Life of David Hockney Read online

  It’s an understatement to say he was enthralled by the book: it was earth-shattering. In its pages he found the theory behind everything he had been searching for during the past four or five years in his new photographic and pictorial experiments. He learned that, without knowing it, he had moved away from a limited Western tradition toward a more open Eastern tradition. European painting was forever linked to the invention of perspective in the fifteenth century. It was precisely the tyranny of perspective that David was trying to escape in his photomontages and his paintings that moved through space and time. Chinese artists did the same thing. In their work, they showed both interiors and exteriors and did not limit the gaze, which, in life, was not limited by perspective. “They practiced the principle of the moving focus, by which the eye could wander while the spectator also wandered in imagination through the landscape,” David read. He could have written those words. Professor Rowley made a fascinating suggestion regarding one-point perspective: “Reverse perspective, in which the lines converge in the eye of the spectator instead of in the vanishing point, would have been much truer to psychological fact.” The expression “reverse perspective” summed up what David had intuited years earlier when he had painted his Kerby from a work by Hogarth illustrating the gross errors that could arise when one ignored the laws of perspective: he believed at the time that those errors constituted a truer space than the so-called realistic space, because they opened the imaginary—what there was in us that was most individual and most subjective.

  Should he believe in chance or fate? By what miracle had the director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis had the idea of organizing an exhibition that had brought David to this faraway city where he had found the book that summed up his work? It was incredible. A professor at Princeton had published this book forty years earlier, when David was six years old. The text he was reading gave his research the theoretical framework that every artist worthy of the name needs if he wants to be taken seriously. Even though he hated that notion of “serious,” in the name of which the elitist and snobby art critics scorned his cheerful and colorful paintings, he had come to understand that his work was not determined by a mere hedonistic quest. It was an exploration, to quote Picasso, who had said something one day that David had never forgotten: “I’m not painting; I’m exploring.”

  Even though he was still haunted by the memory of the recent funerals of Joe and Byron, he had never felt so exhilarated. During the following months he met with curators of Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum and the British Museum. At the Met, in January, he was shown a seventy-two-foot-long scroll, a commission from the Chinese emperor dating from 1690. David spent four hours on his knees unrolling the parchment and observing each tiny detail, each little figure of A Day on the Grand Canal with the Chinese Emperor. He had trouble containing his excitement. This major discovery brought together his two passions—painting and music—because it had introduced him to another type of painting that, like music, had melodies and counterpoint, crescendos and diminuendos, and was experienced through time.

  Back in Los Angeles, brimming with inspiration, he dove into a large painting that represented a visit to his friends Mo and Lisa’s home, with a moving focus enabling the viewer to move through the rooms. He then painted a similar tour through Christopher and Don’s place, from the studio where Don was painting the view of the ocean to Christopher’s office, at the other end of the house, where Don’s work, completed, was hanging on the wall. David simply made line drawings of the figures so they didn’t distract from the true subject, which was the exploration, the traveling through time and space. The work was also an explosion of shapes and colors, with warm shades predominating over cool shades. These hues attracted and absorbed the eye before you even knew what you were seeing.

  He was sorry he had to stop working to go with Gregory and Graves to the opening of an exhibition of his theater sets that was being held at the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City. On the way back, the car broke down and they had to spend five days waiting for it to be repaired in a small Mexican town, Acatlán, where there was absolutely nothing to do. Graves and Gregory drowned their boredom in tequila while David, ecstatic, contemplated the inner courtyard of the hotel thinking about his next painting: he would depict the stroll of a solitary walker around this courtyard in reverse perspective. There wouldn’t be a figure, because the character inside the painting would be the viewer, whom David would bring into the work through this new way of representing space.

  He was becoming increasingly famous. Several exhibitions were devoted to him every year in different countries. Emmerich’s sale of A Visit with Mo and Lisa, Echo Park had surpassed six figures, as they said in the States. His older brother, Paul, a former accountant who had been mayor of Bradford, had left politics and was now his business manager. Together they made a decision: David would no longer grant exclusive rights to a gallery and would control the fate of his work himself. He would be the master of his own house.

  Because everything else escaped his control. Ian had moved in with a young actor, and even if it was a natural development, David had a bitter taste in his mouth that reminded him of Peter’s betrayal. In Paris, his two closest friends had died of AIDS, one after the other. The month the second was buried, Christopher in turn died of cancer in Los Angeles. He had died at the “normal” age of eighty-two, after a long and full life, but his death left a hole in David that was as deep as the affection he felt for him. Close friends in Los Angeles, New York, London, and Paris had AIDS, with only a few months or a few years to live. Ann and Graves had decided to move back to England, even though David had begged them to change their minds: what would they do in gloomy London? Ann acknowledged that moving to Los Angeles had saved her life, and was infinitely grateful to David, but she now felt the need to return home and to get back to her roots. Despite several attempts, she had never obtained her driver’s license, and life in L.A. without a car made her too dependent. Though he understood her reasons, he felt abandoned. A few lines in a letter she wrote to thank him after she left struck him: “In essence you’re an island, David. Your mechanism is self-winding.”

  He didn’t want to be an island. He liked having company, he wanted to have a family, friends, people around him, to help him not to think about all those who were dead or dying. But the last of them abandoned him, too. Gregory, returning from a month-long stint of rehab, announced one evening that he had to leave Montcalm Avenue if he wanted to stay sober.

  “Unbelievable. Just don’t touch the bottle, that’s all.”

  “David, you drink every night, friends come over, drugs are passed around. It’s impossible to resist.”

  “No. I’ll help you.”

  “You’re not listening to me. I’ve found an apartment in Echo Park, near Mo and Lisa. I’m moving out tomorrow.”

  “You’re mad! What about me?”

  “You only think about yourself! For me, it’s a question of life and death.”

  “Don’t you think you’re being a bit dramatic? Is it the shrink I pay who put these ideas in your head?”

  “This won’t prevent us from working together.”

  “If you leave, don’t ever step foot in here again.”

  The next day, Gregory packed his bags.

  Gregory, who had shared his life for ten years, on whom he had always been able to depend and whom he had helped again and again, whose health care bills he had paid and whose insults he had endured without holding it against him, Gregory, whom he had always allowed to be free, was also betraying him, just when Ian had finally vacated the premises! David was so hurt that he had his brother send Gregory an official letter firing him like a mere employee, telling him to return the keys to the house, and even to reimburse David for the rehab clinic. Sorrow made him petty.

  Only work saved him from the solitude in which his increasing deafness, the death of his friends, the departure of Ann and Graves, th
e break with Gregory, and his fear of a sexuality with fatal consequences had entrapped him. As soon as he was concentrating on a page, a canvas, or a screen, he no longer felt alone. The pleasure of discovering a new machine made him want to play with it while forgetting all the rest. He bought a computer on which he could draw with an electronic pencil. It felt like he was painting with light—an extraordinary experience. A new photocopying machine allowed him to enlarge and shrink the images, and even to photocopy real objects. You could create art with a humble office photocopying machine! Soon, he would be able to directly connect his camera to the printer and print out as many of his own lithographs as he wanted, as many times and as quickly as he wanted, on the Arches paper that he imported from France.

  He was busier than ever. He had accepted a commission from French Vogue, which had given him carte blanche over forty pages—an excellent opportunity to expose his ideas on cubism and perspective, and to explain that there wasn’t any distortion of the real when Picasso painted Dora Maar with three eyes and two noses, but that, on the contrary, the work showed an intimate reality: the face as it was seen by the artist who was getting closer to kiss her. The Magic Flute was going to be performed at the San Francisco Opera; he created sets for Tristan and Isolde for the new Los Angeles Opera; and he made the most complex of his photomontages for Vanity Fair: Pearblossom Hwy., 11–18th April 1986, #1, the crossing of two roads in the desert, in which even the road signs are made up of several photos, and in which the viewer can clearly see how altering the perspective renders the landscape more alive and more real. He feverishly prepared the second retrospective of his work that would open in two years at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

  He did something else: he bought the house next to his and tried to convince Celia to move into it—but her teenage sons refused to live abroad, and she also had to take care of her aging mother. He ended up giving the house to Ian and his boyfriend, and they moved in during the summer of ’87. It was better to purge himself of jealousy, bitterness, resentment, all negative feelings. Why not simply be friends? Wasn’t Ian, that adorable boy, like a son? David had the incredible luck of having escaped AIDS. He didn’t need sex anymore. Friendship was enough. For his fiftieth birthday in July, Ian gave him a little dachshund, the baby of his own dog. David had never had a pet before. His nomadic life on several continents made owning a pet impractical. He never imagined he would get attached to a dog. He couldn’t believe what happened to him: he instantly fell in love with the puppy. He called him Stanley in memory of his father, who adored the actor Stan Laurel, and soon got a little companion for him so he wouldn’t be lonely. He now had a good reason to stop traveling and to stay home with his dear dachshunds, close to his dear friends. For the New Year he and Ian threw a huge party in which several generations blended together. The house on Montcalm Avenue again vibrated with music, laughter, and noise, a celebration overshadowed only by the theft of his Picassoesque portrait of Celia, probably by one of Ian’s young guests. The painting was never found.

  The retrospective that opened at LACMA in April ’88 showed thirty years of his work. The day of the opening, while he was walking through the rooms that contained drawings, etchings, portraits, the large California paintings, photomontages, opera sets, and even images from his own printer, David wondered whether his work didn’t strive to be as ambitious as that of Proust, whom he had reread over the years. Proust’s opus was built like a cathedral around a spiritual quest: the search for lost time—the search for the link between our different selves, which kept dying one after another. As for David, hadn’t he, from the beginning, been searching for lost movement? He had always painted for the pleasure of it, following his impulses against all odds, without compromise, faithful to his own desires. This notion of pleasure, which critics put down and called superficial, didn’t it rather contain something essential? Wasn’t it the expression of life itself? Wasn’t it the reason why he gave up a style as soon as he began to be bored with it, that is, as soon as life had drained out of it? Hadn’t he always needed to feel emotions in order to paint, and wasn’t emotion (which etymologically came from the Latin word motio, movement) the same thing as movement, as life? His oeuvre was thus not just a personal refuge where he could escape pain; it was actually a construction that helped save painting, that art form which seemed to be doomed in the face of photography and film. David’s work showed that painting was the most powerful art, the most real, because it contained memory, emotions, subjectivity, time: life. In that, it helped us overcome death.

  For an exhibition in Arles, an homage to Van Gogh, David painted the artist’s famous little chair from a reverse perspective: the “erroneous” perspective, just like the cubist paintings that revealed the reality of perception, gave the chair a dimension so human and affective that he immediately painted another one. He added it to the LACMA retrospective when it came to London in October after traveling to New York. People flocked to the Tate. The phone rang constantly. The public adored the exhibition. The art critics weren’t absolutely negative, but called David “the lost child of contemporary painting” and found him as boring as an old school teacher in northern England when he talked endlessly about the tyranny of perspective. They didn’t rave about him as they did about the new wunderkind of British art, Damien Hirst.

  Their reticence awakened David’s old provocateur spirit. A band of reactionaries in England thought they were guarding the entrances to “art” with their pitchforks? He would show them what a boy from Yorkshire who lived in Los Angeles was capable of. They were elitists? He would be egalitarian. Radically. He would make art accessible to all. He had already committed a subversive act the year before when ten thousand copies of an original “homemade” engraving of a ball bouncing had been distributed with the local Bradford newspaper. This time he would go farther.

  He had been invited to participate in the São Paulo Biennial. He decided to send his works by fax. Henry, the commissioner of the exhibition, found the idea original; the biennial organizers thought it was a joke.

  He wasn’t joking.

  The telephone lines weren’t very reliable in Brazil; he had to send his work from his studio to another fax machine in Los Angeles, and then his assistant flew to São Paulo with the faxes in a suitcase. David didn’t go. Since it was an exhibition by fax, he would respond to interviews by fax.

  The fax machine was the telephone of the deaf. Ever since his sister Margaret, who was also hard of hearing, had made him buy one of the first machines available, every day he faxed drawings to his friends and family on two continents. They were often composed of several sheets of paper that had to be assembled when they arrived. First four sheets of paper, then eight, then twenty-four, and so on.

  On November 10, 1989, the day after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he sent a fax of 144 pages, a stylized rendition of a tennis match, to the gallery that his young friend Jonathan Silver, his compatriot from Bradford who had become a rich businessman and an art patron, had opened in their hometown. It was in an old salt factory, and was dedicated to exhibiting David’s engravings. He was alone with his assistant in his California studio, peaceful, in the morning light, introducing one by one into the machine the pages that would be received thousands of miles away, at the same moment, but in the evening, in a place where several hundred people were gathered to witness the assembling of the huge puzzle, applauding, laughing, and drinking wine. It was marvelous to think that this artistic performance had the power to erase distance while connecting day and night between continents: it was the best way to fight against solitude. It was his own way of tearing down walls.

  Mo, his first model, his former lover, his friend, his assistant, had recently died at the age of forty-seven, after succumbing to the alcoholism that gripped him when his wife left him. Nick, his first friend and first gallerist in Los Angeles, died of AIDS in New York at the age of fifty-one, as did Kasmin’s partner in London, one of David’s cl
ose friends, too. Then he lost another friend who was only thirty-eight. The man had been working at Emmerich’s gallery and, thanks to his contacts, had raised a million dollars to help those stricken with AIDS. The art world was decimated. When David took the plane now, it was to go to funerals. Churches, synagogues, and cemeteries were the places where he saw again those who were left. So many died that you couldn’t cry anymore. Henry, who devoted his energy to helping AIDS victims, had been spared, thank God. But one evening Ian told him that he had tested positive. David took him in his arms and had to fight not to burst into tears.

  “Testing positive isn’t the same as having the illness. You’re young, Ian. You’ll survive. They’ll find a vaccine.”

  You couldn’t say or believe anything else.

  In the midst of this hecatomb, a new man entered his life. David had met John, who was just barely twenty at the time, a few years earlier at a friend’s place in London, and had invited him to California, where he had visited with his boyfriend the following year. The young man, a cook, had recently written to him asking for a job. He arrived in Los Angeles and David gradually fell under the charm of the twenty-three-year-old Englishman, tall and handsome, full of humor, sensual, who prepared the best fish and chips he’d ever eaten, and who loved all pleasures, food, cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, sex, swimming. John made him love his body again. He brought with him a vitality which David, at fifty-two, needed more than ever. He was no longer alone. A man was there with whom he talked, laughed, ate, made love. And what a man! When he saw the bronze torso of his lover, his muscular shoulders, his arms, his thighs worthy of the statues of Michelangelo, he couldn’t believe his luck. It would certainly be the last adventure of that kind.

  He had been living with John for a year when, one evening, he felt extremely tired. When he got up from the couch to go to bed, he collapsed on the stairs. John could hardly get him up, and he immediately drove him to the emergency room. A heart attack. If he had been alone, he would have died. The rapid response and the coronary angioplasty saved him.