Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

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  In the summer of 1967 Kossoff began to make regular visits to a place so unglamorous as to be almost exotic – Willesden Sports Centre. This was a new building in Donnington Road, close to the house in Willesden Green to which the painter and his family had recently moved. Kossoff got into the habit of taking his young son there to teach him to swim. But quickly these excursions in the summer holidays began to have a second purpose.

  Kossoff started to draw the pool, densely packed as it was with aquatic youngsters, diving, splashing and shouting. It was a scene of extreme animation and complexity: a municipal architectural box filled with noise and youthful humanity in which the illumination – through a wall of windows – altered every time the sun moved or a cloud drifted across it. He was fascinated by its mutability, and ‘how the pool changed during the summer months and how, at different times of day, the changing of the light and rise and fall of the changing volume of sound seemed to correspond with changes in myself’. Through the summers of 1967 and 1968 he drew it time and again; he also tried to paint it. But the paintings, he remembered, were initially ‘terrible’.

  In this mundane setting Kossoff had found a microcosm. Here before him were three of the four elements – air, earth and water – plus geometric architecture, ever-shifting light and massed, near-naked humanity. It was a subject with a certain classical quality – nymphs and youths bathing – while being utterly everyday. Furthermore, the pool and its users exemplified one of the qualities that, for Kossoff, made the activity of painting and drawing from life both compelling and dauntingly close to impossibility: the way nothing stays the same even for an instant. This was also true when he looked at a motionless person in his studio; how much more so when he ventured outside to confront the flux of London’s streets or swimmers at Willesden Sports Centre.

  The Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus famously pointed out that it is impossible to step into the same river twice. In the interval between the first and second paddle, virtually every molecule of water in a flowing stream will have been replaced. A painter attempting to make a fixed image of a constantly moving target has a doubly elusive objective. The subject keeps changing, and so does the observing artist (Heraclitus might have added that the ‘you’ attempting to step back into the river is a little bit altered too). Kossoff has described this quandary:

  Every time the model sits, everything has changed. You have changed, she has changed. The light has changed, the balance has changed. The directions you try to remember are no longer there and, whether working from the model or landscape drawings, everything has to be reconstructed daily, many, many times.

  The mid-1960s was a time of transition for Kossoff and, in a muted way, of crisis. He had just passed the age of forty – a landmark in most people’s lives – and suffered a small professional disaster. His previous studio at Willesden Junction had flooded, damaging a number of works that had to be destroyed. What’s more, his career and place in the art world seemed to be sinking, disappearing beneath the waters of fashion. In John Russell and Bryan Robertson’s book Private View: The Lively World of British Art, published in 1965, there were dozens of profiles of artists – many of them now completely forgotten – handsomely illustrated with photographs of them and their work by Snowdon. Kossoff, however, featured in this volume only as a typographical error; in a list of miscellaneous artists, ‘David Kossoff’ – in fact a well-known actor – was mentioned. Although Russell and Robertson were two of the more influential and knowledgeable people in the art world, they were evidently in danger of forgetting who Leon Kossoff was.

  LEON KOSSOFF Children’s Swimming Pool, 11 o’clock Saturday Morning. August 1969, 1969

  Still, he kept doggedly drawing the swimming pool and its occupants, with some success, and painting it with much less. He was doing so one Saturday morning in August 1969 and worked for a few hours before scraping off what he had done. Frustrated, he went back to the swimming pool to draw, returned to his studio – which was now on the ground floor of the family home in Willesden Green – and began again. Finally, very quickly, as he put it later, ‘the picture happened’. He gave it as a title a precise moment in the flux of time and space: Children’s Swimming Pool, 11 o’clock Saturday Morning. August 1969.

  *

  The strangely impersonal formulation ‘the picture happened’, as if it had come into being of its own accord, expresses one of Kossoff’s deepest beliefs about his art. To paint a picture that he considers ‘finished’, he has found, it is necessary to go beyond what he already knows and thinks he is doing, to enter a place of unknowing: ‘Nothing really begins to happen in a painting until you reach the point where conscious intention breaks up and ceases to be the thing that’s driving you.’ This generally happens only after endless effort and repeated failure. Eventually, with luck, ‘one’s initial intent’ dissolves. This is, Kossoff feels, ‘a very perilous condition because it casts you into a world that’s totally unfamiliar’. The results will be unexpected, because they are outside conscious control – ‘every painting I’ve made that I consider finished has something in it that surprised or disturbed me’ – but paintings made in this way are, in his view, the only ones that are worthwhile.

  As a creed it has overtones of Zen Buddhism unexpected in a figurative painter working in a corner of north-west London. But what Kossoff discovered was a truth about creative acts that is echoed by many other artists. Lucian Freud would quote Picasso’s answer to questions about how his work was going, using the words of a notice in Parisian trams: ‘Don’t talk to the driver.’ Freud would add, ‘because he doesn’t know what he’s doing’. As we have seen, Frank Auerbach also found that it was only in a ‘crisis’, after endless repetitions, that he found the ‘courage’ to make a picture as novel and audacious as it needed to be. The choice of words reveals the same level of intensity and effort.

  Over the next few years, Kossoff painted a sequence of pictures of the swimming pool in Willesden. Socially and visually they could scarcely be more different from David Hockney’s California pools yet they are equally memorable. Between them these very dissimilar pool pictures demonstrate that absolutely new ways of depicting the world could still be found with paint and brushes.

  Chapter sixteen

  PORTRAIT SURROUNDED BY ARTISTIC DEVICES

  As a young artist I greatly admired the works Hockney did at the end of his time at the Royal Collage: wunderbar, amazing, fantastische.

  Georg Baselitz, 2016

  Major new figurative painters were no longer expected to emerge in 1960s London, or anywhere else for that matter. Nonetheless, undeniably, and with rapidly increasing prominence, one did. Something unforeseen happened to Hockney in the spring of 1961 – surprisingly, to him at least, he started to earn money. One day in April, having just spent five of his last ten shillings on a taxi to the Royal College of Art, he arrived to discover a cheque for £100, the first prize for a competition he had won without even knowing he had entered. Not long afterwards, he received a commission to decorate one of the rooms on the P&O company’s new liner, the SS Canberra. While other, older artists were assigned some of the more formal spaces, Hockney’s task was to design a room for teenagers, called the Pop Inn.

  More significantly for his long-term future, his works in the ‘Young Contemporaries’ exhibition had attracted the attention of the art dealer John Kasmin. Only a few years older than Hockney himself, Kasmin did not yet have a gallery of his own – at this point he was an employee of Marlborough Fine Art – but he was equipped with energy, taste, intelligence and chutzpah, all invaluable qualities in his profession.

  Kasmin failed to interest his employers at Marlborough in Hockney’s work, so instead he began to promote it on a freelance basis, beginning by buying a picture himself. Here, he felt, was a suitable case for promotion. ‘The main thing was, Hockney was terribly shy and needy, and I knew I could help him.’ Taking on Hockney – who was to become one of the most r
enowned painters in British history – might seem, in retrospect, like an obvious decision. But several influential voices advised against it. ‘Lawrence Alloway was very rude about David,’ Kasmin recalls. ‘He thought I’d made a really wrong choice.’ Hockney fell into neither of the categories Alloway advocated: Pop art and hard-edge abstraction. Indeed, he did not belong in any category at all, which was one of his great strengths. Furthermore, his work changed constantly and this also was a sign – but of inventiveness and inner confidence, rather than uncertainty. If you shift your style, he said some years later, it doesn’t mean you are rejecting what you did before, just that you want to see ‘what’s round this next corner’.

  Nonetheless, Alloway was not the only influential opinion-former in the art world who had doubts about Hockney. Writing several years later, when the painter was considerably more prominent than he was in 1961, the director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery Bryan Robertson still had reservations. He saw him as one of several ‘young artists from the industrialized North of England’ who – like ‘pop vocal groups’ from Merseyside and ‘fresh, lively, unconventional young actors’ – had made a place for themselves in 1960s London. He grouped Hockney geographically with John Hoyland and Peter Phillips (from Leeds and Birmingham respectively), artists who had ‘edgy, sceptical intelligence’ and an ‘awareness of “what’s in the air”’.

  In addition, however, these painters from regional art schools had a quality about which Robertson was more ambivalent: ‘a marked irreverence towards prevailing standards and aesthetic issues’; and about Hockney in particular, Robertson was clearly in two minds. He felt that the ‘delicacy and subtlety’ of his work sometimes degenerated into ‘mere frailty and a slightly “camp” whimsicality’. His humour could be ‘over thin and faux naive’, but a ‘tough, dry resilient’ side of his sensibility asserted itself ‘often enough – so far – to win the day’. That ‘so far’ revealed the writer’s misgivings.

  The problem was, as Auerbach later commented, that ‘what David Hockney does is not laid down in the rule book for modern painting at all’. His art, like that of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, was not the kind expected by people who thought they knew the direction in which art was going. Indeed, he completely ignored their instructions. Auerbach again: ‘We’d been told what modern art was, but Hockney’s paintings broke every single rule about what modern art was supposed to be – and they were terrific.’

  *

  By the early summer of 1961, Hockney had enough money to fulfil an urge he, like many of his generation in Britain, had felt since childhood. He bought a ticket to New York where he had arranged to stay with Mark Berger, a fellow student at the RCA, who was American – like Kitaj he was taking advantage of the GI Bill to study in Britain – and also gay. It was Berger, in Derek Boshier’s opinion, who ‘brought David out of the closet’. Hockney stayed for three months, ‘utterly thrilled’ by the place, though more by the freedom and pizzazz of the city and the life that was lived there than by American art. New York ‘was amazingly sexy and unbelievably easy’. This was a ‘marvellously lively society’, he thought; the bookshops were open twenty-four hours a day, the gay life was much more organized, Greenwich village never closed, you could ‘watch television at three o’clock in the morning then go out and the bars would still be open’. Hockney felt completely free; this was the place for him.

  He came back to London in the autumn, visibly changed. He had sold some prints to the Museum of Modern Art for $200 and spent the money on an American suit. The other modification was more radical. One afternoon he was watching television with Berger and another friend, when an advertisement for a hair dye called Lady Clairol was screened. The slogan was ‘Is it true blondes have more fun?’ On the spot, Hockney decided to go blond.

  Thus, intuitively and naturally, Hockney had found a memorable public image. Artists had had these before – Whistler with his monocle, Dalí with his moustache – and they were to become more common as the 1960s wore on. Previously Hockney had been a black-haired student with a strong Yorkshire accent and an evidently remarkable talent. But from the autumn of 1961, he was more than that: an intriguing personality. His serious, thick-framed glasses contrasted piquantly with the outrageous bottle-blond hair and flamboyant clothes. The combination suggested, accurately, that Hockney was open, pleasure loving, contemporary, and in the process of inventing himself.

  Late in 1962, Hockney confided to an early interviewer from Town magazine that he was just off to Cecil Gee to buy a gold-lamé jacket. He wore it to his graduation ceremony at the Royal College, an event that almost did not occur because of a dispute between Hockney and the teaching staff – a conflict that was not about artistic style so much as the dignity of art itself as a way of understanding the world. He recalls:

  When I began at the Royal College, drawing in a life class was a compulsory activity. Then it altered, and they introduced what they called ‘general studies’. I immediately attacked it and said, ‘What does it mean, general studies? Why have you given up the drawing?’ They said it was all to do with the Ministry of Education. There was a complaint that people were leaving art schools ignorant. I said that there’s no such thing as an ignorant artist really, if they are an artist they know something.

  This tussle with authority demonstrated Hockney’s confidence in himself and his own judgment. He had spent very little time on the thesis that he was required to submit to pass the General Studies section of the course (it was on Fauvism). This was then given a fail by the examiners, and he was told that therefore he could not graduate. At this point he etched his own diploma, thinking – rightly – that he scarcely needed this institutional endorsement. After all, by that date, he already had a dealer and was beginning to become famous (as that interview for Town implied). He thought, ‘Well, Kasmin’s not going to ask for a diploma?’ Why bother about all this, ‘in painting of all things’?

  In the event Robin Darwin, the principal, decided it would be absurd for Hockney not to be awarded the gold medal for painting – and he could not be given this unless he graduated. So Hockney’s essay was reassessed, the marks added up again, and it was conveniently discovered he’d passed after all. The college needed him, it seemed, more than he needed the college. A profile published in February 1962 was illustrated by an out-of-focus photograph and described him as ‘an emergent blur’; very shortly after he emerged completely, and his image was far from indistinct.

  David Hockney, 1963. Photo by Snowdon

  On Wednesday 17 April 1963 Hockney’s father Ken had wanted to stay overnight with David before attending the anti-nuclear armament Aldermaston March the next day; but David explained that he was busy as Lord Snowdon, Princess Margaret’s husband, was coming to take pictures of him for the Sunday Times Colour Section. The images taken that day, and the article by David Sylvester on ‘British Painting Now’ which they accompanied, fuelled Hockney’s fame. He was not the only artist discussed – Francis Bacon, William Coldstream and Frank Auerbach were also included. But Hockney was the youngest and, in Snowdon’s photographs, looked like a star. He regretted buying the gold-lamé jacket, however, complaining that he had only put it on twice – for this photo shoot and for his graduation – but people thought he wore one all the time.

  DAVID HOCKNEY Play within a Play, 1963

  In 1962 and 1963, Hockney often borrowed the vocabulary of Kasmin’s favourite hard-edge and colour field artists – the strong colours, the stripes – and, with a visual abracadabra, transformed them back into landscape, people, objects and an illusion of space. In Flight into Italy – Swiss Landscape (1962), a record of a rapid jaunt to the Mediterranean made with two friends, the Alps are represented as a series of jagged red, blue, yellow, grey and white stripes. Hockney borrowed a characteristic motif of painters such as Morris Louis and Frank Stella, but he unfurled the stripes across the picture like a roll of carpet. The Americans’ abstract fields of colour are transformed into an Alpine terrain, a uniquel
y updated version of a subject from Turner.

  It was also in 1963 that Kasmin suggested Hockney should paint his portrait – though he didn’t quite get what he expected. The result was a brilliantly witty mediation on the picture as illusion. The point about American painting, such as Kenneth Noland’s, was its programmatic, almost ideological flatness. Hockney’s portrait of Kasmin, Play within a Play (1963), is an elaborate fantasia on that theme. The illusion of the western picture, Hockney had already realized, is closely connected with the illusions presented on a proscenium stage. And that was exactly where he chose to place his dealer; in a shallow zone in front of a curtain or backdrop of his own invention and standing on naturalistically painted floorboards. Beside Kasmin is a chair, also carefully depicted using the devices of naturalism. This gives the depth of the area in which Kasmin is trapped. The front of this space is the glass on the picture, against which the dealer’s hands and nose are tightly pressed. Kasmin was pressing the artist to paint the portrait, so he thought ‘I’ll put him in and I’ll press him’.

  However, Play within a Play was much more than a joke between friends. It was a comment, as profound as it was witty, about the nature of pictures, and an indication of the direction Hockney was to take. His work was becoming more and more naturalistic and, simultaneously, more and more preoccupied with analysing the mechanisms of visual illusionism. This illusion of the visual world within the flat plane of the picture was exactly what the American critic Clement Greenberg and his followers were against. But, as Allen Jones noted, it was something that his contemporaries in London found impossible to give up; Hockney, for one, clearly did not want to. On the contrary, he was increasingly preoccupied by the myriad ways in which the illusory space of a picture could be created.