Modernists and Mavericks

by Martin Gayford

  *

  In the late spring of 1963, just after Kasmin finally opened his new gallery on Bond Street, Hockney made another visit to New York. On this trip he made greater inroads into the American cultural scene – meeting, among others, Dennis Hopper, Andy Warhol and a gifted young curator named Henry Geldzahler, who was to become a lifelong friend. Hockney had an exhibition coming up at the Kasmin Gallery in December; he was the first non-abstract artist to be shown there. When the exhibition opened, a number of striking recent works were included, among them Play within a Play. The show was a success, critically and financially, and as a result Hockney was able to depart at the end of the year for a long stay in America. This time he intended to venture further than New York.

  Hockney’s ultimate goal was Los Angeles, where he arrived in January 1964. This was a city where he would eventually spend much of his life but of which, in advance, he knew almost nothing – except what he had gathered from films and the pages of a homoerotic glamour magazine called Physique Pictorial. Initially, not having a car or even being able to drive, he had great difficulty in getting around at all. Quickly, however, he bought a vehicle, learnt how to drive it and was on his way to becoming an English Angeleno.

  When Hockney arrived in LA, the massive freeway system was still in the process of construction. In the first week he passed the ramp of a half-finished road, rising into the sky. It struck him that it looked like a ruin (a reaction much like Frank Auerbach’s to postwar London). ‘My God,’ he thought, ‘this place needs its Piranesi; Los Angeles could have a Piranesi, and here I am!’ Hockney was to become one of the greatest painters ever of the architecture and lifestyle of Los Angeles, but it was not – or not often – the Piranesian aspect of the city that appeared in his pictures.

  Throughout the next few years, Hockney continued his restless exploration on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. In the summer of 1964 he taught at the University of Iowa, driving across the continent on the way. He saw the Grand Canyon and New Orleans with his friends Ossie Clark and Derek Boshier; the next year, with Patrick Procktor and Colin Self, he went to Colorado, San Francisco and Los Angeles again, before taking the boat back to London. The following January he was in Beirut, working on a series of etchings based on the poems of C. P. Cavafy.

  His investigation of art, and the ways in which it could be made, was equally wide-ranging. He had begun what would become a lifetime’s experimentation with different media; etching was just the first of a variety of types of printmaking he would use. Soon he was designing a theatrical production – Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi at the Royal Court Theatre in London – and he would work on many more over the decade.

  At the same time, Hockney was roving through art history. Portrait Surrounded by Artistic Devices (1965) is a visual anthology of art, from the Renaissance to late Modernism. Across the canvas there are Matisse-like blocks of pure colour; a sequence of turquoise and pearl-grey marks looks as if it has been lifted from a colour field abstraction. Through deft touches of chiaroscuro – that is, shadows and highlights – the grey oblongs that dominate the centre of the picture are transformed into a pile of cylinders. As with a skilful magician’s act, the illusion is irresistible although we know it is a trick. Half-hidden behind them is a seated man in suit and tie, sharply drawn. He is, in fact, Kenneth Hockney, the artist’s father, based on a drawing from life. Life and art, in Hockney’s view, are not easily separated. The one flows into the other, a realization that is fundamental to Hockney’s art:

  As if you could separate form from content! There’s a serious flaw in that idea. Any serious artist knows that form and content are one. You can talk about them separately, but in any really good work of art they have to come together.

  DAVID HOCKNEY Portrait Surrounded by Artistic Devices, 1965

  To the right of Kenneth is a rectangle resembling a picture on the wall, a mass of brown brushmarks. Behind it, a multi-coloured arch and a single shadow create a space-frame, a bit like the ones Francis Bacon used in his paintings. As so often with Hockney, this painting is at once playfully entertaining and completely serious. The mystery it poses is this: when we come across a few tones or colours on a piece of canvas, or lines on a piece of paper, somehow we see objects, people and three dimensions. Indeed, we can’t stop ourselves from doing so. Human beings, as Hockney says, have a deep need for pictures. They are one of the means by which we understand the world around us. But, in a way, they are just made up of ‘artistic devices’. One way of seeing Hockney’s art is as a lifelong journey into pictorial space.

  *

  Among the attractions of LA for Hockney was the sexual freedom of the gay scene there. Accordingly, he and Kasmin paid a visit, almost a pilgrimage, to the offices of Physique Pictorial. They were both surprised and amused to discover that this publication was based in an ordinary suburban street. The photographic studio had only two walls, Kasmin remembered, and ‘this was where [Hockney’s] dream of paradise was created’. This was another lesson in the illusionary nature of pictures: that ‘you could make a glossy dream out of such shabby bits of plywood’. Hockney gave a lecture on Physique Pictorial at the ICA on his return to London, at Richard Hamilton’s invitation. It was apparently much funnier than most such talks on American popular culture, and also novel in its focus on gay films and softcore photography.

  Hockney’s work was changing in ways that seemed somehow generated by the new city in which he spent much of his time over the next few years. In LA in 1964, Hockney noted, he began to paint ‘real things’ he had seen. ‘All the paintings before that were either ideas or things I’d seen in a book and made something from.’ He didn’t do this in London, he later reflected, because the place didn’t mean so much to him. He started by painting the urban landscape, then moved on to painting its people.

  When Hockney began to work in LA again, in the second half of 1966, this depiction of reality began to dominate his work. The first picture he started after arriving was Beverly Hills Housewife (1966–67), an enormous portrait of a wealthy collector and patron of the arts named Betty Freeman. It was, like many contemporary works by Howard Hodgkin, as much a depiction of the setting and the sitter’s possessions as of the person herself. Hockney described the picture as ‘a specific portrait and a specific house, a real place that looks like that’. Nonetheless, his methods were only partly naturalistic. The huge image was executed in his small apartment cum studio, using a mixture of drawings and photographs – the latter being a new source for Hockney. The result had the lucid geometry of right angles, rectangles and straight lines that came from European Modernism, and was, paradoxically, almost a naturalistic idiom in LA since much of the domestic architecture of the city derived from the styles of architects such as Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier (one of the items in the painting was a lounger designed by the latter).

  Two themes that dominated Hockney’s work in LA in the years 1964–68, during each of which he spent periods living in California, were sex and water, often combined in the same image. A series of pictures, including Boy About to Take a Shower, Man in Shower in Beverly Hills (both 1964) and Man Taking a Shower(1965) repeated a favourite motif from Physique Pictorial. Water – and more generally, transparency – fascinated the artist as much as the male body:

  It seems to me an interesting thing to do, to draw transparency, because – visually – it’s about something not being there, almost. The swimming pool paintings I did were about transparency: how would you paint water? A nice problem, it seemed to me. The swimming pool, unlike the pond, reflects light. Those dancing lines I used to paint on the pools are really on the surface of the water. It was a graphic challenge.

  Hockney’s pool pictures of 1966 and 1967 are among his most celebrated works, and the ones very obviously connected with his life in Los Angeles (the ubiquitous pools were a feature of the city that he noted on his first visit, even as his plane made its approach to the airport). These paintings are, however, still near-neighb
ours of abstraction. Sunbather (1966) is very close to a hard-edge painting – by Frank Stella, for example – consisting of a series of horizontal stripes. But Hockney has transformed one of the hard-edge stripes into a row of tiles edging the pool, and another, wider one into the poolside patio where the sunbather lies on a towel. Thus light, air and space appear in the image – and not just any light and space, the clear sharp atmosphere and sunshine of maritime California. Looking back on those early days there, Hockney muses, ‘I used to say it was all about the sex, but now I wonder if I was really attracted by the space.’

  The lower zone of Sunbather is covered in squiggly lines borrowed from another painter in Kasmin’s stable, Bernard Cohen. Gillian Ayres remembers wandering into the Kasmin Gallery one day to find Hockney delivering a new painting. He and Kasmin were laughing about the fact that in it he borrowed some stripes from Cohen: ‘they couldn’t decide if that was an upper or a downer!’ Kasmin might have been in two minds when he saw the art that was closest to his heart being appropriated with cheeky aplomb, and transformed into its exact opposite.

  Though only an image of a corner of the grounds of one house, Sunbather is a picture filled with a sense of place – and not that of a native. This is LA as seen through the eyes of an outsider, who is in love with it, just as Richard Smith’s New York was depicted from the romanticized view of a traveller. Hockney’s vision was puzzling to his friend Ed Ruscha, one of the artists Hockney met on his first trip to LA in 1964. Ruscha, an Angeleno who has himself painted and photographed the city prolifically, has talked about this outsider’s perspective, which, for him, holds true both ways:

  David was one of many British people who have a true affinity to this city that I never really understood. I go to England and I see the soft edges to things, the humaneness of everything, the beauty of that place. It puzzles me that British people can come to Los Angeles and actually get excited about it. But there are notable British people who say California is the greatest! It’s oily about the edges, it’s gritty, but at the same time it promises something. I don’t know what, the fountain of youth, maybe.

  *

  Back in the UK, on 9 January 1966, David Hockney was in the news once more. He was fed up with Britain in general, and London in particular, with its stuffiness, its staidness, its lack of freedom. He expressed himself freely to the journalist who wrote the ‘Atticus’ column in the Sunday Times, and his views appeared under the headline ‘Pop Artist Pops Off ’. Why, Hockney asked, did the pubs have to close at 11 o’clock? Why did television stop at midnight? He felt ‘livelier’ in the US, so he was going there:

  Life should be more exciting, but all they have [in London] is regulations stopping you from doing anything. I used to think London was exciting. It is, compared to Bradford. But compared with New York or San Francisco, it’s nothing. I’m going in April.

  BERNARD COHEN Alonging, 1965

  DAVID HOCKNEY Sunbather, 1966

  DAVID HOCKNEY The Room, Tarzana, 1967

  Hockney stayed in Los Angeles – with brief excursions elsewhere – for two years. He had a teaching job at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) where, initially, the class struck him as very dull, made up of would-be art teachers diligently accumulating their credits. Then, one day, in walked Peter Schlesinger, the eighteen-year-old son of an insurance salesman from the San Fernando Valley. He was to be the first great romance of Hockney’s life.

  For the next few years, his art was filled by a feeling beyond the sexual excitement he had felt on his initial arrival in LA. For a while, Hockney’s pictures were concerned with love and happiness – two states virtually excluded from Modernist art (and certainly from the world of Francis Bacon). Here was another of the unspoken taboos of the avant-garde that Hockney insouciantly ignored. A few years later a television interviewer asked Hockney to what he attributed his remarkable appeal to the general public. He replied, ‘I’m not that sure.’ It is indeed a complex phenomenon – in which the charisma of his personality and the virtuosity of his skill doubtless play a part. But, surely, the positivity of his work is important too. If he has a message, he has said, it is: ‘Love life!’

  At the beginning of 1967 Schlesinger moved into Hockney’s apartment on Pico Boulevard in the Santa Monica area of the city. This was the first time the painter was not just in a sexual relationship, but living together with somebody as one half of a couple. While the romance was developing, Hockney’s work was changing yet again. One day later in the year he saw an advertisement for Macy’s department store, ‘a colour photograph of a room’. This struck him firstly because it was ‘so simple and such a direct view’. But it also contained an element new to Hockney’s art: a diagonal. The space was viewed obliquely, rather than head-on, so that the line made by the bottom of the left-hand wall ran upwards across the picture plane, from left to right. This created a deeper, more oblique space, but one defined with the crystalline clarity that Hockney loved, for what one can only call temperamental reasons:

  Macy’s advertisement, San Francisco Chronicle, 1967

  It was so simple and beautiful, I thought, it’s marvellous, it’s like a piece of sculpture, I must use it. And of course I must put a figure on the bed, I don’t want it just empty, so I’ll paint Peter lying on the bed.

  Schlesinger flew up to Berkeley, where Hockney was teaching, and posed lying on a table at the same angle as the bed in the Macy’s photograph. Hockney also, to use a cinematic term, tracked back, enlarging the view in the photograph and thus creating a grander and more harmonious space. Then he transfigured it through a new element in his art: the fall of light. The room in the Macy’s advertisement, he realized, was illuminated by the sun from the window, which cast shadows on the window blind, the carpet and was ‘dancing around the room’. For the first time, the way light fell became an interesting subject for Hockney, joining the transparency of water and the ‘dancing lines’ of the reflections on its surface.

  He entitled the resulting picture The Room, Tarzana (1967), because Schlesinger came from Encino, the neighbourhood next to Tarzana where Edgar Rice Burroughs had written the Tarzan books. The substitution was in case Schlesinger’s parents saw the picture and discovered he had posed half-naked for this openly erotic image. Though coded, the point of the title was that this was Peter’s room, the place inhabited by a person the artist loved.

  The picture was thus a complex construction – a virtual collage – consisting of a found, photographic image, simplified and reimagined, with inserted into it the body of a person deeply known to the artist and observed from life. In the mid-1960s, photography was a new factor in Hockney’s art; the lens-eye view of the world was something that he would work both with and against, grappling with it and meditating on it, from this point until the time of writing, fifty years later.

  In The Room, Tarzana, however, photography merges with an element that had been in Hockney’s consciousness for almost two decades by 1967: the art of fifteenth-century Italy. Perhaps the first great painting he saw in reproduction was an Annunciation by Fra Angelico, a poster of which hung in the corridor at Bradford Grammar School where he had begun to study at the age of eleven. The light, clear colours of Fra Angelico’s fresco had obviously lodged in Hockney’s sensibility, as had the forms as precise as an illustration to Euclid. Pictures by Piero della Francesca have similar characteristics, and he too was one of Hockney’s reference points (as he was for Euan Uglow and many other British painters).

  Of course, the exposed bottom of a young man on a bed would not have been a subject for Fra Angelico, a Dominican friar who was beatified after his death. Somehow, however, Hockney imbued this subject – an erotic male nude – with the mood of a scene by the Florentine master: radiant innocence. This was no doubt how he felt then; it was also the spirit of the time. After all, the middle months of 1967 were remembered as the ‘summer of love’. And San Francisco was its epicentre.

  One of the extraordinary aspects of Hockney’s p
aintings in the mid- to late-1960s – apart from their beauty – was the openness with which he revealed pleasure in the male body. This subject was common in art, of course, but seldom treated in British, American or European painting of the twentieth century. Rare, too, was to find it presented with such calm, matter-of-factness as if to say, this is an important part of my life, why should there be regulations or conventions stopping me from enjoying it? Such willingness to broach this kind of issue was one reason why the curator Norman Rosenthal once remarked that Hockney, from early on in his career, had been a ‘moral force’.

  *

  After he returned to London in 1968, Hockney’s art reached the opposite end of the spectrum from the loose, gestural action painting with which he had begun the decade. A few pictures from this period come close to Photo Realism, though Hockney never actually projected a photograph onto the canvas and then copied it, as true Photo Realists did. But Early Morning, Sainte-Maxime (1968–69) was painted by eye directly from a picture he had taken with his new, high-quality camera. He sometimes wondered, he confessed in 1975, whether it was the worst painting he had ever made. It is certainly very far from the best, and perfectly exemplifies the problem that was to obsess Hockney later in his career: that it is a grave limitation for figurative art to be dominated by the camera-lens view of things. That, he would exclaim again and again, was just not good enough.