapped, really.”
This kind of thing has already happened with one or two of his paintings. Emmerich sold a picture of Hockney’s in 1972 for eighteen thousand dollars to a man who acted as if he knew the artist but who in fact was the agent for some European dealers; within a year, after passing through an art fair in Germany, it had been sold for nearly fifty thousand dollars. Hockney has come to realize that there isn’t much sense in other people’s making more out of his paintings than Emmerich, Kasmin, or he himself makes. His general shrewdness is not in question. In 1976, when the London publishing firm of Thames & Hudson was pondering whether to publish his account of himself and his painting, “David Hockney by David Hockney,” with eighty color plates at ten pounds or a hundred and twenty color plates at twenty pounds, he said he thought the book would be more successful at the lower price, and he was probably right, for the publishers chose the lower price, and the book has so far sold fifty thousand copies worldwide. (In the book, he confesses to several ploys he has used for getting ahead: putting long titles on his pictures in order to get more space in group-show catalogues, and bringing large canvases into college so as to qualify for a larger work space.) Nevertheless, he is perfectly happy to accept fourteen hundred pounds from Glyndebourne for the “Magic Flute” work, which will take him roughly five months. He says, “I’m overpaid for some things, so I can be underpaid for others. And maybe I need to be overpaid so I can afford to do this.”
Norman Stevens, a Bradford fellow-student and old friend, says, “David’s not concerned with material things, really. He just uses them, like oil paint.” He gives away opera seats and airline tickets to his friends. He gave one of the first big awards he won, the fifteen-hundred-pound first prize at the annual John Moores Exhibition in Liverpool in 1967, to his parents to help pay for a trip to Australia. He gets his dealers and publishers to arrange trips for him, have his cameras repaired, and send him yellow tulips, which he has a thing about. And these obligations—at once wanted and kicked against—tie Hockney to his business associates and give him the freedom to get on with his job. He says, “In art, really, the money’s a kind of by-product. It’s not how you measure your activity, the way it may be in other occupations. Perhaps, therefore, it’s easy for an artist to sound a bit moralistic about it.”
THE EMPTY CHAIR
He picks up the sheet he is working on and takes it to the model stage. He slides it in from the top, switches on an overhead spotlight, and then sits down in a chair. A line on the floor by its front legs marks a distance from the stage equivalent to that of a good seat at Glyndebourne. From the rear, Hockney in the chair looks like one of the figures in his 1970 painting “Le Parc des Sources, Vichy.” In this picture, three chairs are seen from the back: one is unoccupied, and the two people sitting in the others are looking into a green funnel formed by two converging lines of trees; the empty chair is presumably that of the artist, who has got up to paint the painting. Hockney sits and broods about the flames for a minute or two. Then he brings the sheet back to the drawing board, squeezes out some white and some yellow gouache, and goes back to work. From time to time, he exchanges snatches of conversation with Maurice, who is penning the German word “Vernunft” (“Reason”) on the pediment of one of the temples.
“Did you eat turkey for Thanksgiving, Maurice?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t you find it a bit dry, like cardboard?”
GETTING STUCK INTO IT
Maurice spent Thanksgiving with friends in New York. His wife was in London, and he was living in an apartment downtown during his and Hockney’s stay in the city. Hockney went up to Rhinebeck for the Thursday holiday but was back in Sutton Place at work on Friday. Norman Stevens remembers him in college as “an incredible grafter;” that is, as someone with a great capacity for hard work. When Hockney moved to his first studio, in Powis Terrace, Notting Hill, in 1962, after leaving the Royal College, he made a bedside sign: “GET UP AND WORK IMMEDIATELY.” In summer, he tends to work slightly longer hours, because there is more daylight. In winter, he generally starts soon after nine, without breakfast, and works, fortified by cups of tea, till lunch; then, in the afternoon, till five or six—though when he and Maurice were working on the “Blue Guitar” etchings they often finished at 2 A.M., after an eighteen-hour day. He ignores weekends, and instead, when he is in London, may take a day off in midweek to go up to Bradford to see his parents, or may take an afternoon for visiting a museum. He now spends about six months on a painting. One double portrait—of George Lawson, an antiquarian book dealer, and Wayne Sleep, a dancer with the Royal Ballet—he worked on constantly for nine months, putting the figures in, taking them out, and putting them in again; he still regards it as unfinished. A lot of work gets thrown away; his local garbage collectors in London are said to keep a close eye on his dustbins. Sometimes a picture may be thrown away soon after it’s begun; sometimes much work has been invested. When he and Maurice had worked several days on one of the “Magic Flute” drops, they decided that the pyramid they were doing looked like a brick oven, and scrapped the design. Hockney has found that painting has become more difficult with time. “You don’t let things go as easily as you did. Maybe it’s that the more you know about it, the more difficult it becomes—in everything.” But if something isn’t working out he doesn’t hang around for inspiration to strike. He says, “Only work—sitting down and getting on with it—is going to put it right.” Hockney did a hundred drawings for the “Rake’s Progress” production at Glyndebourne, and he turned up every day for rehearsals. (He reckons he spent more than his fee on materials and travelling expenses.) John Cox says, “He has real technical insight into the problems of production.” When the London dealer Angela Flowers asked a number of artists to do pictures to be printed as postcards, Hockney was the only one who sent her a design that was precisely Post Office-regulation-postcard-shaped.
His work habits, however sensible, do not always coincide with those of his friends. Several complain that he will drop in for a late-night chat and at once fall asleep, sitting up. On some projects, like “The Magic Flute,” he cheerfully chats as he works. On some paintings, working alone, he tears his hair. When he was in California in the sixties, he sometimes did what he calls the boring bits—countless blades of grass on a lawn, crosshatching in an etching—while watching daytime TV. Working in England, he listens to records or the radio. But even while doing fairly mechanical areas of pictures which one might do automatically he remains intent on what he is creating. In portraits, particularly. “Your eyes travel back and forth between the subject and the paper,” he says. “All the time you’re using your hands you have to be thinking. Afterward, if you don’t fall asleep from tiredness, you feel like doing something like washing dishes, which is mindless and lets you recover.”
THE QUEEN OF NIGHT
Hockney enjoys showing visitors the set and demonstrating how the small figures on the stage for scale are made of modelling clay; the mountain, hollow and in two parts, is papier-mâché. The first thing he made was the dragon, based on the beast in the Uccello “St. George and the Dragon,” in the London National Gallery. He says, “There are ten different scenes in Act II, all of which have to be changed very quickly. Here, with three palm-tree drops, you have a wide vista. Hey, presto—in five seconds a brick pyramid appears and there’s no space at all. A pictorial opera! 3-D! Now, this is where the Queen of Night lives, in this mountain.” Hockney hangs a cloud or two from above, and the clouds swing back and forth for a moment. He goes to the stereo and puts on a record: A cracked bit; thunder; voices. In German, “She comes! She comes!” Hockney runs back to the stage. Stars appear in the sky behind the mountain. The mountain opens. A strange blue figure stands there. Quite magical. He says, “There’ll also be stars inside the mountain.”
One is reminded of two boys making sand castles.
THE TELEPHONE
During the day, most calls are incoming. Many come from England. The London Sunday Times rings to ask if he would like to go to China for the paper. The London Evening Standard wants to know what he thinks of a man mentioned as possibly the new principal of the Royal College of Art. Although Maurice most often answers the phone and asks Hockney if he wants to take the call, Hockney rarely says no. When he got back to London a few years ago from eighteen months in Paris, he told his good friend Ann Upton, “My new phone number is highly secret.” A little while later, she heard him giving it to someone he hardly knew. Soon, she says, half of London had his new phone number. He is known to be generous with his time and his opinions. The Sutton Place phone rings with calls from people asking favors or wanting information. A man at the Yale Center for British Art calls to inquire how to get hold of “A Bigger Splash”—a film (with the same title as one of Hockney’s swimming-pool pictures) about Hockney and his work—and although Hockney has several good reasons for finding the film disagreeable, he tells the Yale man he believes that it was shown in Chicago recently, and after rummaging around in some papers he finds the name of someone who may know how to get the print.
He says, “The most pictures I’ve ever done in a year—sixteen or seventeen—was when I was in California in 1966 with Peter Schlesinger and we didn’t have a telephone. There must be a link.”
Sometimes there are bursts of telephone calls; then for half an hour or so the phone doesn’t ring at all. Hockney advises one caller—Peter Langan, a London restaurateur friend who is in New York—to visit the Frick, and adds, still going on about Thanksgiving, “They make a bit of a fuss about it, don’t they? The chestnuts. The sweet potatoes. Everything’s a bit dry, really, isn’t it?”
WHY NEW YORK
Various friends say, “He’s gone to get away from it all”—meaning that he’s gone to get away from a group of rather clinging admirers, among whom, for the moment, they don’t include themselves. Hockney’s friends tend to distinguish between his “really good friends” and his “hangers-on;” no one admits to being a hanger-on. Some of his more intellectually rigorous friends get fed up with what strikes them as almost a male harem that lazes around Hockney’s London studio and with which even Hockney loses patience at times—taking off, for example, in the middle of what has developed into a party of twenty people in order to go to a smaller studio he has elsewhere, to paint or read a book. At any particular moment, he seems to have a number of people financially or emotionally dependent on him. Kasmin says, “People are always just dropping in on him. Students who’ve hitchhiked up from Brighton to shake his hand. Ladies with their knitting. If he stays anywhere for long, it becomes a flophouse.”
Then, when things build up and the complications of this sort of life put pressure on him, Hockney, the invigorating center, moves on. He takes a trip to Cairo or Kyoto, or settles in to Santa Monica or Paris, where, of course, friends and companions soon assemble. The book dealer George Lawson, who is a good friend of his, says Hockney gets tired of the circle around him but would be furious if there wasn’t one. Hockney liked living in Paris but never learned to speak French. New York seems to him a place where he can be more alone, to work, and yet not be lonely, since it is a city where bars and stores are open late at night and the streets have some life in them even in the small hours, unlike his part of London, which is dead after eleven-thirty. (Although he may fall asleep in a friend’s company, he doesn’t like to waste time sleeping; he wants life to be going on twenty-four hours a day.) He also feels, as one can in England now, the nearness of New York, whether it is expressed by Freddie Laker’s Skytrain or by books, films, and pictures. Sometimes he thinks he will live in New York and fly Freddie back to England for occasional midweek weekends.
When he left England for New York to paint the “Magic Flute” sets, one reason was that the London art world was getting him down. Hockney is a figurative painter; he is popular outside the world of galleries, critics, museums, and tastemakers—a rare position for a serious artist. Although the world at large conceivably affects art in Britain—three or four daily papers devote a lot of space to art; the taxpayer-supported Arts Council hands out grants to artists and runs shows; and a large number of people enjoy visiting museums and looking at pictures—the art world, as in most places, gives an impression of managing to exist in a cozy climate of its own. People rarely attack “modern art.” Anything goes. However, in the summer of 1977 the Hayward Gallery annual show of contemporary British Art, organized by the Arts Council, got a surprisingly bad press from a wide variety of critics, and also poor public attendance—at least until August 15th, when a bearded Scots TV commentator named Fyfe Robertson marched through the show, which he called a “feast of avant-gardism,” pointing out for BBC viewers such exhibits as empty white canvases, an arrangement of rope coiled on the floor, and a man (live) crawling through detergent foam and retching as he did so. Coming to Hockney’s work, Robertson said he felt “like the Sahara explorers starving for water who suddenly came on an oasis—an oasis, here, of what I call art.”
Hockney, never shy on these occasions, agreed to talk to Fyfe Robertson on television. Asked what he thought of “some of the more way-out stuff there,” Hockney said he didn’t understand all of it—there might be something in it, but he doubted it. He said, “It seems to me that if you make pictures there should be something there on the canvas. I don’t understand four lines of ballpoint pen round the edge of canvas.... I suspect it’s supposed to be about an experience of looking at some weave. Concerning Robertson’s reference to the avant-garde, Hockney said, “I think it was an American artist who said that the term should be given back to the French Army, from which it came. The concept of the avant-garde in a way is rather old-fashioned now, so it’s a paradox—I mean the avant-garde is not avant-garde.”
Some of Hockney’s friends thought he was foolhardy to say all this on TV. He in fact enjoys some abstract art. Color-field painting is one contemporary development he thinks can be “stunningly beautiful,” but, he says, “for me it’s just one little aspect of art.” And although it may be intellectually respectable to hold the position, as Hockney does, that “the modern movement began about 1870—I assume that it has actually ended,” his saying this sort of thing in public made him sound like a reactionary superacademician, some of his friends thought; it seemed to identify him with the philistines. (Other people were immensely grateful to him for saying it.) In any event, London for a month or so was like Paris in the eighteen-seventies, when Impressionism was under attack. The discussion overflowed from the Hayward and the BBC into the correspondence columns of the Guardian and into articles in Art Monthly. In an interview that appeared in that lively new British magazine, Hockney reported that his mother had put to him the question about the arrangement of the coiled rope, by Barry Flanagan, “Did he make the rope?” Hockney said, “Modern art generally ignores skills and crafts, or assumes they are not necessary. But the real world of ordinary people is full of them. So they question things by asking, ‘Where is the skill?’ I suppose the skill Flanagan knows is that of deciding to do a piece and placing it. But an ordinary person finds that hard to take. They see the skill as making the actual rope. I don’t think their question can be just dismissed, unless you think art is just for a few people.... Instead of trying to hide behind the struggles of the past, the art world should begin to deal with the questions people are asking.”
There was a good chance that Hockney’s autumn and winter would be consumed by attempts to answer some of those questions. He suddenly realized that he had been in London for eighteen months; that was long enough. If he went away, leaving several unfinished pictures against the studio walls in London, he would have nothing to do except get on with “The Magic Flute.” So he cleared out for New York.
SHAGGY DOGS
Hockney’s sense of humor is what Kasmin calls “heavy.” It has elements in it of schoolboy practical jokes and Yorkshire drollery, mystifying to many, and it involves taking any figurative statement very literally. His friend Ann Upton took her extremely right-wing uncle to see Hockney, to whom she said, “Be careful with Uncle Alban—he wants to bring back the cat.” “Why?” asked Hockney. “Has he left it outside?” At Rhinebeck for Thanksgiving, Hockney was in the living room with several people, one of whom was reading a newspaper on whose back page was an ad: “Strawberry baskets for $2.98.” Hockney asked aloud, “Does anyone know where you can get strawberry baskets for less than three dollars?” There was desultory conversation about this; one girl said she thought Alexander’s might have them. Finally, someone saw the ad and realized that a leg-pull had taken place. “But it took a long time,” says Hockney. “Henry wouldn’t have taken a long time”—Henry being Henry Geldzahler, now New York City Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, then a curator at the Metropolitan (“Henry’s museum”), and one of Hockney’s best friends, who has gone on numerous trips with Hockney and has visited his home town of Bradford with him on several occasions. Once, in London, when Geldzahler wanted to cash a check, Hockney drew a sketch of him to introduce him to the local bank manager, who took the drawing as evidence of good character and cashed the check. Hockney’s friends, including Geldzahler, tend to acquire a fondness for or be sympathetic to this sort of behavior. In New Zealand with a friend called Gregory, whom he describes as “a bit of a literalist, like me,” Hockney went to rent a car. “The girl said, ‘Do you both want to drive, then?’” (Hockney confers on people everywhere his tenacious Yorkshire accent, which has been nicely described as like lumpy custard.) “And Gregory replied, ‘Oh, do you have one with two steering wheels, then?’ I like that. Henry likes that, too.”
The strong current of eccentricity in the Hockney family has its practical side. Paul Hockney, then Lord Mayor of Bradford, wore all during 1977 under his formal morning suit a pair of vivid Union Jack socks, to publicize the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Appeal. His brother David remembers walking home from school late one day and seeing his father sitting in a comfortable chair outside the local public phone booth. They didn’t have a phone at home at that time, and his father had put an ad to sell a portable billiard table in the town newspaper, giving the telephone booth as the number to call between six and eight; he was waiting for calls. (He sold the billiard table.) At a school speech day, pandemonium broke out when Hockney went up to collect the art prize, his schoolmates cheering, booing, stamping, and whistling. The headmaster explained to Hockney’s puzzled parents that this was because the other boys found David so amusing. (A contemporary says that though Hockney made his pals laugh, he passed his exams, while many of those who joined in his jokes got into trouble or failed.) One of his teachers at the Bradford School of Art described Hockney as the sort of person who, having bought a chair in a shop and joined a bus queue to take it home, would sit on the chair while waiting for the bus; most people wouldn’t have the confidence. He used to wheel his art gear around in a baby’s pram and when he reached the right spot take out his stool and easel and start to paint. With several pals, he faked a painting by Ivon Hitchens, the principal’s favorite artist, and hung it in the art-school vestibule; and he once spent several minutes talking in a pretend foreign language to avoid the wrath of a bus conductress, who was trying to tell him off for jumping on the bus at a traffic light between stops. (Conductress to the other passengers: “Bleeding foreigner!” Hockney to the conductress as he got off: “Ta-ta, love!”) Norman Stevens recalls an occasion when their art-school class was on outdoor studies, strung out along the canal bank near Eccleshill, where Hockney lived. “I was sketching at the end of the line and someone came along and said, ‘David Hockney says he’ll jump in the canal for a pound.’ I said, ‘I’m not putting anything to that.’ I knew he would. But they made a collection, and pretty soon this figure walked past, wringing wet. He went home, changed, and then came back and finished his work, a pound better off.”
ON ALL FRONTS
He has put aside the fire for a moment and is reworking the flood, which he has represented as a series of waterfalls. Maurice goes to find him an old toothbrush, and with this Hockney does some vertical scrubbing of the paint. Then he walks back to see how Maurice is getting on with the shadows on the gray rusticated stonework of the temples. He says, “Maybe it needs a gray No. 2 or No. 3. And try it with a brush, not a pen, but as thin as you can.”
VISITORS
During the morning, several people call. One is a London print dealer named Bernard Jacobson, who stopped by with his pregnant wife the day before to look at the “Magic Flute” drops. Jacobson now announces shyly that he is a father. Hockney asks what sex the child is.
“A girl,” Jacobson says, in a dazed way.
Hockney says, carrying on with his work, “Perhaps seeing the fire brought it on.”
Jacobson looks at Hockney, seems to decide he is being serious, and nods agreement.
A little later, Alf Young arrives. He is British and was a student at the Royal College of Art at the same time as Hockney; he has been living in San Francisco but is now sculpting in New York. He is wearing a denim jacket and bluejeans. He sits down diffidently in a chair that is to one side and slightly behind Hockney, who says, over his shoulder, “You don’t mind, do you, Alf, if I keep going? We’re running a bit late.” He explains about the “Magic Flute” commission. Then he asks the following forthright questions:
“What are you working on, Alf?”
“Then how do you make a living?”
“It’s amazing how people get by in New York, isn’t it? A bit of hustle here and there.”
“Are you good at waterfalls, Alf?”
“And so do you live alone now, Alf?”
“How long have you lived alone?”
“Have you read Francis Steegmuller’s ‘Flaubert in Egypt,’ Alf?”
It is a couple of quick jumps from Flaubert to France to Picasso. Hockney recalls talking to Aldo Crommelynck, Picasso’s printmaker, about Picasso’s extraordinary willpower. Picasso, according to Hockney’s account of this conversation, gave up drinking at forty; he resumed drinking at eighty. Sitting in the Café Flore or the Deux Magots, he would stand up at 11 P.M. in midsentence and go home to bed.
Hockney squeezes out some paint and chooses a new brush from the collection at his elbow.
Alf Young gets up and says he must be going. He leaves unspoken the phrase better get back to work.
Hockney says, “Cheerio, Alf.”
Alf Young lets himself out.
HEROES
At the Bradford School of Art, Hockney admired the British painter Stanley Spencer, and wore his hair in a sort of pudding-bowl cut, the way Spencer did. Spencer also pushed his art gear round in a pram. When Hockney’s father brought home a dog from the stray-dog’s home one day, Hockney insisted that the dog be called Stanley. Unfortunately, the Hockney’s new next-door neighbor was also called Stanley, and after a year of going into the garden to call the dog and bringing their neighbor to his back door, they changed the dog’s name to Paddy.
While Hockney was still an art student, he stole from the Bradford library a volume of poems by Constantine Cavafy, the Alexandrian Greek poet. The book’s potential wickedness was indicated by the fact that it wasn’t on the shelves; it had to be requested. Hockney says, “I read it from cover to cover many times, and thought it was incredible. I’ve still got it.”
He has also gone through periods admiring William Blake, Walt Whitman, Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, Matisse, Auden, Charles Sheeler, Edward Hopper, Picasso, Wallace Stevens, Saul Steinberg, and, most recently, Balthus, whose studio he used briefly in Paris, and whose work, among contemporary painters, gives him more pleasure than anyone else’s right now. As for the Old Masters, he says, “I respond to Rembrandt the way I don’t to Raphael or Rubens, though Rubens is a great draftsman. There’s a bit of schmalz in Rembrandt, but I suspect there is in a lot of really great art.”
WHAT TO DO THIS EVENING
Hockney is fond of quoting the Auden lines, from the “Letter to Lord Byron,” “To me Art’s subject is the human clay,/ And landscape but background to a torso.” In the next stanza are lines one could quote in reply: “And our first problem is to realise what/ Peculiar friends the modern artist’s got.”
Hockney often says, “When I was in such-and-such a place with So-and-So”—for example, “When I was in France with Christopher Isherwood” or “When Henry was with me in Le Nid du Duc,” the important word being “with.” He thinks of himself one moment as a gregarious person and the next as a loner. He carries with him everywhere a large red leather address book filled with names and addresses and telephone numbers written in pencil in his distinctive fine script. His phone bill is large. A good number of his pictures (like those of Balthus) seem be studies of loneliness—even the double portraits, such as the one of Mr. and Mrs. Clark (his friends Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell, now divorced) and their white cat, Percy, in which the viewer feels something awry between them. In this painting, titled “Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy,” the man is sitting down while the woman stands; they are two separate people. The cat, perched on Ossie’s left thigh and looking away, is a disturbing presence. (This is a large picture, roughly seven by ten, the figures almost life-size—an indoor picture filled with natural English light.) George Lawson says that Hockney is unable to finish the double portrait of Lawson and Sleep because the two subjects get on so well together. Kasmin says that Hockney needs a dozen good friends always on call and is livid if they aren’t available when he wants them. Much of his life seems to involve a reaching out for friends and companions and an almost equal and opposite reaction away from them, to seek his own time and space.
Almost every night, he goes out to eat. He got to know Peter Langan by going with friends to eat regularly at Odin’s, Langan’s restaurant in Devonshire Street, London, and he has helped Langan put his new Brasserie, in Mayfair, on the map as a London version of La Coupole by being seen there often and drawing Langan for the cover of the menu. He says, “London isn’t an easy city to live in if you’re on your own, as I suppose technically I am. It’s a house-home city. I’m not a very domestic person.” He enjoys the more intense life of Paris and New York, and in New York, particularly, finds the gay life easier than in London.
Norman Stevens recalls standing in chapel with Hockney behind a pretty girl when they were schoolboys, and Hockney’s wanting to pull her pigtail. Hockney denies this conventional expression of interest in the other sex; he says he has never been stirred, in the usual sense, by a woman. He began to acknowledge his homosexuality when he was at the Royal College, and conversations with two older, American students, R. B. Kitaj and Mark Berger, helped change him from evasive to exuberant. Talks with Ron Kitaj (who is not homosexual) brought him to realize that he should be painting his true interests: he started to create “love pictures,” in which men and boys were the desired objects. After an argument with the staff about the female models always provided at life classes, Hockney was allowed to bring in a male model. And as his work began to attract notice he gained confidence. For one college Christmas revue, Berger persuaded Hockney to go onstage in a girl’s dress and miner’s cloggy boots and sing “I’m just a girl who can’t say no.” And while staying with Berger in New York in 1961, watching a late-night movie on TV, he was taken with a Miss Clairol commercial proposing that blondes have more fun. Hockney went to a drugstore first thing next morning and has ever since dyed his hair some shade of ash, gold, or silver.
Hockney has had his militant moments. Of those early love pictures—one of which was called, after Walt Whitman, “We Two Boys Together Clinging”—he has written, “They were partly propaganda of something I felt hadn’t been propagandized, especially among students, as a subject: homosexuality. I felt it should be done. Nobody else would use it as a subject, but because it was a part of me it was a subject that I could treat humorously.” (George Lawson says, “The really serious things about David are quite funny.”) Hockney has given money to gay-liberation causes, has had rows with the police over their alleged harassment of the owners of a small gay bookshop in Notting Hill, and once had a strenuous fight with Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise for the return of some magazines, with names like Golden Boys and Naked Youth, that were seized from him at Heathrow Airport. Hockney claimed they were “just nudes,” which he needed for professional purposes. A customs official responded that it didn’t seem quite so straightforward: “In one of the pictures, the boys have painted their genitals with psychedelic colors.” Hockney enlisted the help of the National Council for Civil Liberties. He asked Kenneth Clark, the art historian, to stand by as a court witness. The British press took up the story, and Hockney’s mother called him up and said, “Isn’t it awful when you need them for your work.” Then the Customs and Excise sagely changed its mind and handed the magazines back.
He has never talked with his mother about his homosexuality. He has sometimes wondered whether his parents saw the movie “A Bigger Splash,” which candidly shows a lot of likely lads thrashing around in the buff. His parents did. His mother says, “The world is a far stranger place than I ever thought. I wasn’t brought up that way. It’s not what I expected, but I try to understand it.” In any event, there is nothing camp about Hockney—no outlandish theatricality. He seems perfectly secure in his self. To anyone who suggests to him that the big glasses and bleached hair may be extraneous to “the real you,” he replies, “I wouldn’t do it if it bored me.” He has, in fact, recently moved down a size or two in spectacles, and the roots of his hair (“It used to be a lovely chestnut color when he was a boy,” says his mother) are occasionally exposed as brown. He doesn’t spend a lot of time admiring himself in mirrors, and he isn’t compulsively tidy. “He’s a bit of a slut,” says Maurice. (Hockney’s mother used to come down to London with her apron to clean his flat, and after Tony Armstrong-Jones, Lord Snowdon, photographed Hockney in his studio she complained with proper Yorkshire horror that you could see all the ashes in the grate.) Yet meticulousness may be creeping in; he has been heard to condemn the mess left by some friends to whom he lent the studio.
For Hockney, the world has one more dividing line than it has for most people: people are either sympathetic to gays or not; men are straight or gay; bars are straight or gay. Although he is visibly male and attracts women, he is open about his sexual preference: phrases like “This boy I was with,” the photograph of Michael on the mantelpiece, and the many drawings, full of affection, that he has done of nude male bodies speak of it. Perhaps because of his dyed hair and his glasses, he was once asked to pay in advance when he was booking into a hotel in Manchester, where the city gallery was holding a retrospective exhibition of his work, and he says he’s had trouble getting served in P. J. Clarke’s (as less conspicuous would-be drinkers have, too). But in general he has run into very little trouble from being homosexual. One friend says, “David doesn’t always appreciate the problems of being gay for someone who’s got a regular job.”
Yet his freedom in this respect coincides with a greater ease for all homosexuals in Britain in the past twenty years—an ease that, possibly, he and a few other well-known people have helped bring about. And in America he finds an even greater freedom. In Los Angeles, he now and then went to bars to pick up good-looking boys. In New York, he gives the impression, rather, of appreciating the possibilities; the pleasures are possibly those of a voyeur or a talker who can later describe, say, a night’s outing to a Greenwich Village hostelry called the Ramrod—“the sort of place where you take all your clothes off and check them as you go in.” He says he isn’t at all promiscuous. For five years, he lived with Peter Schlesinger, a young art student he met in California. Since that broke up, he has been on his own. He is bothered now by people who want him to make big statements on the subject, when what he has come to feel is that a lot of sex is fantasy, and “not a great pioneering thing.” He says, “I no longer feel militant about homosexuality. Years ago, asked about it, you felt you couldn’t deny it, part of your nature. You had to stand up and be counted. But I mean it’s all rather accidental, isn’t it? Like lots of things.”
LUNCH
At the Sutton Coffee Shop, on First Avenue at Fifty-eighth Street, Hockney orders a bowl of Yankee bean soup, a baconburger with French fries, and a Coke. As a child, he rarely ate meat; his mother is a vegetarian, and so was Hockney himself between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four. At the Royal College, he handed out pamphlets for the London Vegetarian Society and painted “vegetarian pictures.” One of these, “The Cruel Elephant,” showed a huge elephant treading on the words “crawling insects.” A man sat on top of the elephant. According to the painter, “It’s as though the man’s weighing the elephant down and the elephant didn’t after all intend to kill the crawling insects—it’s that extra weight of the man that is the cruelty.” A bit wishful, possibly; but more recently he has done some straightforward and absolutely eloquent color-pencil drawings of leeks, carrots, beans, and green peppers. At the Royal College, he lived mostly on tinned beans, and he became ill perhaps from malnutrition. When Kasmin took him out to lunch to celebrate their first agreement, he had shrimp—the first fish, flesh, or fowl he’d eaten in seven years. In California, he acquired a taste for hamburgers. He says now, “Vegetarians are quite boring, really.”
These days, he eats a lot of Hungarian salami and pickled onions. He believes that pickled onions eaten in sufficient quantity prevent a buildup of cholesterol in your arteries and make it possible to consume fish-and-chips fried in beef dripping every day of your life, which will be long. When he goes home to Bradford, he generally visits Harry Ramsden’s fish-and-chips shop at Guiseley, a nearby town. Sometimes when he is abroad, he is swept by a great nostalgia for the food of childhood. In California, he once went into a café and asked for toast and bloater paste. The waitress said (he claims), “Oh, we’d like to serve it, but we can’t. They say it’s unfit for human consumption.” According to Kasmin, Hockney is now thoroughly at home in grand hotels, and, coming in late at night, will ask the concierge to prepare some fine dish he fancies. But in some places he’s adaptable. When he was driving in Poland with Ron Kitaj, they stopped for breakfast at a small-town station café. Since neither of them knew Polish, and French and English made no impression, Kitaj drew what he thought looked like an egg in an eggcup and held up two fingers. “Oh,” said the girl, lighting up. She brought two dishes of ice cream. As they ate these, Hockney said to Kitaj, “Ron, it might have been a good idea to draw a chicken, too.”
Hockney drinks Guinness and wine but little liquor; smokes pot now and then but avoids hard drugs. “I once took some Mandrax—Celia said it made you feel sexy—and immediately fell asleep,” he says. “My students at Berkeley kept telling me how great drugs were and how they brought into being great works of art. Rubbish! That psychedelic junk is all the bloody same.”
At lunch, which he is eating with Maurice and Robert Miller, a New York art dealer, Hockney says—in regard to the dangers of city life—that in a way people who get mugged want to be mugged, don’t they. Talking of Eurocommunism, he says that he thinks its dangers are mostly to the Russians, who obviously prefer right-wing governments in Western Europe, as offering contrast and less temptation to dissenters in the East. When Robert Miller suggests that he might bring his children over so that Hockney could draw them, Hockney asks, “Can they be animals?” The animals in the first act of “The Magic Flute” are often played by children. But Miller perhaps recognizes a hint of evasion in the reply and, possibly not wanting to seem to badger Hockney for a favor, doesn’t pursue the subject.
Afterward, Maurice goes off to Flax’s. Hockney, on the way back to the apartment, enters the corner news store and browses through some thirty magazines—horror, true-love, detective, movie-fan, photographic, automotive, scientific, do-it-yourself, astrological, and teen—looking for illustrations of fire. He can’t find any. He then goes across the avenue to the drugstore to buy three bottles of Magic Scalp Conditioner, at three thirty-nine each, and orders six more to take to England. The proprietor asks, “You local?”
SPAS
Hockney is an average swimmer and, though in Britain he is not much of an outdoor person, has a normal interest in sunning himself on summer beaches. However, the beaches he favors, in Santa Monica or on Fire Island, tend to be male-populated, and the boys who attract his eye are usually tanned, with salty blond hair. The water he prefers is in pools and springs rather than the sea. In California, where he went for the first time in 1963, he was fascinated by swimming pools and began to paint them. He writes in his book:
Water in swimming pools changes its look more than in any other form. The colour of a river is related to the sky reflects, and the sea always seems to me to be the same colour and have the same dancing patterns. But the look of swimming-pool water is controllable—even its colour can be man-made—and its dancing rhythms reflect not only the sky but, because of its transparency, the depth of the water as well. So I had to use techniques to represent this (in the later swimming-pool pictures of 1971 I became more aware of the wetness of the surface). If the water surface is almost still and there is strong sun, then dancing lines with the colours of the spectrum appear everywhere. If the pool hasn’t been used for a few minutes and there’s no breeze, the look is of a simple gradation of colour that follows the incline of the floor of the pool. Added to all this is the infinite variety of patterns of material that the pool can be made from. I once saw a pool in France where the floor had been painted with loose blue brush strokes, which gave a marvellous contrast between artistically rendered water and the natural.
As for the splashes, for which he found precedents in Leonardo, “I loved the idea of painting this thing that lasts for two seconds; it takes me two weeks to paint this event.”
Hockney’s interest in moving water has been manifested in various forms. He has done crayon drawings of piped water entering swimming pools. He has made an etching—one of a series for “Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm”—called “Cold Water About to Hit the Prince.” He has painted lawns being sprinkled, rain falling, and people taking showers, which is not only what Americans seem to be doing all the time but fits into what he knows is the “three-hundred-year tradition of the bather as a subject in painting.” Beverly Hills houses, he has noticed, are “full of showers of all shapes and sizes—with clear glass doors, with frosted glass doors, with transparent curtains, with semitransparent curtains.”
When he was a boy, he and a younger brother, John, used to hang around the house of their one car-owning neighbor on Sundays, hoping for a ride. And if they were lucky they often found themselves driven to the Yorkshire spa of Harrogate, where the neighbor went to take the waters for his rheumatism. Now, when Hockney is driving in Europe—perhaps on a trip to look at, for example, the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, or on what his friend Christopher Isherwood calls one of Hockney’s whiz tours, made after a spell of hard work and an impulsive call to someone to accompany him, say, to France for a few days—he will consult the map or the Guide Michelin to find out what spas he will come to en route to his destination, which may well also be a spa. He has been to Aix-les-Bains, Baden-Baden, Bagnoles-de-l’Orne, Marienbad, Carlsbad, Miers (Lot), Contrexéville (Vosges), Vichy, Vittel, Montecatini, Lucca, Hot Springs (Arkansas), and Bath (England). He and a former studio assistant, Mo McDermott, were at Bagnoles-de-l’Orne for two days before they learned that the waters there were especially recommended for female complaints. At Hot Springs, where there were Dixie cups from which to drink the nearly steaming water as one bathed, he felt, climbing out, quite stoned. Since ceasing to be a vegetarian, Hockney has suffered from indigestion, and mineral water is one of his remedies; in America, he drinks Coke as if it were Perrier or Evian. He recommends Montecatini, near Florence, for its “ferocious” water, which is good, he says, if you are feeling costive. At Bagni di Lucca, near Pisa, there is steam in the caves, an English library, and streets with names like Via Evangelina Whipple.
Hockney is pleased that spas are now frequented not only by the old and infirm but by athletic young men using the sports facilities that, in Europe, are often attached. He is annoyed that the baths at Bath have been closed, in part because the water is considered lacking in medicinal properties. “Silly,” he says. “The lawns, the music, the place itself all do you good.” He likes the picturesque old hotels and gardens at spas, and his painting of the Parc des Sources, Vichy, is only one of numerous works he has made at spas—by their pools or looking out on hotel terraces. He has read Ford Madox Ford’s “The Good Soldier,” which begins in the spa of Nauheim. And he enjoys reciting these lines from “Casablanca”:
CLAUDE RAINS: And what, in heaven’s name, brought you to Casablanca?
BOGART: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
RAINS: Waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.
BOGART: I was misinformed.
Hockney repeats the last line with a chuckle: “I was misinformed.”
WEST RIDING
Hockney had given himself a deadline of December 19th for his work on the designs for “The Magic Flute.” The scene painters were due to start making the full-size drops and props for the set in London on January 3rd, but, apart from that, he also meant to be back in England for Christmas. He has only once—he was teaching in California—not spent Christmas in Bradford. When he was growing up there, it was still in many ways a grim Victorian city. Now, after some years of “improvements,” much has been cleaned up or pulled down, and Hockney, with the indignation of a home-town boy, says, “The city center is like Cologne or umpteen other rebuilt cities—a bloody desert.” Bradford is also an immigrant city—Pakistanis have followed to it the Irish, Latvians, and Poles; and yet to some of those born there it has always seemed a good place to leave. However, Hockney realizes that there are certain advantages in coming from Yorkshire. “In a way, you always have your feet on the ground,” he says. “The sense of reality is different there.” He was twenty-two when he left Bradford, and twenty years later the West Riding accent is still strong in his voice. Although he complains about the northern dark in winter, which makes the days short for painting and drawing, and says, “Probably if my mother wasn’t there I wouldn’t go back,” his tie to Bradford remains firm. He has done a portrait drawing of the writer J. B. Priestley, a Bradfordian, which he has given to the city. Two years ago, he invited the headmaster of his old school to the London publication party of his book. He has paid for the stolen Cavafy book in kind, with a copy of his own book, and has also given the city a set of his etchings based on Cavafy’s poems. A couple of years ago, he gave the Bradford City Art Gallery some paintings.
His mother still lives in the house he grew up in, in Eccleshill, on the edge of town. Hockney tells approvingly of his mother’s reply to a reporter from the Yorkshire Post who called her not long ago and inquired whether he might interview her about her son. “Which one?” asked Mrs. Hockney. Paul, the oldest, is a chartered accountant. Philip, the second son, runs an engineering firm that builds gasoline tank trucks in Australia. Margaret, the only daughter, is a district nurse in Bedfordshire. David is next in line, and the youngest child, John, is also in Australia and has been working for Philip. Both Paul and John are Sunday painters, and Philip studied draftsmanship. The Hockney talent in this respect perhaps springs from their father, Kenneth Hockney, who died last February at the age of seventy-five. Kenneth Hockney used to attend evening classes in art after work as a clerk in a small firm. Some of David Hockney’s early memories are of his father with paintbrush in hand—making charity posters, restoring secondhand bicycles to look like new, and painting sunsets on plywood panels he had fastened to all the doors in the house. Mr. Hockney was said (even by his family) to be eccentric, and though a lot of people in England are called that, the claim seemed a rightful one in Mr. Hockney’s case. A small, stooped man who favored large bow ties, he sometimes wore two watches, one on each wrist. He corresponded with Khrushchev, Gandhi, Cyrus Eaton, and Nasser. He campaigned against war and capital punishment. He kept his photograph-developing equipment on the attic stairs, sucked mint humbugs, and was fond of showing visitors scrapbooks he had made of pages of brown wrapping paper held by string within hardboard covers. The scrapbooks covered both world events and family matters, with articles from the Bradford Telegraph & Argus about, for example, a guillotining in France and about the latest doings of Paul and David. Mr. Hockney also kept an eye on Christie’s and Sotheby’s yearbooks for the prices that David’s works were fetching at auction. Laura Hockney, a few years older than her husband, is a very warm and observant person. She keeps David’s juvenilia: drawings of farm carts and cottages; versions of comic-book and cartoon characters; and photographs of David as baby, schoolboy, Boy Scout, soapbox-derby racer, hiker, student, and painter. Also as uncle to his brothers’ children. With his parents in a Welsh hotel the summer of 1977. Receiving from the Duchess of Kent an honorary M.A. at Leeds University. Famous son. The son sends her roses on her birthday, calls her on the telephone every week or so, and puts on no airs and graces when he’s at home. The family know some of his failings: “He puts socks and shoes on his figures because he can’t do feet.” (Ossie Clark is painted with—presumably—bare feet, but they are buried in the deep pile of a carpet.) Mrs. Hockney’s terraced house in Eccleshill is now faced by new houses, partly blocking a country view, but it still gives the family great pleasure to sit in the small front room, in which the walls are covered with a lively brown-green-and-white tulip-patterned wallpaper and overhead spotlights illuminate half a dozen superb works by David, including a drawing of his father, a color-pencil drawing of some anemones, and a lithograph called “Rue de Seine,” of an interior in France. Most are signed “To Mum and Dad, with love.”
PREOCCUPATIONS
Hockney took on his father’s pacifism as well as his mother’s vegetarianism. In 1957, when he was twenty, Britain still had compulsory national service, and Hockney, as a conscientious objector, worked in hospitals in Bradford and in Hastings, Sussex. In Hastings, as an orderly in the heart patients’ ward, he washed bodies, alive and dead. In Bradford, he worked in the skin-diseases ward. “I swept the floors, put the ointment on, and was the caller in the afternoon bingo games. If the TV broke down, or if you didn’t give them anything to do, they just sat and scratched. I was also the runner. I used to collect all their bets, mostly sixpences and shillings, and take them to a porter who took them to a bookie. I soon knew which patients won regularly, and so I backed the same horses and won, too.”
For the next two years, he hardly touched a paintbrush. He read all of Proust. When his hospital career was over, he spent his first few months at the Royal College drawing skeletons. Now, although he is no longer a vegetarian, he gets fanatically worked up about certain subjects—Wagner and yellow tulips, say, which he passionately likes, and such dislikes as the system of teaching in art schools, coffee, and the opening times of British pubs, regulated by laws that strike him as undemocratic. “If you’re wealthy enough to belong to a club in Curzon Street, no need to worry. Otherwise, you can’t get a drink in the afternoon or after 11 P.M. It isn’t fair.” Some of his best friends take an almost masochistic delight in Hockney’s obsessions. George Lawson says, “I often tell him, ‘These are the things that can’t be mentioned.’ Then I can sometimes get an hour free of his current preoccupation.” Nikos Stangos, his editor at Thames & Hudson, says, “At times, he’s like somebody’s grandfather. Just impossible. It never occurs to him that someone may not agree with him. His favorite phrase is ‘The truth is...’ He has very little insight into himself. He has no idea what his problems, desires, frustrations are.”
Yet when Hockney is asked if he has any great worries he says no. He sleeps well. He declares, “I only worry about art.”
NOTTING HILL
Hockney says “It’s not fair” and “The truth is” most often while living in London, exposed to the various elements of British life that get him worked up to a point where, like many in Britain, he claims he is going to write to the Times about it. (He has done so on several occasions, when the Times was around to be written to.) From 1962 to 1978, he lived much of the time in Powis Terrace, one of the tattiest streets in Notting Hill, which is in general a seedy part of town. Powis Terrace is a narrow street of fairly high four- or five-story Victorian stucco houses with tall stoops, somewhat like the West Eighties and Nineties in New York. Most of the houses are divided into flats and bedsitters. An automobile-towing service operates from a garage in the street, and one can hear the constant noise of the Westway, an elevated urban expressway a few hundred yards north. Yet there are sometimes rag-and-bone men’s horses tied to the railings in the street, and old women, chatting with one another, who seem stranded in time. The cheerful Portobello Road market is a few streets away. Hockney has many friends in the neighborhood, which for him has a residual village feeling, despite the process of change he has watched there. Property speculation and council-housing schemes have their upheaving effects. Local shops close: of half a dozen there in 1962 only two are left—the chemist’s and the wine-and-spirits shop. Mrs. Evans’s, where Hockney used to buy his milk, butter, and eggs, has gone. When he first moved to Powis Terrace, it was partly West Indian, and was noisy. Then much of the street was, as he puts it, tarted up by a property company and renamed Hedge Gate Court. “It was full of real tarts,” he says. “Every night, every taxi in London turned up in Powis Terrace full of sailors. That lasted three years. Then the tarts moved out, and Powis Terrace became a hippie street. Everybody there was a hippie.”
He first rented a ground-floor flat at No. 17 for five pounds a week. In 1972, on Paul’s advice, he bought No. 17 and the house next door, and he had the top floors of the two houses turned into one deluxe flat: kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and twenty-five-foot-square studio, eighteen feet high, with a long north-facing skylight. (The reason artists like north light is that shadows maintain a constant position in it.) An architect designed the conversion. The equipment included a large chrome-tubular-framed mirror on wheels, two easels, a huge sink, a gym-finished wood floor, Mies van der Rohe chairs, plenty of built-in shelves and cupboards, movable drawer systems, and nine overhead halogen lights with a rheostat switchboard. The whole thing, complete with unfinished canvases stacked against a wall, looked like a film set for the studio of an internationally known artist. Hockney himself felt uneasy about it, and finally put it up for sale a few months ago. He’s the sort of person who buys things off the shelf—when all the glasses in his flat are broken, he’ll go to Heal’s or Woolworth’s and get a few dozen. He has kept a smaller studio in Kensington, which he used while Powis Terrace was being fixed up; but he says, “Kensington’s a bit like Sunday every day.” His dreams of suddenly simplifying his life lead him now and then to say he is going to take a loft in downtown New York, or buy a warehouse in Covent Garden; right now, he is talking of living in California for a few years. But London, one suspects, remains home—a place he gets fed up with but returns to, at which point he realizes how much he has been missing all the newspapers (he likes to read the Times, the Guardian, and the International Herald Tribune every day, along with the Evening Standard most evenings, and such weeklies as The Listener, the New Statesman, and the Times Literary Supplement) and also missing the BBC, and even the weather, and the deadness at night, when people are still walking around in Greenwich Village or on the Left Bank. He says, “In England, they think you’re wicked if you stay up after ten-thirty.”
GIRLFRIENDS
Apart from his mother and his sister, the women in Hockney’s life have all been residents of Notting Hill. His good friend Celia Birtwell used to live in Blenheim Crescent, around the corner, and now lives not far away in Linden Gardens. Celia, a fabric designer, comes from the North of England herself (her former husband, Ossie Clark, is a clothes designer). Hockney’s good friend Ann Upton, a rugmaker and designer, who is the ex-wife of the painter Michael Upton, lives in Colville Square, close by. Marinka Watts, who is a waitress at Langan’s Brasserie and a model, used to live just down the street. All three of these women have modelled for him. All three have a scruffy chic and are pretty—Ann in a plump way, Celia and Marinka with broad cheeks, firm jawlines, and somewhat gamine features. These two look a little the way Hockney might look if he were a woman. Some of his finest color-pencil drawings are of Celia, Ann, and Marinka. The three respond to him, love him, and want to look after him and tidy up for him and see that his work isn’t disrupted. He visited Celia in maternity hospital and drew her. He drops in on any of them late at night and feels so much at home he falls asleep. He brought Ann and her son Byron on a visit to Paris when he was living there, and Celia and her two small boys came to stay with him in Malibu. Each of the three women knows she can call and ask him to supper and he won’t look at his diary and see if he’s got anything more important to do. He strikes them as a very sentimental person; he sides with them in their marital problems. (He used to spend evenings with the Uptons playing the card game called happy families, but the Uptons split up.) He hugs them and gives them the avuncular, northern comfort of phrases like “There, there, love.”
SETBACKS
Celia says, referring to Hockney’s abilities, “He’s terribly together.” Ron Kitaj says of him that within a few weeks after he bought his first car he knew every shortcut in London. At school and college, it was obvious to Hockney’s pals (and even to one or two teachers) that he was going to be a success, and his progress in the years since might appear to an outsider to have received not a single jolt. Unlike many of the hits of the swinging sixties, Hockney is still there. (One friend says, “David had no idea London was swinging. Anyway, he wouldn’t know a miniskirt if he saw one.”) And yet he is a person whose apparently insuperable self-confidence now and then has almost total collapses; there are frequent unsettled periods, known to his very close friends. “Most people don’t realize he’s never really relaxed,” says Norman Stevens. He goes off the deep end, furious—not always with the people responsible—because the wrong sort of screens have been delivered, say, or there are no postcards of a certain artist for sale in a museum. Shortly after he has talked of losing weight, he blows his stack with Maurice for trying to talk him out of buying jars of peanuts in a supermarket. “He loses his temper on little things, like there’s no milk for the tea, and stays icy cool on the important issues,” says Maurice.
Yet Hockney did not stay cool when Peter Schlesinger left him. Schlesinger is the one person who has lived with Hockney for a long period—a time that Hockney, now used to living more or less alone, looks back on as exceptional. Schlesinger, who was an aspiring painter, travelled with Hockney, met people, and saw new things, but came to feel that his life was being completely subsumed into Hockney’s. He wanted to be known as something other than David Hockney’s boyfriend. He had to break loose. The split-up coincided with a trip to France and Spain in the summer of 1971, and with the constant presence of Jack Hazan, who was making his documentary film about Hockney, “A Bigger Splash.” There were public rows and much driving back and forth across the South of France, and Ossie Clark was there, and Mo McDermott, and Maurice, and George Lawson and Wayne Sleep; and Jack Hazan wanted to keep filming everybody; and there was an earthquake in Perpignan, during which cracks appeared in the hotel ceiling and the chandelier began to swing—and that, according to Lawson, took Hockney’s mind off his problems for a few moments. But then, being Hockney, he drew the necessary conclusion: “I was so unhappy there was nothing to do but work.”
He is constantly bemused by the acclaim he receives for the virtuosity of his work, because his own feeling is that he has a long, long way to go. Setbacks and abysses are there every moment the brush moves toward the canvas. Where should the brush fall? What colors should the paint consist of? How thick or thin should it be? Answers occur that possibly he didn’t want or that are too easy. Is this way of doing it too naturalistic, too obviously demonstrative of skill, showing something as it is seen rather than known, when what he wants to convey is both the seeing and the knowing: the two people in the room, say, and also who the people are and who they are to each other and how they exist in the world of space and time and light?
DESERT ISLAND DISCS
He usually works with either a radio or a record-player going. As a schoolboy, he did his homework with the radio on. In London, he listens to plays and problem-solving programs and long-running comedy quiz programs with names like “My Word!” and “Just a Minute,” to be heard in the early afternoon on the BBC, and starring personalities who are known throughout Britain. Hockney is as thrilled at meeting the comedian Frank Muir (of “My Word!”) in Asprey’s, the Bond Street jeweller’s, as he would be at meeting Balthus in the Louvre. A few years ago, Hockney participated in the BBC radio program “Desert Island Discs”—a weekly feature on which a well-known person discusses with the producer, Roy Plomley, aspects of his life and chooses eight records, one luxury, and a book he would want if he were shipwrecked on a desert island. Brief passages from the records are played. Hockney says he would have picked a completely different selection the day after, but on that occasion he chose Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony played in the Liszt transcription for piano, which made him laugh when he first heard it, at George Lawson’s; Erik Satie’s “La Belle Excentrique,” also for the piano; Hans Sachs’ song “It’s Just Art About Art,” from Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger;” a section of “Les Biches,” by Poulenc, music for a ballet for which Marie Laurencin did the original sets; and Jeanette MacDonald singing “San Francisco,” because, said Hockney, “it’s about California and a very pretty song, and really I like it because it used to be sung by a marvellous drag queen in a bar, which isn’t there anymore, and he actually looked like her in the film and swung out into the bar on a swing—it was really terrific.” Next came the beginning of “Fedora,” a “marvellous corny opera” by Giordano, which Hockney plays once a month while he is working. Then Marilyn Monroe singing “I’m Through with Love,” which he finds very affecting, and, finally, what he described as “almost the same thing... it’s just high-art form”—the “Liebestod,” from the end of “Tristan and Isolde,” sung by Birgit Nilsson. The “one luxury” that the program allowed him to take to the island he stretched to “some paper and some pencils and a battery-operated pencil sharpener.” To go with the Bible, Shakespeare, and an encyclopedia, already provided, he chose a pornographic book, which he thought might stop one from fantasizing overmuch—“Route 69,” by Floyd Carter. “I think it was written in a back room on Forty-second Street, and it’s full of bad grammar and spelling mistakes, but quite touching in its way, and it covers a great number of interesting things.”
SEEING
The highly visible side of Hockney causes some people who don’t know him very well to assume that there is no other side, but one exists. Anyone accompanying him to a museum is likely to see a bit of both. In New York, he often visits the Frick (where he has pointed out that the Arabs used fountains for their sound as well as their looks), the Metropolitan, the Whitney, and the Museum of Modern Art, whose Cézanne show two years ago he went to three times. On one occasion, a woman, recognizing him, said, “Oh, I like Cézanne, but I love you!” This made him giggle, and then wonder if people thought he was giggling at Cézanne. As a tourist and museumgoer, Hockney has an almost nineteenth-century enthusiasm; he wants to see everything. In Berlin with Henry Geldzahler, he went looking for paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, and at the end of the day, after visits to numerous museums, churches, monuments, and public buildings, and after Geldzahler had given up and gone back to rest at their hotel, Hockney found the Friedrichs at the Charlottenburg Palace. (“Henry was furious,” he says.) His companions on such excursions are likely to be told why cracks appear first in black paint or the reasons for reverse perspective or how the raincoat in a figure by Francis Bacon has been created out of three brushstrokes. Among his favorite museums are the Uffizi, in Florence, and London’s National Gallery. He says of the latter, “Somehow, everything seems a masterpiece there, which isn’t the case at the Louvre.” Hockney now has a written permit to carry a magnifying glass or his Leitz binoculars in the National Gallery. He used to run afoul of guards who, finding him peering at short range at, say, the Canalettos, would tell him, “Here, lad, you can’t do that.” (One drawback of going round a museum with Hockney is the watchful presence of guards, who follow him, sure that he is about to touch a picture or harm it, if only by the intensity of his gaze.) At the National Gallery, he obtained the permit by going to the director’s office and saying, “It’s not fair.” He sits on a seat there staring at a Rembrandt through his binoculars. “You can see every brushstroke. If you know a bit about painting, you can learn an awful lot this way.” He learned from the Canalettos how to do the shadows on the temple stones in “The Magic Flute.” At the Courtauld Institute, in London, he gazes through his magnifying glass at a Cézanne and notes the many colors used in a tiny segment of the painting.
Of the Cézanne show in New York, he says, “You got this wonderful impression of a cantankerous old man and his obsessions. It was all about looking and seeing. What the artist cares about I mean, one particular mountain—if Cézanne hadn’t painted it, you wouldn’t have noticed it, a bump on the Provence landscape. But he’d known it since childhood, for sixty years, and there it was.”
Hockney himself has a valuable ability to see as he works how the completed picture will appear to a viewer. Between 1973 and 1975, he turned out several very large paintings in a very small Paris studio. He appears to be exercising the same kind of ability with his designs for “The Magic Flute.” Maurice says, “He seems to know how they will look full-size from a distance.”
MIDAFTERNOON
The light beginning to fade. Wet snow falling. Gray light. Maurice has come back from Sam Flax’s with some paint and from Lincoln Center with tickets for “Madame Butterfly.” Hockney has reluctantly turned on some lights in the room. He has also donned a red pullover and his white cap. He is smoking a very black Italian cigar, which looks like burning licorice. He has cut out a large gap in the middle of one of his designs for the fire scene. He says, “The Met didn’t do ‘The Magic Flute’ for fourteen years, because it was too lowbrow, not grand enough.” And “If worst comes to worst, I can always get a job at Harrods painting the flames in those artificial coal fires.”
SNAPS
Hockney on Susan Sontag’s “On Photography”: “She says there are too many images. People take too many photographs. I used to.” This sort of statement, with its implication that he doesn’t take many nowadays, makes Hockney’s friends smile and say, “Well, yes, he’s cut down from four rolls of 35-mm film a week to two.” In the bedroom at Kensington are twelve strong shelves holding eighty leather-bound photograph albums (Wallace Heaton, Bond Street, twenty pounds each), which cover just the years 1961 through 1977. Kasmin says, “They make it seem he’s always on holiday.” There are photographs of Hockney crewcut and Hockney with long bleached locks, Hockney wearing Coney Island sweatshirts, Union Jack waistcoats, seersucker jackets, and nothing at all. Photographs of friends in cafés, drawing rooms, pools, and bed. Of the Rhine, Route 66, the Rue Jacob, and Powis Terrace, and of Worthing, West Sussex, where he stayed with his parents in a small hotel. A ship’s photograph from the S.S. France showing him and Peter Schlesinger sitting at the dining table they shared with a couple who, Hockney recalls, collected duck decoys. Summer scenes on Fire Island with muscular young men, and Hockney posing as a beach cutie, doing sexy poses from the Ziegfeld era, pulling the top of his bathing suit down.
On the cover of the February, 1977, issue of the highbrow British monthly The New Review was a photograph of Hockney and Kitaj standing side by side, Hockney in the nude and Kitaj in undershirt, shoes, and socks. Hockney’s explanation: “It was kind of innocent. I was drawing Peter Langan. Ron Kitaj came over—he’s working on a painting of me nude, so he took a few photos of me nude against a canvas. Then Peter said, ‘That looks easy.’ He grabbed a Polaroid, said, ‘Well, take your pants off, Ron,’ and snapped a few of the two of us. He gave one to Ron, and the next week Ron had this big blowup of it on his wall. The New Review girl interviewed us there—it was to do with the debate about figurative art that followed the exhibition Ron had selected, ‘The Human Clay’—and later she asked Ron for the photo. They didn’t ask me. They just assumed I didn’t care. Then the magazine’s printers wouldn’t print it. They said they were an old Quaker family. So the magazine got another printer. They sold out that issue. The only place you could get it a month later was the gay bookshop in Notting Hill. The feeling was Ron and I weren’t pretty enough.”
Hockney thinks that photography is overrated as a means of creating work of more than transient interest. “In a hundred years of photography, considering the staggering number of photographs taken daily, the number of memorable images isn’t that great. I’ve never seen a photograph that’s as interesting as a minor painting. At exhibitions of photographs, the texture and scale are boringly the same. Maybe it has to do with time. A photograph takes a split second, at the most a few minutes, and describes so little time. Whereas a painting can take months.”
Nevertheless, he has used photographs to help make many of his paintings. In one album are nearly a hundred and fifty color photographs of a swimming pool and a man swimming underwater, which he used for “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),” of 1971. He made a special trip back to Vichy to take photographs before painting “Le Parc des Sources.” Yet he regards as mindless the school of Photo-Realism, whose paintings are created by projecting a photograph on canvas and coloring it in, and he tends to dislike pictures of his own in which photographs dominated the final work; one entitled “Early Morning” he now calls “the worst picture I ever did.” He says, “You have to learn what you can use a photograph for—as an aid to composition and a prod to memory. There’s no real information there. A photo is devoid of life.”
EDUCATION OF THE ARTIST
Hockney knew by the time he was eleven what he was going to be. He was academically bright, and he won a scholarship to Bradford Grammar School; there, however, he found that art was taught only to the less clever boys, so he coasted for a while and failed tests until he was put in that form. He used to doodle in the margins of all his exercise books, illuminated the logbook of his Boy Scout patrol (he was its leader), did cartoons (signed “Okni”) for the school magazine, and drew an illustrated washing-up schedule for the kitchen at home. He made posters for a local sweetshop in return for candy and ice cream. He sold programs at concerts and sat in the cheap seats behind the orchestra, where he sketched the musicians. He won local art competitions, in which the prizes were generally table-tennis sets, and when he was fifteen he came second in a national competition for an advertisement for Ingersoll watches. His parents, impressed by that feat, paid for him to take evening lessons in calligraphy with a teacher from the junior section of the Bradford School of Art, who told one of his classes there (it included Hockney’s friend-to-be Norman Stevens), “I’ve got this private pupil who can take you lot to the cleaners.” When Hockney, at seventeen, sold his first painting, the portrait of his father, he rang home and said, “Hullo, Mum, I’ve sold my dad.”
He wanted to go to the junior art school when he was fourteen, but the scholarship authorities insisted he stay at the grammar school until he had had a basic, well-rounded education. At sixteen, he went to the Bradford School of Art. Norman Stevens remembers his first appearance, fresh from a summer job on a farm, with fringe of brown hair, a big chin, and a spread-out face, and wearing a long red scarf, which he tripped over as he entered the room. David Oxtoby, fellow-student, said, “Jesus! Boris Karloff!” The nickname stuck for several years. But Hockney worked hard. He resisted the inclination of the staff to treat all students there as heading for careers as commercial artists or as art teachers. He was going to be an artist. Despite a few annoyances (the principal set up a compulsory machine-embroidery course), the largely academic training suited him. He studied perspective, anatomy, life painting, figure composition, and lithography. Hockney found it thrilling, after grammar school, to be in a place where he knew he would enjoy almost everything he was asked to do. For four years, he spent twelve hours there every day.
He and his friends were always broke. When evening classes ended, at nine, they walked to the station buffet for cups of hot Bovril. They hitchhiked to museums and special exhibitions. He and Stevens rode to Edinburgh in the back of a fish lorry and walked around a Cézanne show reeking of mackerel. In London, they slept on the Thames Embankment with the down-and-outs. They went to the Royal College of Art and photographed each other on the front steps, as if they were students there.
Hockney, in fact, was accepted by both postgraduate institutions he applied to—the Royal College and the Slade. (Stevens went up to the Royal College right away, a lameness caused by polio exonerating him from the two years’ national service.) Hockney chose the Royal College because it seemed somewhat broader-based than the Slade, which concentrated on fine art. At the Royal College, painting students and students of fashion and design got to know one another and were interested in the interaction of arts, crafts, and design. The college magazine, Ark, had for a decade been promoting the view that art should be more open to the artist’s surroundings and to the visual sources of the time, such as Victoriana, advertising, films, and comics. Within a year, Hockney was well known at the Royal College. To save money, he moved out of a shared Earls Court flat into a garden shed, which had electric light but no plumbing. He used to turn up at the college at seven-thirty every morning with milk for his tea and make use of the college facilities before setting to work. (A professor of painting, Carel Weight, once found him washing his feet in a studio sink.) He was one of a conspicuous, somewhat headstrong bunch, which included Derek Boshier, Allen Jones, Peter Phillips, and R. B. Kitaj—all of whom have since achieved a measure of fame in the British art world, and some of whom at the time antagonized the staff. Jones was expelled, Phillips was warned of a similar fate, and Hockney was told that he had failed the general-studies course—a failure that usually meant one couldn’t graduate. Hockney felt that general studies, which included a smattering of nuclear physics, was a crazy waste of time.
During his first year, 1959, many of his fellow-students were painting Abstract Expressionist pictures. Kitaj says, “Hockney had a two-week abstract period.” The human figure could be discerned in his 1960 paintings, though he had to work through a little nervousness about being thought reactionary. The important thing, he believed, was deciding how to find subject matter. Soon he and some of his friends were painting figuratively, but apparently without rejecting the recent past of non-figurative modernism; and their first show, the Young Contemporaries exhibition of 1961, made a far greater impact than student shows generally make. The reviewers talked of “neo-Dada,” then plumped for “Pop.” Cecil Beaton, the eminent photographer and theatrical designer, bought one of the Hockney paintings in the show. Kasmin, then a director of one of the two Marlborough Galleries, bought one, and took along friends, who bought others. (Harry Fischer, then the head of Marlborough, didn’t like Hockney’s work, and insisted that Kasmin, who wanted to handle Hockney, do so privately, keeping his pictures in an office where regular customers couldn’t see them.) Hockney decided that he had better invest in better paint and materials than he had been using. “If people were paying sixty pounds for my paintings, I thought they mustn’t fall apart.”
In July of 1962, the Royal College bent the regulations and allowed Hockney to graduate. They also gave him the College Life Drawing Prize and the top award of the year, the Gold Medal for Work of Outstanding Distinction. Hockney went to the convocation ceremony in an orange-blond crewcut, wearing what looked like a gold-lamé jacket, and carrying a gold-colored shopping bag to put his prizes in. When someone later pointed out that his jacket wasn’t real gold lamé, Hockney said, “The medal wasn’t solid gold, either.”
His views on art education remain somewhat militant. The ease with which he delivers them is perhaps helped by the fact that he has done very little art teaching. For six or eight months after leaving the Royal College, he taught etching one day a week at Maidstone, in Kent. He has taught briefly in California, Colorado, and Iowa, but has always made a living from his art—a great advantage, of course, in terms of the time he could spend on his own work. Norman Stevens, who has taught until recently, says that Hockney knows “sod all” about the present situation in British art schools, but he agrees with Hockney that the academic entry requirements should be abolished. Hockney says, “Art is a non-academic subject—people who are good at it may be no good at exams in other subjects. People like Norman, Ossie Clark, and the painter John Hoyland might not get into an art school now. It’s a swindle if you lose that sort of talent. They need to let in people who love art. It’s something you need passion for—not learning or just an interest.”
FRIENDS
Something that Hockney talks about with Ron Kitaj is life drawing, which he believes is one of the few subjects that should be taught in art schools. He and Kitaj chat on the phone or meet for a meal almost daily when they are both at their homes in London. Kitaj, who was born in the United States, seems almost as interested in the cultural and political implications of art as he is in painting itself; he is four years older than Hockney, and has been an elder statesman to him since their Royal College days. They spend a good deal of time telling each other their troubles. They go on trips together, swap works, and take the mickey out of one another. (“Ron can’t read,” Hockney says of Kitaj, who has a vast book collection, including first editions of almost everything written by Ford Madox Ford.) They are aware of themselves as encouraging (and being encouraged by) a number of other figurative artists working in Britain. Kitaj thinks that Hockney is the finest living draftsman of the human figure. Hockney admires Kitaj’s work, and when a 1977 London exhibition of it was attacked in the Times (“slick, badly made pictures”) Hockney wrote to the paper defending his friend, though he was aware that the gesture might draw fire on him.
Henry Geldzahler is Hockney’s best friend in America. Hockney tells of Kitaj’s meeting Diana Vreeland, doyenne of New York fashion, who works at the Metropolitan Museum, as Geldzahler used to, and making conversation:
KITAJ: Do you know Henry Geldzahler?
DIANA V.: We all know Henry.
KITAJ: He’s very well read, isn’t he?
DIANA V.: You would be if you went home every day at one o’clock.
(Hockney says that when Miss Vreeland saw Henry going down the museum steps on the way home at one, she was just arriving for the day.)
Hockney met Geldzahler at Andy Warhol’s studio. They found they have the same birthday, July 9th. Geldzahler, who was born in 1935, in Antwerp, meets Hockney’s strenuous specifications for solid friendship, which are humor, generosity, powers of acute observation, and not complaining—or, at least, complaining about the same things as Hockney or being prepared to listen to him complain. When Hockney is in New York, he has daily heart-to-hearts with Geldzahler about art, books, sex, films, and personalities. They have travelled together in France, Italy, Germany, and Britain. Geldzahler was supposed to write a book on Hockney, but nothing happened, so Hockney dictated for twenty-five hours into a tape recorder for Nikos Stangos, his editor, who prompted him with questions and edited the results—“David Hockney by David Hockney.” Geldzahler wrote the introduction, placing Hockney “in the grand tradition of English eccentricity.” Hockney has done two paintings and sixty drawings of Geldzahler, who claims it is hard work for the sitter as well as for the artist. (“You moved,” says Hockney, crossly.) The friendship, also according to Geldzahler, has its own demanding features. A couple of years ago, he had dinner with Hockney on Friday, lunch and dinner on Saturday, and tea on Sunday. On Tuesday, Hockney called him and said, “When are you coming over? I never see you.” When Geldzahler arrived not long ago to take Hockney to dinner with Sir John Pope-Hennessy, the former director of the British Museum, he found Hockney wearing jacket and tie, pin-striped trousers, and grubby white sneakers.
Geldzahler said, “You can’t wear sneakers.”
They argued for a few minutes, and then Hockney began to recite Robert Herrick’s poem “Delight in Disorder,” beginning, “A sweet disorder in the dress...” He spoke the whole, lovely poem. Geldzahler gave in.
Hockney says, “Henry’s susceptible to art, really.”
FLAMES
Hockney takes his glasses off to wipe them with a big linen handkerchief. When he has them on again, he looks at the cavern of flames—on two drops—which is almost finished. He talks about the collapsing Capitol Records building in the film “Earthquake”—stunning special effects! The ones in “The Towering Inferno” weren’t half as good. In fact, it might as well have been called “Blazing Semidetached.”
CRITICS
Although hailed from the start as the great hope of British art, Hockney has also been commonly criticized in terms that are now familiar to him: “It’s rather good, really, but a bit thin.” The review by Hilton Kramer of his Emmerich show taped to the Sutton Place living-room wall judged Hockney’s work amusing but also called it “a kind of 19th century salon art refurbished from the stockroom of modernism.” Kramer admires Hockney’s technical virtuosity, whereas Hockney thinks of himself as in fact somewhat ham-fisted. Henry Geldzahler says that Hilton Kramer’s reaction is puritanical—that Hockney’s work gives him pleasure and is therefore to be distrusted and not taken really seriously. Hockney says, “You never read books about Maupassant, because people still read Maupassant.” The popularity of his work has rarely been in doubt. Emmerich’s was full of viewers throughout his last show there. In big group exhibitions, like the “Twenty-five Years of British Painting” at the Royal Academy two years ago, people linger in front of the Hockneys and actually smile with pleasure at what they see. (To accompany reviews of group shows, picture editors often pick a Hockney as the illustration, which has the effect of blatantly contradicting any mealymouthed critical words alongside.)
The times that critics move with are not always signalled by the same drumbeats that artists hear. Critics have categories—e.g., “predictable,” “academic”—into which artists are often in danger of falling or of being pushed. Many writers expressed apprehension over Hockney’s media-inflated role as a sixties swinger and, like Bryan Robertson in the London Times, admonished him to “conserve his strength for his work.” The view that he is a fashionable lightweight was proposed two years ago by Albert Hunt, a teacher at the Royal College, who in a review of Hockney’s book quoted the Cole Porter line about “goldfish in the privacy of bowls” and remarked that Hockney and his friends were “swimming around in the tank while the house collapses around them.” Richard Cork, in 1970, thought that Hockney might develop into one of the greatest British artists ever but could easily “slip back into the brainless pursuit of prettiness.” A writer in the London Sunday Times color supplement declared in May of 1977 that Hockney’s success could be partly attributed to the fact that he entered the art world at the right moment, “with his gold lamé jacket and boyish charm... tailor-made for Fleet Street and the color supplements.”
Hockney himself doesn’t get very worked up about all this. He says, “They used to call my success a fluke, a flash in the pan. They’re saying it now, and if they’re still saying it in twenty years’ time, I won’t mind.” He has days when he thinks he is overrated by his fans and days when he knows he isn’t bad at what he does, and over and under it all, a feeling of heights left to conquer. “I don’t think I’ve found the real solutions yet. I go off on lots of tangents. But I’m trying.”
And by no means all serious criticism has been unkind. In 1963, Hugh Gordon Porteus, one of the art critics for The Listener, wrote:
When he has worked all this perilous adolescent stuff out of his system, Hockney will surprise us, I feel sure, with fresh advances. He is already a special kind of artist. As much as anyone of his age now painting in this country, he promises to develop into that kind of artist—and here we may think of the imperfections of Blake as well as of the rare perfections of Hogarth or Goya—who is indeed a rather special kind of man.
FAME
It is having exhibitions of your work appearing in three or four countries at any one time. It is being photographed by Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, being treated by gossip columnists as art’s equivalent of the Beatles. And being asked to give funds to wayout causes—most recently, by a Sussex couple who have been squatting on Lewes racecourse with a hundred and thirty dogs, eight cats, and a fox, and need money to establish an animal sanctuary. (Hockney says he isn’t going to give them anything.) It is having a young Japanese artist turn up, unannounced, in Eccleshill to worship the native ground. It is having your work—an ink drawing of Peter Schlesinger—stolen from the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, in Paris. It is turning down many requests to do portraits and instead doing, say, a jacket for a friend’s book. (David Plante, the author of “Slides,” found a copy of his novel in a bookshop with the jacket, by Hockney, removed, presumably by a fan.) The Yale Center for British Art, set up to house the Mellon Collection, extended its purview from 1851 to the present to show Hockney’s paintings, prints, and drawings last year. The film “A Bigger Splash” (“two and a half hours of weeping music,” according to its subject) is frequently shown in film-buff cinemas in Europe and America. At Glyndebourne, a secret dossier is kept of the “Rake’s Progress” sets that Hockney actually painted himself and that are therefore valuable. Fame is also being parodied, as by Osbert Lancaster in his book “The Littlehampton Bequest,” in which the last picture in a series of pastiches of portraits by great British artists is recognizably derived from Hockney’s “Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy,” Lancaster’s being called “Basil Cantilever Esq. and the Lady Patricia Cantilever.” And it is a matter of being imitated in innumerable advertisements and illustrations, and of affecting the work of a generation of young art students, and of causing people, whether sitting in railway carriages in their own living rooms, suddenly to see things his way. Talking to Hockney, someone once said he had never noticed the patterns in water until he’d seen Hockney’s paintings. Hockney said, “Well, they’ve been there an awful long time.”
It also means the occasional letdown. Hockney went with Norman Stevens to a retirement dinner for an old Bradford professor of theirs, Frank Lyle. Another guest was a Leeds brain surgeon who had never heard of Hockney. Stevens says, with the natural feeling of an excellent artist who doesn’t attract the same attention as his friend, “It did David good.”
LEARNING HOW TO SAY NO
Hockney does book jackets for friends like David Plante and George Melly, the jazz singer. Two summers ago, he designed an invitation for a late Jubilee party given by the dealer James Kirkman. He said yes to Jack Hazan when Hazan asked if he could make the film and Hockney didn’t really want it. He complied with a request from Wayne Sleep to design a drop curtain for a ballet charity performance that Sleep was dancing in. He goes to old boys’ dinners at Bradford Grammar School to please his mother and his brother Paul. He takes two or three people to dinner and a few more join the party, and with no fanfare he pays the bill. “David says yes to twenty-nine requests a day and then blames Kasmin and me because he’s under pressure,” says Paul Cornwall-Jones. Both Cornwall-Jones and Kasmin are in the finely balanced position of running businesses that require Hockney to produce work, of needing to show they want his stuff and, indeed, admire it, without giving him the feeling that they are breathing down his neck. But—apart from the fact that Hockney makes them do favors for him, and give him advice, whether or not he means to take it—he seems (according to Maurice) to be growing a little less dependent and better able to say no.
MAURICE
For a long time, Maurice Payne saw more of Hockney, and perhaps knew him better, than anybody else. Since meeting him in 1965, he has worked with Hockney on the Cavafy etchings, of 1966; the “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” etchings, of 1969; and the “Blue Guitar” etchings, of 1976, doing the “technical things”—putting on the grounds, biting the plates, and proofing them. He was Hockney’s full-time assistant until last December, when he decided to set up his own etching studio in New York. He has a pale, triangular face and the somewhat melancholy look of a young man in an Elizabethan miniature by Nicholas Hilliard. He enjoyed working for Hockney, but finally felt he was losing a grip on his own life, the way others who have been with or worked for Hockney have done. It helped Maurice, he thinks, that he isn’t gay, and therefore wasn’t swept up into Hockney’s style of life. He had his own friends.
Maurice feels that the drama of Hockney’s life is exaggerated by those who talk about it, and he includes Hockney in those who talk about it. In reality, Maurice says, it’s often a quiet and lonely life. Hockney is a demanding person, who needs someone to take care of the time-consuming day-to-day details of living for him, like laundry and shopping. He sometimes gets jealous of two people who are happily together. But he’s also great to be with—tremendous to talk with, travel with, and work with. Maurice says, “I’m not sexually or emotionally involved with David, but I love him in a way.”
Yet Maurice remains a detached, articulate critic. “The work’s uneven,” he says. “He spends a lot of time on work he shouldn’t be doing.” Although he admires much of Hockney’s work, Maurice would tell him what he thought was wrong in work that was under way. Maurice thought some upright bedposts spoiled an etching in the Grimm series, and Hockney removed the posts; Maurice said the boot was too big on Henry’s right foot in a portrait of Geldzahler, and Hockney demurred, but later the boot was made smaller, Maurice noticed. Hockney once gave him a drawing that Maurice didn’t think was up to snuff, so he said, “David, do you think this is any good?” David looked at it, his bottom lip twisting in a smile, and said, “Maybe not.” Maurice tore it up.
FROM LIFE
Hockney has done some beautiful drawings of Maurice. The people he draws best and prefers to draw are those he knows well—perhaps a dozen, like his mother, Geldzahler, and Celia. He can draw them again and again, showing changes in them. He is a domestic artist. He says, “The trouble with drawing people you don’t know is that you never really know what they look like. You spend a lot of time just trying to get a likeness. Whereas if you know them well you know there are several faces there. You can draw one of them, a face that belongs to a certain day. That’s what interests me.” Although the drawings show both knowledge and great affection, in some of the painted portraits the technical problems appear to have preoccupied him more than the people concerned. He admits to having spent longer on the red tulips in a commissioned portrait (one of only a few he has done) of the late Sir David Webster, the general administrator of Covent Garden Opera, than he did on Sir David. But his pictures involve more than simply the formal values that interest some critics. He says, “If a picture has a person or two people in it, there is a human drama that’s meant to be talked about. It’s not just some lines.”
Perhaps some of his paintings—for example, “Pool with Two Figures” and “American Collectors”—have too visible a drama in them, like Victorian problem pictures. His own dissatisfaction takes him back to rework a picture like “My Parents and I,” which he can’t give up. He says, “It doesn’t really matter if a painting takes ten years.” Many of what are possibly his best pictures are without people but are in a way populated, with such appendages of a vital world as umbrellas, deck chairs, a shaded window with the light bursting in on all sides, a vase of flowers—ordinary human things made exceptional. His feeling about abstract art is chiefly that it lacks the passion of life. “A lot of modern art is too into itself,” he says. “It’s about issues that people aren’t interested in. The art that relates to human beings, to their passions, is what pleases people. It’s the passion that people recognize.” A number of people believe that Hockney is not taking an easy or a backward way out. Paul Cornwall-Jones says, “It is more difficult to paint people. He is doing the most difficult thing.”
SKILLS
Hockney uses, adapts, and is bold with themes and devices from past masters, among them Piero della Francesca, Fra Angelico, Hogarth, Gainsborough, and Picasso. He has picked up etching tricks from the British artist Anthony Gross and the Paris printmaker Aldo Crommelynck. From painters in California he learned how to manipulate acrylic more freely by keeping it wet. With knowledge gained from the American graphics printer Ken Tyler, he has recently been making large swimming-pool pictures out of pressed paper pulp, pre-saturated with paint. He cares about materials and likes visiting art shops in various countries, finding in France, for instance, brushes that only French painters use and funny little pots that they stand them in. In New York, at Sam Flax’s, he buys pieces of graphic equipment he hasn’t seen before. He has found an electric eraser useful for getting a certain blurred effect. At Flax’s, he buys Prismacolor pencils, which the Eagle company has ceased to make in Britain but is making in the United States. Hockney prefers them because they are a trifle softer than rival makes. When the Eagle people in Britain were closing down the line, Hockney went to see them. “I told them how good they were. But they wouldn’t keep on making them.” He sounds mystified that his approval of their pencils wasn’t enough to make them change their minds.
MODERN BRITISH ARTISTS
Hockney is the youngest artist given a chapter—the last—in the third and most recent volume of Sir John Rothenstein’s “Modern English Painters.” Sir John approached Hockney tentatively, wary, as is natural, of his popular success, and ended, as also seems common, impressed. When Sir John was director of the Tate Gallery, he persuaded the Friends of the Tate to buy for the gallery Hockney’s 1962 painting “The First Marriage,” at a price of three hundred pounds. In 1971, the Tate—which has a modern international collection and a historic to-the-present-day British collection—acquired “Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy” for a modest fifty-four hundred pounds, also provided by the Friends. A number of artists nowadays seem to be purchased only by museums or public institutions, but Hockney has managed to interest what might be called the private public more; one suspects that museum directors have bought him, as Sir John did, more as individuals than as bosses of museums. For all that, his work is now in public collections and museums in numerous countries. It is doubtful if any other British artist of his age has figured in as many one-man shows or group exhibitions, all over the world, of contemporary British or European art. He has won awards in London, Liverpool, Paris, Lugano, Ljubljana, and Cracow. He had a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1970 and a one-man show at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 1974. To some observers, he does not seem at all out of place in the tradition formed by such cranky geniuses as Hogarth, Turner, Whistler, Wyndham Lewis, and Stanley Spencer—at once indispensable to British art and life and slightly at odds with the more ponderous aspects of it.
With the Tate, the official custodian of that art in separate items and as historic sequence, Hockney is not exactly at ease. This spring, he attacked the Tate publicly in an article in the London Observer. This initiated a vehement debate about whether the diversity of modern art had properly been represented at the Tate in recent years. Hockney’s position is such that no one could suggest that self-interest prompted this blast—even though the Tate not long ago declined an opportunity to buy “My Parents,” saying it already had a double portrait of his in the Ossie and Celia picture. (Henry Geldzahler says, “So they have more than one Turner sunrise.”) Hockney was also upset with the Tate in 1974, when it refused to lend the Clark picture for his Paris show, on the pretext that it was too fragile to ship. Hockney went off the deep end—stormed into the Tate and demanded to see the conservator. “He was in the cellar—a Hungarian,” says Hockney. “I said, ‘Where are the cracks?’ He said, ‘They haven’t occurred yet.’ I went up to see Norman Reid, the director, and I said, ‘The conservator doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with it yet. If something happens to it, I’ll repaint the whole bloody picture for you. Really, it’s not fair—you won’t lend a picture for a British artist having a big show in Paris. I’m appalled.’” Then, Sir Norman Reid being apparently unmoved, Hockney took him into the gallery and showed him an abstract painting of vertical and horizontal lines which depended for its effect on being tightly stretched; it was sagging in its frame. The painting was taken down at once and removed for conservation. And Ossie and Celia went to Paris.
CHEEKY
As he talks, eyes and mouth mobile, memory and imagination inventive, Hockney often has the smart-aleck look of a boy who knows that he is funny but also clever and therefore the teacher won’t punish him for whatever he is up to. He hopes his humor will be counted for him after death if there turns out to be a God and a Heaven. “He’ll say, ‘Well, David, at least you weren’t envious or ambitious or terribly wicked. Come on in.’” (Hockney went to Methodist Sunday school, but he no longer considers himself a Christian. He likes the Wallace Stevens lines “poetry exceeding music must take the place of empty heaven and its hymns.” On the other hand, if someone with him starts singing John Bunyan’s great seventeenth-century hymn “He Who Would Valiant Be,” Hockney joins in; he knows every word of it.) One night when he was an art student at Bradford, Hockney was walking with Norman Stevens and two friends to the station buffet, three of them pretending to limp in company with Stevens’ real limp. At that point, a crippled man came hobbling toward them. As he approached, Hockney said loudly to Stevens, “All right, pack it in, Norman.” The others stopped limping. The crippled man said to Norman, who, of course, couldn’t, “Cheeky bastard!”
MAGIC FLUTE
The light had gone. Big flakes of snow were falling on Sutton Place. The evening traffic was rumbling out over the bridge. Hockney stood, his back to the window, scratching his stomach and contemplating the model stage, where his fire drops were in place, imagining Tamino and Pamina passing through their ordeal while the flute itself protected them with its magic charm. He had the music in his head. Wonderful opera! A fairy story, about art, about idealism, a combination of childishness and farce and something profound. Something for everybody. He remembered words from Auden as he slipped the waterfalls in to replace the fire, a quick change, a proper show, creating magic: “A work that lasts two hundred years is tough.” And, a little later: “Genius surpasses all things, even Chic.” The buzzer at the apartment door sounded. Maurice put down his pen and stood up to answer it. Hockney stared deep into the falling waters of the cascade. “That’ll be Henry,” he said.♦
