Life of David Hockney Read online

  When he left the hospital, the doctors recommended rest. He shouldn’t work.

  It seemed like a bad joke.

  His friends had died of accidents, old age, alcoholism, cancer, AIDS. For him, it was work, his long-term constant ally against death, that had almost killed him.

  Had killed him. One doesn’t cheat death. He had lost the battle. Something in him surrendered. When he returned home after his surgery, he felt different, somewhat detached. He no longer felt the need to fight, to win, to convince the world of anything. Perhaps he had wanted too much.

  Two years earlier he had bought an oceanfront cottage in Malibu, built in the 1930s, which Ian had discovered by chance, on a beach where dogs were allowed to run freely. It had belonged to a painter and included a studio, the smallest in which David had ever painted, but he felt good there. He installed a treadmill to do the exercises the doctors had recommended, he walked on the beach with his dogs every day, he changed his diet and ate healthy dishes that John prepared for him. John had suddenly assumed an almost paternal role toward his lover, who was much older than he. In the hospital, when he woke up after the operation, the first thing David had done was call Gregory, who had rushed to his bedside. They had reconciled, and Gregory began to work for him again. That was life: an ebb and flow. In his Malibu studio David painted little imaginary landscapes inspired by the movement of the ocean, which he watched from his window, and by the music of Strauss’s The Woman without a Shadow, for which he was supposed to create the set with Gregory’s help. For the first time he didn’t give titles to his twenty-four paintings, but called them Very New Paintings, or V.N. Paintings. Were they abstract? What did it matter? The distinction between abstract art and figurative art existed only in the West.

  While he was driving back from Chicago, where he had gone to attend the premiere of Turandot with John, his two dogs, and his two assistants, they stopped for the night in Monument Valley and slept in the RV. David woke up very early to photograph the sunrise. A storm had been forecast, and there were thick, black clouds on the horizon. When the sun appeared, it looked like gold on the rocky peaks. A bolt of lightning tore through the sky and a perfect rainbow appeared. David wouldn’t have been surprised to see Moses speaking to the masses from atop the mountain. The extreme beauty of this sunrise erased the tension of the preceding days, when the RV had broken down in the desert and the constant barking of the dachshunds in the confined space had become unbearable for David’s assistants. It made up for everything. The fights. Even death.

  Tony Richardson, the friend with whom he had once spent wonderful summers in the south of France and family-like evenings in Los Angeles, died of AIDS in Paris, at the age of sixty-four. As for Henry, he called one evening, his voice strained. Ironically, it wasn’t AIDS, but pancreatic cancer, like Christopher. It progressed very quickly, in a few months. David was there at the end, sitting next to his friend’s bed, and drew him until the final moment. Henry was fifty-nine years old, only two years older than David, but he looked ninety. His fat cheeks had caved in, his face was gaunt. His mind, however, was just as alert as ever. And his vanity hadn’t disappeared. “Draw me,” he said to David, in a dying voice.

  Henry had been his best friend since he had met him at Andy Warhol’s in 1963, thirty-one years earlier. As soon as they arrived in a city together, they ran to the opera. Henry was the friend who knew every person and every event in David’s life, who had participated in the creation of each work, to whom he spoke on the phone every day, and who had been there when his father, when Byron, when Joe, Christopher, and all the others had died; the friend who had always advised him and didn’t hesitate to tell him what he thought, even harshly. In three decades they had had only one real fight, and after their reconciliation their friendship became stronger than ever. They had cried laughing together, in New York, London, Los Angeles, Corsica, Paris, Berlin, Lucca, Martha’s Vineyard, Fire Island, Alaska…David had to chuckle when he thought of the day long ago when he had taken Henry, who was in London, to have dinner at the home of an old, deaf art collector whose mother, a close friend of Oscar Wilde, had taken in the Irish writer when he got out of prison in 1897. They rang the doorbell, the old lady opened the door, and Henry turned to David and asked in a trumpeting voice: “Let me get this straight: Oscar Wilde was her mother, right?” David was in stitches and unable to tell the old lady what he was laughing about. Without Henry, the world would be forever sadder.

  He did small paintings of flowers and of the faces of his living friends. An exhibition entitled Flowers, Faces and Spaces (who still dared to paint and show flowers?) opened in London in a new gallery, since Kasmin, after the death of his partner, had closed his space. “Steep decline!” the art critics exclaimed.

  The death toll kept climbing. Ossie was stabbed in his apartment by a former lover. Jonathan Silver, his compatriot from Bradford and close friend with whom he resumed the ritual of daily phone conversations following Henry’s death, learned that he had pancreatic cancer and only a few months to live. The same illness that had killed Christopher and Henry, like a curse: Jonathan was only forty-eight.

  The dark period had begun in ’79 with his father. Then Byron in ’82 and Joe in ’83. After ’86, it continued unabated. One, two, three, four friends every year. In Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles. No city, no continent was spared. Death everywhere, as in the Middle Ages during the Plague.

  Maybe death was overrated.

  Just before going to Mexico in ’84, David had read a book that described the ritual practices of the Aztecs: Montezuma going into a temple and ripping out the hearts of five or six people before leaving, covered in blood, and resuming a conversation with the Spanish conquistador, the man he thought was a god, and who would destroy his civilization. The Spaniard, horrified by such a practice, thought the Aztec was a barbarian, as did any Westerner who read the book. But in the temple twenty-five thousand people stood in line for the honor of having their hearts ripped out. For those people, death didn’t exist.

  Perhaps death wasn’t a tragedy, perhaps there was no reason to fear it. It was part of life. It was useless to fight it. One had to embrace it. And create works that would put joy in people’s hearts. What the critics thought was of no importance. History retained the names of only a few rare artists: Rembrandt, Vermeer, Goya, Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse. They had all offered an enchanting vision of the world. Art, like religion, shouldn’t exclude anyone. It should be universal.

  In Malibu, David painted. John, his young cook lover, had just left him following a fight. He was twenty-nine years younger than David: it was in the natural order of things. David wasn’t alone, since he had his dogs, the most affectionate and most dependable of friends. The constant motion of the Pacific filled his windows. When he opened his kitchen door, the waves crashed at his feet. The ocean had come and gone that way for millions of years. His dachshunds watched the ocean, as he did. They weren’t interested in television, where they probably only saw the flashing lights and flat shapes on the screen, whereas the regular beating of the waves hypnotized them. David painted the movement of the ocean. And he painted his dogs.

  HAWTHORNS IN BLOOM

  What the hell was he doing here?

  “To say that there weren’t any great artists before optical devices is like saying there were no great lovers before Viagra!”

  Susan Sontag spoke in such a booming voice that David had no trouble hearing her in spite of his handicap. The auditorium burst out laughing. Someone even whistled in the back; Larry held up the crutch that was leaning against his chair. His sciatica proved to be useful.

  “Calm down, please! We’re at a university symposium, not a circus!”

  “Because David Hockney doesn’t draw as well as the old masters,” Sontag continued in a measured tone, “he concludes that they used optical devices. He has developed a theory from his personal experience. It is a very American p
rocess. He has truly become one of us!”

  David smiled. When the famous American intellectual finished, the audience applauded for a long time. Larry then introduced Linda Nochlin, a professor with gray hair and the author of many important books. In the middle of her lecture, she stood up and took from a chair an article of clothing covered in dry-cleaning plastic, which she removed. The intrigued audience followed her movements. She hung on the wall a short white dress with a bold blue pattern of large, round-edged rectangles, which seemed to have come straight out of the 1960s.

  “This is my wedding dress. I got married in ’68.”

  The crowd of students, professors, art historians, journalists, artists, and socialites who had stood in line all morning on Cooper Square to get one of the four hundred coveted seats waited, delighted, ready to laugh.

  “David,” said Linda Nochlin, looking at him, “you say it’s up to us to provide proof. Here it is.”

  With a dramatic gesture she pulled off the cloth that was covering a large painting also hanging on the wall: in it one saw, next to a man, a young woman wearing the wedding dress with blue rings, identical to the real dress and painted on the same scale. David immediately understood where she was going with this: she wanted to show that one could reproduce the motif of an article of clothing exactly without using an optical device. Which proved nothing.

  “It’s my wedding portrait by Philip Pearlstein. Philip?”

  The American painter joined them on the stage.

  “Philip, did you use an optical device or your own eyes?”

  “My eyes.”

  Nochlin turned to David. “You see? Some artists are able to do it.”

  The audience applauded even more frenetically than they had for Susan Sontag. Someone shouted, “The old masters weren’t cheaters, Hockney!”

  Larry again had to brandish his crutch and threaten to kick the rabble-rouser out of the room.

  David shook his head. He had never accused the old masters of cheating. The optical device was only a tool; it didn’t create the painting. But three years earlier, at an exhibition of the drawings of Ingres in London, he had been fascinated by their extreme precision and the strength of the lines. He had bought the catalog and, back in L.A., enlarged the reproductions on his copy machine to examine them closely. One of the portraits had reminded him of the drawing of an eggbeater done by Warhol, for which Warhol had used a slide projector. David had then been certain that Ingres had also employed an optical instrument: the camera obscura, invented in 1807. After several years of research that had ended with a wall in his studio filled with reproductions of portraits, he had become convinced that European painters had been using optical instruments for centuries. He had even managed to date precisely the beginning of their use: in 1434, in a painting by Van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait. The lens didn’t yet exist at that time, but a physics professor at the University of Tucson in Arizona, who was a specialist in optics, had come forward after reading an article about David’s research and taught him that a concave mirror could have played the same role.

  That research had enthralled him, because it revealed a continuity between the fifteenth and the twentieth century: the curved mirror and the lens were the ancestors of the camera. Up until cubism, the same perspective with a single viewing angle had ruled over European art. His theories, published in October in a book titled Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, had created a storm on the two continents. Nothing, proclaimed art historians, proved the presence of optical devices in the studios of the old masters. They accused David of wanting to belittle the great European painters. Only a few rare artists and scholars had come to his defense. The symposium had been organized to resolve the debate. The scale was clearly weighted on one side, and David had the impression he was attending his own trial. Most specialists attacked him like a college of cardinals trying to decide if they should condemn a heretic to the stake.

  A trial, to be sure. What taboo had he broken for art historians to stand up as one against him? What were they afraid of? Their desire to keep art in an ideal world had something fascinating about it. David felt a bit like Robin Hood in his attempt to give art back to the people. In any case, it was reassuring to see that these questions evoked such passion in New York in December 2001, in an auditorium a thirty-minute walk from the site of the twin towers, three months after the event that had changed the world. But what was he doing being held hostage in this auditorium, when he had only one desire—to paint?

  He had launched the polemic, to be sure. He now realized he didn’t give a damn.

  The next-to-last speaker got up. Rosalind Kraus, a professor at Columbia, editor of October and a diva of contemporary art criticism, reputed for her ferocity, projected on a screen the enlarged detail of Ingres’s portrait and Warhol’s drawing on which David’s intuition was based. She showed that Warhol’s lines, inert and of equal width—the result of technology—had nothing to do with those of Ingres, which swelled and shrank. An intelligent demonstration. The audience applauded for a long time.

  Then it was David’s turn. The grand finale. He walked up to the lectern. He was wearing a T-shirt on which I KNOW I’M RIGHT was printed in large characters. There was some chuckling, then the room was silent while he adjusted his glasses. You could have heard the proverbial pin drop. No one wanted to miss a word of what the famous painter was going to say in his defense after such a demonstration of his ignorance.

  “I’ve learned many things,” he began, speaking slowly while looking around at the audience above his glasses, “and I thank all the participants. These paintings are admirable. The truth is, we will never know how they were done.”

  He paused. Everyone was hanging on what he would say.

  “Now I’m tired, and I want to go home and paint.”

  He walked off the stage in front of the dumbfounded audience: he had admitted he was beaten, okay, but this denouement lacked panache!

  He hadn’t admitted he was beaten. His conviction was not shaken. The earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around: that fact had ended up being proven without Galileo dying at the stake.

  He really was exhausted. This business had taken three years of his life, three years during which he had painted only a series of portraits à la Ingres, using a camera obscura, in order to illustrate his theory. Three years earlier his mother had died, at the age of ninety-eight, surrounded by four of her five children. The autumn following her death, at the approach of the first Christmas—or almost the first—that he would spend without her in sixty-two years, David felt extremely depressed. Gregory had saved him from a dangerous addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs by sending him to rest at the FKK baths in Baden-Baden. When he got back from Germany he had dinner one evening with John, in London, where they were both passing through. At thirty-three, John had matured while staying the same—lively, funny, sensual, and warm—and a miracle that David would never have believed possible occurred: they fell back in love. John moved back in with him in Los Angeles, became his partner and his cook again.

  A few months later, John had wondered whether David was sick. He was always tired and often fell asleep in the middle of dinner, at home or at his friends’. They had anxiously awaited the results of the medical tests: cancer, like Christopher, Henry, and Jonathan? No, just acute pancreatitis, a nonfatal illness, which from then on prevented him from drinking alcohol and caffeine. Then Stanley, his beloved dachshund, his first dog, had died at the age of fourteen. Then John and he, for months, had cared for one of their close friends in L.A. who was slowly dying of AIDS. David knew what had really motivated his optical device research: by awakening his old fighting spirit, it had given him the energy he needed to get through his mourning for his mother, for Stanley, and for his friend. Now it was time to get back to painting. He was sixty-four years old. Where was his great work?

  Si
x years earlier, in 1995, the British prime minister, John Major, had borrowed one of his paintings from the Tate to hang in 10 Downing Street. An honor. But it was My Parents, painted in ’75, as if David had done nothing as good as that in the following twenty years.

  The older he got, the less he understood where inspiration came from.

  The last time he had been truly inspired (and that completely by chance) was four years earlier, in ’97, when he had spent the whole summer painting West Yorkshire for his friend Jonathan, who was dying and who had asked David, as a final favor, to do a painting celebrating their region of hills and farm fields, of modest beauty, which had been ignored by painters. David stayed with his old mother in Bridlington and almost every day visited his bedridden friend, who lived an hour and a half away. He traveled through the landscapes of his youth, the villages of Fridaythorpe and Sledmere, fields and farms where he had worked as a teenager—places to which he had emotional ties. Using bright colors and a naive style, he had applied his technique of altering focus to his Yorkshire pictures, which didn’t simply depict landscapes, but his route from home to see Jonathan. Back in Los Angeles after Jonathan’s death, he had continued to paint Yorkshire from memory before creating a huge painting of the Grand Canyon made up of sixty little canvases, a painting that measured over six feet by twenty-four feet, his largest format up to then. That had been his last period of intense creativity. Afterward, there were just the portraits done with the camera obscura.

  After the New York symposium, he didn’t want to stay in Los Angeles, where his friend had just died. In his state of indecisiveness, he decided to go back to London and agree to the request of Lucian Freud, who had been wanting to paint his portrait for several years. Freud needed some hundred hours of posing, and David had never found the time to do it. This would enable him to see the great artist’s method and think about what would come next.