Life of David Hockney Read online

  Far from expressing solidarity with his colleagues who were being attacked by the journalist, David acknowledged that the Hayward Gallery exhibited a number of very boring works. He even dared to say on TV that it seemed to him that a painting should have a subject, represent something. He shared his mother’s reaction in front of Flanagan’s rope, and added that in his eyes, the question she’d asked raised a real issue. The making of art, handicraft, scorned by the London art critics who spoke only of ideas and theory and who formed a little incestuous circle amongst themselves, was part of a work of art and deserved to be acknowledged. In his opinion, there shouldn’t be such a separation between the elite and the people. Why was it just abstract works, accessible only to a small number, that were considered “serious” art? Shouldn’t art speak to everyone? Interviewed by Peter Fuller for Art Monthly, he reiterated the same ideas, adding that the Tate’s collection was truly insignificant.

  He wasn’t afraid to say what he thought and to throw a bomb into the critics’ circle. Art belonged to artists, not to theoreticians. After all, he had always moved against the current. And he had nothing against scandal, which drew attention to his work. But he was happy to leave London in the autumn and take refuge in New York, where he was able to paint in peace. In October a solo exhibition opened at the André Emmerich Gallery, where the same works that were exhibited in London were shown—to which was added the painting depicting Henry looking at reproductions hanging on a screen, which he had finished in the meantime. The evening of the opening, a crowd filled the gallery on Fifty-seventh Street. Emmerich was happy, because Hilton Kramer had deigned to come. Surrounded by a court that listened to him religiously, the great American critic chatted amiably with the artist. Kramer’s name circulated reverentially from mouth to mouth. He was a god in his field, and his presence had the value of a consecration. It was clear that David, at just forty years old, could no longer be ignored.

  A few days later, Emmerich called him early in the morning.

  “Kramer’s review has just come out. David, I’m sorry: he’s made a mockery of us.”

  David was shocked. He didn’t expect that. During the opening, the critic had seemed to like his work.

  “Is it that bad?”

  “It’s harsh. Backstabbing. I don’t know what bug bit him. He must have something against the English, or against your success. Luckily, your reputation doesn’t depend on him. The reviews in the other papers are excellent, and everything has been sold.”

  “I’ve been painting for twenty-five years, André. Kramer isn’t going to tell me what I’m worth. Anyway, in my opinion he’s a has-been. His attack flatters me.”

  As soon as he hung up David ran out to buy the New York Times at the deli down the street. He read the review as he walked back to the apartment he was renting, not far from where Henry lived. Kramer began with some apparent compliments: the works exhibited in the gallery, he wrote, were pleasant, entertaining, and the public really liked them. “Why, then,” he continued, “do I find them—well, superficial and even reactionary?” He believed Hockney’s art was “a kind of 19th-century salon art refurbished from the stockroom of modernism.” He spoke of the triumphant return of what could be called “bourgeois art compounded out of the very materials that once challenged and offended bourgeois taste.” He concluded by saying that David was too much of a lightweight to do justice to Wallace Stevens’s imagination.

  David laughed. Kramer had wanted to massacre him. The article, with its rhetorical questions, was perverse. An assassination. It was always the same old argument—the serious versus pleasure—clothed in well-turned phrases. He cut out the review and stuck it on the wall of his studio—a little reminder of the stupidity of critics and of the abyss that separated them from creators. Of course they snubbed the notion of pleasure. Prematurely embittered, without any other talent than that of denigrating, they hated success, except that which they had artificially created with their pompous words!

  Henry called him a bit later. He had just seen the review. He was sorry about it and wanted to know how his friend was doing. His sincere solicitude annoyed David because it revealed the power of the critic. He understood that he should expect curious, falsely commiserating, secretly triumphant, looks from people, and that he now risked being labeled. Ill will was universal and success attracted envy. He reassured Henry. Kramer hadn’t hurt him at all.

  “He calls works I spent years thinking about, as you know better than anyone, superficial! Total crap. But ultimately not surprising. It’s a very small world, and I’m the one who took the first shot, after all. Kramer has surely read the article in Art Monthly. He’s defending his clique.”

  He had more important things to deal with. Where should he live? Which city should he and Gregory settle in so he could get back to work?

  That’s the question he asked himself in the spring when he returned from Egypt, where he had taken his friend Joe McDonald and even Peter, without Gregory showing any jealousy. Life in London was good, but too busy. Too many friends stopping in, too many journalists wanting to interview him, too many people asking favors of him (a design for a book cover, a party invitation, a poster for a charity gala…). He felt drowned but couldn’t say no. The publication of his autobiography in ’76, the exhibition at the Hayward in the summer of ’77, The Magic Flute, for which he had designed the set for the Glyndebourne Festival in ’78, had made him too famous. He couldn’t complain. But he missed his California years, when Peter and he lived in Santa Monica and he didn’t know many people. He had done seventeen paintings in one year! How, at the age of forty-one, would he find such solitude again? In London it was impossible, and he hated his new apartment, with a view of the sky where the light was, granted, excellent, but where he felt isolated because he could no longer see the street scene.

  The solution was obvious: Los Angeles. “You’re just nostalgic for your Peter years,” Henry told him on the phone. For once he didn’t think Henry was right. When he was a child, he didn’t have enough paper to draw on. Now that he had achieved fame, he lacked the emptiness from which painting was born. After designing the sets for two operas in a row and settling accounts with the past, he just needed a place to be alone and paint. In Los Angeles, he was still essentially anonymous, and the city was so huge and spread out that there was little chance he would run into many people. His instincts told him he should go there.

  He was just going to spend a few days in New York (on his way to Los Angeles) to get his new driver’s license—and to visit Henry and Joe McDonald—but his American printmaker, who had left California and moved to the suburbs of New York, insisted that David come and see the new technique he had just perfected. It consisted of printing color in paper pulp. The process was very messy, because you made the paper yourself and wallowed in water. In boots, wearing long rubber aprons, the two men cut out metal shapes similar to cookie cutters to use in printing the design right into the paper. David spent a whole day there, then returned the next day, and the day after, and decided to delay his departure. He worked with such concentration that he could stand for sixteen hours, scarcely stopping to eat a bite or to dive into the pool to cool off, because the August heat was torrid. The colors were extraordinary, amazingly strong and intense. He first did a series of sunflowers in homage to Van Gogh, the master of bright colors. He then wondered how to vary his subjects and thought of swimming pools. It would be an opportunity to use blue again. In the evening he took the train to New York, had dinner with Henry or went out with Joe, then, like Cinderella, returned home by midnight: he had to get up early the next day to go to Bedford. If he could have, he would have stopped sleeping. In a month and a half he did thirty paper pools. One morning, he was done. He had exhausted the fun of it. He flew off to L.A.

  The heat there was dryer than in New York. He was happy to see again the wide streets bordered by low, white houses with impeccable lawns, the blue of the sky and
the ocean, the air scented with jasmine and marijuana, the luxurious vegetation. His assistant had found him a small apartment on Miller Drive and a studio in West Hollywood, on Santa Monica Boulevard. He missed Gregory, who had gone off to Madrid with a boy he had met in Paris, but solitude was good, since it allowed him to think and to work without distractions. He finally had an idea for a large painting: he would paint the street scene in Los Angeles as experienced from a slow-moving car. It would depict the entire length of Santa Monica Boulevard, where his studio was, and every viewer would have the impression of sitting next to him in his convertible. Full of creative energy after his stay in New York, he got to work. Gregory returned from Madrid, tanned and handsome, his tenderness increased by his gratitude toward David for letting him have his fling. Their reunion was joyful; Gregory’s eyes lit up when he saw the sketch of the new painting.

  During the autumn, David, who spent two days a week in San Francisco teaching at the Art Institute, realized that he couldn’t hear the voices of the female students, which were softer than those of the boys. He went to see a specialist, who confirmed what he feared: his hearing was deteriorating, he had already lost 25 percent. It was irreversible. “You can’t hear girls anymore? What’s the problem?” Henry joked. But the problem would only worsen. He would end up like his father, completely deaf. It was a very depressing thought. The doctor asked him if he preferred a hearing aid in the left ear or the right.

  “If I wear two, I’ll hear better?”

  “Yes, but in general, people only wear one: it’s more discreet.”

  For David only one thing mattered: to hear the music with which he lived at every moment in his studio and in his car. He ordered two hearing aids that Gregory proclaimed were very sexy after David painted one bright red and the other bright blue. There was no more reason to hide one’s deafness than one’s homosexuality. He had always had that positive attitude, and he would keep it.

  For the time being, it was working in his favor. In February ’79, there was an exhibition of his paper pools at the Warehouse Gallery in Covent Garden. The critics who had panned him the year before compared his new work to Monet’s water lilies. Monet, no less! He had to be careful not to pay any more attention to their praise than to their attacks. The only thing that mattered was the pleasure he had had in creating that series. David was sure of one thing: pleasure, in work as in life, was the only compass. The same critics who had asserted that pleasure meant superficiality were now singing his praises. Their ironic turnaround—rather, their lack of consistency—was satisfying enough, but he wasn’t painting for them: he wanted nothing more than to surprise himself.

  He shared his success with his parents and his brother Paul, whom he brought to London and put up in the Savoy. For two days he devoted himself to his guests, treating them to the best restaurants and even taking them one evening to see a pantomime, as in the good old days in Bradford. There comes a time when one becomes the parent of one’s own parents. His father, for once, didn’t complain about anything, and his mother, for whom he bought a dress at Harrods, was as excited as a twenty-year-old. He was happy he could bring her such joy, his beloved mother whose daily life wasn’t easy, living with a silent husband who was more stubborn than a child, who did not regularly follow his diabetes treatment and ended up at the hospital almost once a month to be put on an intravenous drip, indifferent to the concern he caused his wife. That was, moreover, what happened after their brief stay in London: again, Ken wasn’t careful, and had to be hospitalized.

  The phone rang at six in the morning, the day after David had returned to Los Angeles. When he picked up the phone and heard his brother’s voice, he immediately guessed that it was bad news. His father had died during the night from a massive heart attack. He burst into tears. When his mother had told him that Ken had been hospitalized, he wasn’t worried; they would give him an insulin infusion and he would get out of the hospital all perked up, as always. He hadn’t imagined for a second that the old man, who in London a few days earlier had gone around everywhere and looked at everything around him with a curiosity that age hadn’t diminished, would die. The conversation he had not had with his father would never happen. The word “never” took on new meaning. It didn’t involve the past, but opened onto the future and encompassed eternity. David would never see his father again. Ken had disappeared from the surface of the earth, as intangible as if he had never existed.

  David booked a seat on the next Concorde and flew to Europe. “You’ve come back to a sad house,” his mother told him when he got to Bradford and took her in his arms, so small, frail, and alone that he felt closer to her than ever. He couldn’t say a word during the funeral. Laura wouldn’t forgive herself for not going to see her husband the day after he was hospitalized. A snowstorm had covered Bradford with a white carpet and the temperature had fallen well below freezing. Ken had told her to stay in the warm house, it wouldn’t do any good for her to go out in that cold and risk getting sick, when he would be home in two days at most. He had been generous enough to think of her, her health, when he was lying far from his family on a hospital bed. She had let him die alone, in a strange place. She had given in to the temptation of comfort, and heaven had taken away her partner. She didn’t express these thoughts, but David guessed them in the devastated look on her face. All he could do was draw her, as if in drawing he could extract the sadness from her heart with the tip of his pencil. He thought of the portrait he had painted of his parents, that image of solitude and silence. He had gotten it all wrong. Ken was perhaps not the most communicative man in the world, he was certainly self-centered and cranky, but he had always been there for his wife, and for fifty years she had never been alone. And David, that beloved son who thought he loved his mother and understood her better than anyone, would be gone in a week.

  From Los Angeles he wrote to her: “I think you made a marvellous choice for a partner in life and I know in a way you are very proud of him. I know it must have been difficult at times but his motivations were like yours, always to kindness. I think the combination was wonderful. Keep cheerful.” The words he wrote to soothe his mother’s sorrow eased his own pain as well. They were true. David thought there was no reason for despair. Dead at seventy-five, Ken had had a long and very full life, he had been a good father and a good husband, he had fought for causes he was passionate about—against tobacco, against the war, against nuclear weapons—he was a man of convictions who had transmitted his tenacity to his children. He was still living through them and in their memory. He was dead, but his combative spirit was still there, that spirit that pushed David, passing through London after the services, to inquire about the Tate’s acquisition policy, after learning that the museum—who had only two of his paintings, bought a long time before—had passed on the opportunity to acquire one of his paper pools at an excellent price. He gave an interview to the Observer and poured out the bitterness he felt after the death of his father. In the article, entitled “No Joy at the Tate,” he accused the museum’s director of favoring a soulless and purely theoretical current in contemporary British art, despite its mission to represent all movements.

  It had been several weeks since the exhibition in London and his father’s death, and his mind had traveled far from the large painting he was working on. He wanted to get back to it when he returned to Los Angeles, and walked into his studio, where the canvas was hanging on the wall in the back. It was Santa Monica Boulevard with its rectangular, low, and colorful buildings, its bright blue sky, its wide sidewalks, its palm trees and their shadows. There were a few figures: a black man in jeans, white tank top, and basketball shoes leaning against a door; a woman jogger with a cap on her head leaning against a post; someone walking; a person pulling a cart looking at the price of a car for sale. The colors were those of California, sharp, contrasting. He had never seen such a boring painting. He recognized the frustration he had already experienced twice, while painting Portrait o
f an Artist and then My Parents, before the lightbulb moments that had enabled him to create his two best works. He had to be patient and have confidence. The feeling of failure was part of the creative process. Every artist—painter, musician, writer—knew this.

  His mother’s visit took his mind off his concerns. He had bought her a plane ticket so she could go see her two sons in Australia, one of whom had not been able to fly to England for their father’s burial. She spent a month with them and, on the way back, stopped in Los Angeles for the first time. It was during the Easter holidays. David had also invited Ann, his London friend, with her son, Byron, thinking that the presence of this kind woman and her thirteen-year-old son would help cheer up his mother. Laura was in mourning, she seemed lost, absent at times, but she marveled at everything with her usual sweetness, and in particular at the constant sun and warmth. “With all this sunshine,” she said one day, “it’s wonderful drying weather, but nobody ever seems to hang their washing out.” Her comment could make one smile in the land of washing machines and dryers, where most people were unaware that you could do your wash by hand and let it dry in the wind. David was surprised that he had never wondered about it, he who had spent his youth washing his own laundry—so he was already more jaded than he thought! He loved his mother’s astonishment at noticing the absence of sheets flapping in the wind. That impressed her more than all the screenwriters, artists, and famous actors she met without being able to place them at Christopher and Don’s weekly parties in their old Spanish-style house on Adelaide Drive—Dennis Hopper, Billy Wilder, Tony Richardson, Igor Stravinsky, George Cukor, Jack Nicholson, and others. David did delight her, however, by inviting Cary Grant, all of whose films she had seen, over for tea one day.