Life of David Hockney

by Catherine Cusset

  Derek and London had expanded his thinking. He had understood that you couldn’t become an artist if you stayed in Bradford. He had to go to London, study in an art school worthy of the name. He spent two summers in a row painting outside in the streets of Bradford, transporting his paint and brushes in a pram that his father had repaired. He begged his mother to let him use a room in the house as a studio. She got mad when he spilled paint on the floor or didn’t put the caps on his tubes, she criticized his negligence, his lack of respect for others, but he knew that she would say yes—she was on his side. In the spring of ’57, when David wasn’t yet twenty, his portfolio was ready. He sent it to the Royal College of Art in London, as well as to another art school, the Slade, to increase his enrollment chances, because the Royal College took only one student out of ten. He was chosen for an interview and went to London, unable to sleep the night before, aware of his ignorance and his inferiority compared to his rivals, who had grown up surrounded by museums.

  He was accepted.

  Before starting at the school, David had to fulfill his military service requirement. A conscientious objector, like his father, he was sent to a hospital as a health care aide, first in Leeds, then in Hastings, and he spent two years taking care of elderly and sick patients all day long, rubbing their decrepit bodies with ointment, and washing the dead. He didn’t have time to paint, or even to think. He fell asleep at night trying to read Proust and wondering what an asparagus was. He was aware of his good fortune. He wouldn’t be doing this exhausting and thankless work his entire life. The Royal College awaited him.

  The time finally arrived.

  He was in London, in the most prestigious art school in England, one of the best in the world. His new friends were filled with certainty on subjects he had never even thought about. The day when one of them exclaimed, “You can’t paint like Monet anymore after Pollock!” David blushed as if they were talking about him. He discovered that figure painting belonged to the past, that it was antimodern. French painting was of no interest to any of the other students. He would have been ashamed to show them the portrait of his father that he had been so proud to sell four years earlier, and which he had painted in the vein of the Euston Road School or of French artists such as Vuillard and Bonnard. People were interested only in American abstract works: huge paintings that represented nothing, whose titles were numbers. David had, of course, seen the big exhibition of abstract expressionism at the Tate Gallery in the winter of ’59 and discovered de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, Sam Francis, and Barnett Newman. That exhibition, then those at the Whitechapel Gallery, had shaken his conception of art. You were contemporary or you were nothing.

  What would his first work at the school be? Certainly not a figurative painting. He already had a strong Yorkshire accent, he was terrified at the idea that he would be considered provincial, a Sunday painter. He had to stay on safe ground: drawing. A human skeleton hanging in one of the rooms inspired him. A skeleton, that was original. A large drawing with all the details would reveal his perfect training in anatomy and perspective.

  Everyone noticed his skeleton. A tour de force, they said. He had passed his first trial, hadn’t made a fool of himself. He felt a bit more at ease. One of his friends even offered him five pounds for it. He was an American, a rich student, a former GI who had returned to London on a generous GI Bill stipend. You had to be American to pay five pounds for a student’s drawing. Ron was five years older than he, married, and had a baby. He lived in a real house, unlike David, who shared a tiny room with another student in the lively Earl’s Court neighborhood. Ron painted slowly and didn’t care what the others thought. His free spirit reminded David of his stubborn father. They became friends. They both arrived at school early in the morning, earlier than the other students, and had a cup of tea together before getting to work. They talked about art, art history, contemporary art. David had realized for some time that the painters he had known in Bradford, even his teachers at the School of Art, weren’t artists. He finally understood why: they didn’t question their place and relevance in the history of art. One couldn’t be an artist without asking oneself that fundamental question and finding an answer to it. He no longer had anything in common with the innocent boy he had been, the one who spent happy summers ambling around, pushing his pram filled with tubes of paint and brushes, stopping here and there to sketch a tree or a house. Figure painting was good for poster and Christmas card artists. He had had a close call, but the new atmosphere he was breathing in had opened his eyes: he would be modern. Ron shook his head and smiled.

  David should have been happy. He had done everything he could to get into this school. The day he was accepted, he had felt as if he had passed through the eye of a needle, had entered paradise, had been rescued from the life of an office employee that was the lot of his brothers, his sister, and his neighbors in Bradford. During the two years he had worked at the hospital, he had dreamt of his future existence and developed a serene patience, knowing that his deliverance would come and awaken him from what felt like a century of sleep. Now he was finally free, but that anticipated, desired happiness that should have been within his grasp escaped him. For the first time, he no longer felt joy in painting. He felt strangely detached from his work, without energy or enthusiasm. Maybe he had been wrong. Maybe he was just an impostor. His American friend listened to the twenty-two-year-old, completely at a loss, pour out his anxieties. They also talked about other things, politics, literature, friendship, love, the vegetarian diet that David, like his parents, practiced. His daily conversations with Ron at least allowed him to feel less alone.

  “This is what you should paint,” Ron said one day. “Things that matter to you. You don’t have to worry about being contemporary. You already are, since you live in your time.”

  The idea was interesting. There was no point in struggling to belong to one’s time—one belonged to it by definition. Ron’s figures, indeed, didn’t seem to have been painted in Manet’s or Renoir’s time. In any case, something had to change. If David didn’t rediscover pleasure in painting, he would end up like an old, dried-up lemon left out on a kitchen counter. As a matter of fact, he felt like painting vegetables. No one could accuse him of being antimodern, because their round shapes seemed respectfully abstract. But in his mind, they were vegetables. He then painted the can of Typhoo Tea from which he took a bag every morning when he arrived at school, and which reminded him of his mother. In addition to the words “Typhoo Tea,” he had the idea of adding a letter or a number here and there which would force the viewer to get closer to the painting to decipher them. He was smuggling in a bit of intimacy. The letters and numbers engaged the viewer instead of leaving him at a distance, as abstract painting did.

  Ron shared a corner of his studio down the hall with another student, and when David went to see him in the afternoon, he also chatted with his studio mate. Adrian was gay. The first openly gay man David, at the age of twenty-two, had ever met. He had known for a long time that he liked men, but his sexual activity was limited to rare, furtive encounters about which he spoke to no one in places where he went alone. The day when one of his friends told him, “I saw you in that pub with that bloke and I saw what you were doing!” he had blushed, terribly embarrassed by the unfortunate coincidence that had brought a student he knew into a pub far away from their school, where a stranger he had met an hour earlier in the Leicester Square movie theater was fondling him. Afterward, his own reaction had made him angry. Would he have blushed if the student had caught him with a girl? And would the student have even mentioned it? What gave him the right to talk to him with such mocking familiarity? David painted a work that he called Shame, without any other identifiable shape than that of an erect penis in the foreground. While he listened to Adrian unashamedly tell him about his homosexual adventures, he thought, That’s how I want to live. Adrian advised him to read the American poet Walt Whitman, whom David had heard of, and th
e Egyptian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, whom he hadn’t.

  The summer he turned twenty-three, he read Whitman and Cavafy. Whitman’s poetry was easy to find, but not Cavafy’s. At the public library in Bradford his works weren’t on the shelves; you had to get them from a special room, the library’s “Inferno.” When he was checking the book out, the library employee gave him a suspicious look, one that implied that the prodigal son who had gone to live in London had obviously been debauched, and was about to read this book holding it in one hand, using the other to rid himself of the tension that reading it would cause. At the end of the summer, he couldn’t bring himself to return it. It wasn’t just the dread of again confronting the frown of the librarian. He simply couldn’t separate himself from Cavafy—the book belonged to him.

  He immediately fell in love with the Greek poet’s humor. One of his favorite poems was “Waiting for the Barbarians,” with its refrain “The barbarians are coming today,” and its final verse that revealed the absence of the barbarians whose arrival was so feared: “Those people were a sort of solution.” How true that was, and how we were always seeking hypocritical pretexts! People were so lacking in courage and freedom! The two poets, the American and the Greek, expressed everything he was feeling in simple words that he could understand, unlike Proust, whose meaning escaped him. “And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was happy,” wrote Whitman, talking about the love between two men. For the first time in a year, David no longer had any doubt: he had to paint what mattered to him. He had just turned twenty-three. There was nothing more important than desire and love. He had to find a way to represent what was forbidden in images, just as Whitman and Cavafy had done through words. No one could authorize him to do it—no professor, no other artist. It had to be his decision, his creation, the exercise of his freedom.

  Having returned to the Royal College, he produced a series of paintings in which he slipped in words and even lines, some of which came from Walt Whitman, such as “We two boys together clinging,” and others from graffiti he had read on the men’s room door in the Earl’s Court Tube station, such as “Ring me at…” or “My brother is only seventeen.” Geometrical shapes like those in children’s drawings, the figures were identifiable thanks to the hair, mouths, teeth, impish ears, and erect penises. To represent himself in these paintings, he borrowed a childlike code from Whitman that consisted of replacing the letters of the alphabet with numbers, drawing on the canvas in tiny script the numbers “4.8” which represented his initials, and the numbers “23.23” for Walt Whitman. These were so small, so light, that one could choose not to see them and to interpret David’s new works in a purely artistic context by seeing the influence of Pollock or Dubuffet in them. His professors were in the dark (so to speak). It was an excellent way to dupe the system.

  He no longer felt the gloomy lack of inspiration he had felt the year before, and didn’t stop painting, completing one work after another. He had established a routine: he arrived early, when there was still no one at the school except Ron, and he painted in blissful quiet for two hours before the others arrived. Around 3:00 p.m., when his fellow students left their easels for some tea, David slipped away and went to the movies, alone or with the girlfriend of one of his friends, Ann, a pretty, red-headed student who loved American films as much as he did. He returned to the college just as the students were leaving, and he worked late into the night, in peace. In any event, he really had nowhere to go. He had moved out of the tiny room he had been sharing, and was now living, at the same price, in a shed in the yard behind the house. He was delighted to be alone, but the comforts of the place were so rudimentary that he couldn’t do anything but sleep there.

  A new student had arrived in September, Mark, an American as openly gay as Adrian, who had brought from America something that David was quick to borrow: magazines filled with photos of young, blond, muscular men in their underwear, which revealed more than it hid. While thumbing through them and getting excited by the photos, David wondered again why something so beautiful, which elicited such pleasure, should be hidden. These magazines were printed in the United States. Two of his three closest friends at the RCA were American. He had never encountered a homosexual in the town where he had grown up, and any sexual relationship between two consenting adult men was considered a crime by the British penal code. The young blond men who triumphantly showed off their biceps on the pages of Physique Pictorial made him want to immediately fly off to America. “If you come to New York one day, you’re welcome to stay with me,” Mark had told him, as if he could have taken a train to New York as easily as to Bradford. An airplane ticket no doubt cost hundreds or thousands of pounds. It was another universe. David had never been out of England.

  He was grateful to Mark, Adrian, and Ron for that breath of freedom that they blew into his life. When he went home at Christmas or Easter, he was happy to see his parents and talk with his brothers and sister sitting around the good vegetarian meals their mother prepared. They asked about life in the big city, and David explained what American abstract expressionism was; he talked about the exhibition of Young Contemporary Artists for which critics had created the expression “Pop Art,” and of the young art dealer who had really liked the four paintings he had exhibited in order to demonstrate his pictorial virtuosity. It was all very promising. But how could he have mentioned the photos in Physique Pictorial, the homosexuality of Mark and Adrian, the men he exchanged looks with in the subway toilets, or his desire to use painting to depict a reality about which he didn’t have the right to speak? His oldest brother was married; the youngest was engaged. Neither of them asked him if he had a girlfriend. The subject never came up, as if an artist didn’t have a body—rather, as if they knew, but didn’t want to know.

  And yet he had a body. And a heart.

  One night at the Royal College, at the end of a party during which there had been a lot of drinking, one of his friends demonstrated a new dance called the cha-cha-cha. David watched him, rocking on his chair, and when Peter smiled and held out his hand for him to join him, that smile penetrated and suddenly irradiated him. It was like a bolt of lightning. It truly was a bolt, because he was stunned, his ears were ringing. He didn’t want to dance. He preferred to watch. He asked for another demonstration, then another, without taking his eyes off the graceful body, the hips that turned to the right, to the left, and the sensual lips pursed as if to kiss, while the boy looked straight at him singing “cha-cha-cha.” Peter was sexier than Marilyn, sexier than the living doll in the song by Cliff Richard that David liked so much. A boy doll. David would have given his kingdom for a kiss, but didn’t ask for one, he was shy and polite, and above all he knew that Peter had a girlfriend. For months the vision of Peter dancing for him, his graceful hips and his puckered lips haunted him day and night. That’s what he wanted to put into his paintings, that burning desire, his desire for Peter and for his body, a desire that split him in two, because there was sex on the one side and love on the other, and the two could not be reconciled. They could come together only when he was in front of his easel, and he felt alive and full of desire when he painted The Cha Cha that was Danced in the Early Hours of 24th March, 1961, depicting the movement of Peter’s body, using bright red, blue, and yellow for the background and writing in tiny letters here and there “I love every movement,” “penetrates deep down,” “gives instant relief from.” It wasn’t a painting. It was life.

  He had painted so much during the autumn that by winter he was like the grasshopper who had been singing all summer: he didn’t have a penny left to buy canvases and paint. Luckily, the department of graphic art gave out materials for free. David didn’t have a choice. But in his etchings, as in his paintings, he created what interested him, engraving visions inspired by the poetry of Walt Whitman or Constantine Cavafy. In April a friend offered to sell him for forty pounds a plane ticket to New York which the friend couldn’t use. Forty pounds to fl
y to New York? That was an offer you couldn’t refuse. He would find the money. He would work to pay his friend back.

  That rainy day in April, he had ten shillings in his pocket—the last of his money—when he left his little shed behind the house in Earl’s Court. It was pouring rain. A taxi was parked on the other side of the street. The taxi ride to the college would cost five shillings, half of what he had left, while the Tube, which wasn’t far, would be only a few pence, but he would still have to walk ten minutes to get to the school. He felt an urge to do what so many Londoners did without a second thought: cross the street, open the taxi door, get into the rear of the cab, which was dry and comfortable, sit down on the padded seat, and say in a voice full of natural authority, “To the Royal College, please.” And that’s what he did.

  At the school, a letter was waiting for him. When he tore open the envelope and took out the sheet of paper folded in thirds, another piece of paper fell out on the floor. He picked it up. It was a check for one hundred pounds made out to him. He frowned and reread the name, convinced he was imagining it. In the letter, a certain Mr. Erskine, whom he didn’t know, congratulated him for the prize his etching Three Kings and a Queen had just won. David had indeed done an etching with that title, but he had never entered it into a competition. He was baffled. It was either a miracle or the gods were playing a joke on him. He had decided to spend the last of his money on a whim, without thinking of the future, and a good fairy was rewarding him by sending him two hundred times more than he had. Later that day he learned that the good fairy was a professor in the department of engraving who had found David’s work on a shelf and had sent it to the jury without even asking him. But he shook his head. Quite obviously, it was thanks to that taxi.