Life of David Hockney

by Catherine Cusset

  They agreed to spend the Easter vacation apart. They both needed some breathing room. A break. Peter would go to Paris and David to Los Angeles. There he found exactly what he had come for: a period of pure relaxation in the house of one of Nick’s friends, a banker, where the party kept going full throttle day and night around the pool. Drugs were passed around, the boys were gorgeous, and the pleasure easy. After making love, he drew the men with whom he had just slept. He was feeling better, and he already missed Peter. In the airplane going back to London, he thought of him tenderly, impatient to see him and to make it up with him.

  Peter was no longer available—he had met someone. David, who had just had his own fun, was hardly in a position to complain. And Peter was so young, he was only twenty-three. David had been his first lover; he needed to experiment. David had to let him live his adventure. He remembered what Christopher Isherwood had told him. The wise Christopher had managed to control his pain, Don had ultimately returned from London, and today they were happier than ever. David would find the strength to follow Christopher’s lead.

  Luckily, he had a lifesaver—his work. He had begun another double portrait, of Ossie and Celia, who had just gotten married because Celia was pregnant. It would be their wedding present. Ossie is sitting on a modern chair in a nonchalant pose, his cat on his lap, while Celia is standing next to the open window in a long, dark dress, her hand on her waist thickened by her pregnancy, next to a bouquet of white lilies. The phone on the right is white, too, as is the balustrade of the balcony and the cat, and all that white infuses the painting with a softness, reflecting that of Celia. David wasn’t able to paint Ossie’s feet and hid them in the plush of the rug. He also had trouble with Ossie’s head. He kept doing it over without being satisfied, probably because he wasn’t satisfied with Ossie himself, who was taking more and more drugs, becoming increasingly unstable, and was treating Celia badly. David had scarcely finished the painting when he accepted a commission, something he rarely did, for a portrait of the director of Covent Garden, who was retiring. It was better to stay busy. He was also thinking a great deal about another project, the idea for which had come to him when he had seen two photos lying side by side on the floor of his studio. One was of a boy swimming in a pool, the other of a young man in profile looking straight ahead. It looked like he was watching the swimmer. The composition, again born by chance, had pleased him, and he had immediately known what he wanted to paint: Peter in the position of the standing boy. Peter who for once wouldn’t be the man swimming under the water, the object of the gaze, but the dressed man on the edge of the pool, the observer, the subject of the gaze, that is, the artist.

  David begged him to come with him to France in July. If they returned to Carennac, the memory of the happy times spent in the château with Kas, his wife, and their guests, the river that reflected the pale yellow stone of the walls, the dinners in excellent company under the walnut trees, the exquisite grand cru Bordeaux, the mildness of summer evenings, would dispel their problems and resuscitate their love. Peter agreed to come, but wasn’t very nice. He always seemed annoyed with David, even in public, in a humiliating way. He didn’t want to pose or to make love. After a week he insisted they go to Cadaqués, where a friend had invited them. David gave in. When they arrived in the town in northeastern Spain after driving for a long time on winding roads in the heat, a horrible surprise awaited him: Peter’s lover was there.

  In three days Peter would leave for Greece, where he was planning to meet his parents, and David needed to spend some time alone with him. He begged him to skip a picnic on a boat with the group the next day. Peter couldn’t see why he should deprive himself of a fun outing for a tête-à-tête with David, who would probably only criticize him. The day of the picnic, David followed him as far as the dock where all the guests had already gathered, waiting for Peter in the boat, including Peter’s lover, a handsome Dane his age, tall and blond. David watched him jump onto the boat.

  “Peter, if you go, it’s over.”

  Peter didn’t turn around. David’s blood boiled.

  “Fuck off!”

  He had shouted so loudly that everyone turned around to look at him. He ran off. He packed his bag and left right away, traveling through the Pyrenees, stopping in Perpignan for the night, then driving to Carennac as quickly as the winding roads of the Dordogne allowed.

  When he got out of the car in the courtyard of the château de Carennac and saw his friends, Kas and his wife, Jane, Ossie, Celia, and Patrick, he burst into tears. He already regretted getting angry. He tried to reach Peter on the phone, but had no luck. They couldn’t separate for a month with those words “Fuck off!” ringing in their ears. He had to return to Cadaqués. He and Ossie drove off in the stifling summer heat, traveling for two days and stopping only to sleep.

  Peter didn’t seem happy to see him.

  “What are you doing here? Go away.”

  “I can’t leave now, Peter. I’ve been driving for four days, I’m too tired.”

  Tears were rolling down his cheeks in spite of himself. How could Peter be so cruel? Their friends intervened, and Peter softened a bit. The day before he left for Greece, they managed to talk, without shouting, without insulting each other. David felt better when they parted.

  He had an entire month to reflect on what had happened. He was going to change. He would become less self-centered. He had taken Peter for granted. From now on he would listen to him, would pay more attention to him, think about complimenting him on his paintings and photos, would tell him what an essential place he had in his life. David remembered his own youth. He, too, at twenty-three, had felt lost. It couldn’t be easy to live with an older artist who was already successful. He would show Peter that he respected him as a being distinct from himself, with his own life and his own will. He had been egocentric. Absorbed by his work, he had allowed distance to grow between them. But there had been extenuating circumstances. The retrospective wasn’t an exhibition like any other; it represented ten years of his work.

  When Peter returned to London in September, he told David that he needed more time. He put a mattress in his studio. At least he was still living down the street, with their friend Ann. The renovation that had caused such disturbance and noise the year before was done. The now huge apartment decorated with designer furniture that Peter had chosen was magnificent, and the spacious bathroom covered in bright blue tiles had a circular shower with multiple jets, which David dreamed of trying out with him. He had to be patient, allow him time and space. He painted a still life in which the objects scattered on a glass coffee table exuded a solitude that reflected his own. And another, of a red rubber lifesaver in a pool, a mirror of his melancholy. The days went by, in sadness, each one the same as the one before. He couldn’t sleep without Valium. Some nights only the thought of his mother prevented him from swallowing the whole bottle. A friend, seeing how depressed he was, took him to Japan. David had wanted to go there for a long time, but Tokyo seemed ugly and polluted, the beauty of Kyoto didn’t move him, and he couldn’t stop thinking of Peter. He ended up calling him one evening from the hotel, only to hear, from thousands of miles away, these words that broke his heart: “It’s over.” In all of Japan he liked only one painting, entitled Osaka in the Rain, which he saw in an exhibition of traditional-style Japanese painters.

  When he got back to London he threw himself into his work. The only person he could tolerate was his mother. She didn’t know the reason for his sadness, but he sensed that she would have liked to carry his burden for him. She called him “my dear boy,” was always ready to pose for him without ever complaining of fatigue, respected his work, and was overcome with gratitude when he offered her a bouquet of tulips, a dress, or a television. Deep down, he was waiting for Peter to return. It was just a matter of weeks, or of months, he was sure of it. Peter would ultimately exhaust the pleasures of novelty and end up realizing that their love was uniqu
e. There was a task to accomplish beforehand, like a trial in a fairy tale. He would create the painting that would give Peter back his dignity by representing him as an artist, and not as a lover.

  The work resisted him. David spent hours examining it without understanding what was wrong. He tried to repaint the figure, to rework the swimmer and the surface of the water, but the problem persisted. One morning, when his gaze went back and forth from the photos to the painting, concentrating intensely, he had a revelation. The angle of the pool was wrong. Consequently, the entire painting was wrong. It had to be redone. “You’re crazy!” Kas exclaimed. The canvas on which David had already spent six months appeared perfect to him. In any case, David didn’t have time to start again before the exhibition that opened three weeks later, on May 13, at the André Emmerich Gallery in New York, his first solo exhibition since 1969. According to Kasmin, the problem existed only in David’s mind; he couldn’t let go because he couldn’t let go of Peter. “No,” he replied, and promised that the painting would be ready.

  He worked like crazy. He brought Mo, his model and assistant who had become a close friend, to Tony’s vacation spot above Saint-Tropez, where he had often gone with Peter. The latter had had the nerve to stop there at the end of the summer on his way back from Spain with his Nordic lover, but Tony had refused to let them stay, for which David was grateful. In spite of the coolness of the water in the early spring, David made Mo swim for a long time in the pool while taking photo after photo of him, then made him pose on the pool’s stone edge in Peter’s pink jacket. Back in London, he worked nonstop, even at night, because a young filmmaker who was doing a film on him offered to loan him lamps that were as bright as daylight. In exchange, David had to put up with the presence of the stranger in his studio for an afternoon. For ten days he didn’t sleep. The work was completed the day before the opening. With the paint scarcely dry, he rolled the canvas and sent it to New York.

  It was his most beautiful painting, more beautiful than the portrait of Christopher and Don, more beautiful than Le Parc des Sources, Vichy. Haloed in the light that bathes his bright pink jacket, his face, and light brown hair, Peter watches the swimmer in the transparent water, looking like an angel, but an angel with a real body casting a strong shadow on the edge of the pool. In it one finds both the strong diagonals and the green perspective of Le Parc des Sources, Vichy, and the intense, attractive blue of the portrait of Christopher and Don. This painting reflected the strength of his love for Peter. It was a portrait of the sky, a portrait of the water, a portrait of love, a portrait of an artist. Peter wouldn’t be able to see it without acknowledging David’s love for him.

  The painting was bought right away; Peter didn’t come back.

  Henry arrived from New York for the summer, and took David to Corsica. Henry was a friend with a sharp tongue and cruel humor, but on this occasion he showed an exquisite patience, ready to be bored to death by David, who had only one subject of conversation—rather, of a monologue. He didn’t wonder whether Peter would return, but when he would return. It was the only question he asked. When would Peter realize that David was the love of his life? When would he be done with the necessary experimentation of youth? David conceived a new double portrait of two London friends, a dancer and a seller of old books, who had met through him, or rather thanks to Peter. Their age difference was the same as that between Peter and him. If he painted them, perhaps he would understand the secret to a stable relationship. “You’d do better to paint your parents,” Henry suggested. “It will give you time to reflect on your relationship with them. It would be an excellent form of psychoanalysis.” Henry was only half joking.

  David could no longer stand to be in London, where each couple of men in the street seen from the back, one svelte with brown hair, the other tall and blond, made his heart skip. And when he ran into Peter—which necessarily happened since they frequented the same world, the same galleries, the same friends—he had to pretend that he was doing well and stop himself from staring at his lover whose body was forbidden him. It was intolerable. The art world disgusted him. He learned that the man who had bought Portrait of an Artist in New York, pretending to be a private collector, had resold it in Germany for three times what he had paid: that painting in which he had left his soul had become the object of a speculation. He now had to finish the double portrait of the dancer and the bookseller, which would be the centerpiece of his next exhibition. He looked at the unfinished canvas and could no longer see the point. He hated the Powis Terrace apartment. He had to leave. He was lucky, no doubt, because he had the means. But he would have preferred a miserable cabin at the ends of the earth with Peter over this luxurious life he now had. After the Christmas holidays, which, like every year, he spent in Bradford with his parents, his sister, and the only brother who still lived in England, he flew to Los Angeles and rented a house on the beach in Malibu, where Celia and her two boys, one and three years old, joined him.

  Her heart had been broken, too. Ossie continued to cheat on her and treated her very badly. She had to put up with him, for her sons’ sake. Celia, a close friend of Peter’s, criticized his cruelty, and had taken David’s side. David, a longtime friend and former lover of Ossie’s, had taken Celia’s side. Everything about her was soft, her face, her smile, her curls, her light eyes, her voice, her babies. She was so pretty. David couldn’t stop drawing her. Every morning he drove the forty miles to his Hollywood studio, and every evening he drove back to the house on the beach where Celia and the boys were waiting for him. She had prepared dinner, they opened a bottle of wine, drank it looking out at the ocean after the children were in bed. Around 2 a.m., after talking for a long time—about everything, about Ossie, Peter, nothing—they lay on the same bed and fell asleep snuggling. Like a brother and sister. Or a bit more tenderly. David gradually had the impression that his body was thawing. Was it friendship or love? It was something sweet that protected them from solitude and sadness, a protection that was abruptly taken away when Ossie, after hearing about the new intimacy between his wife and his friend, arrived from London like a hurricane and whisked away his wife and children.

  Without Celia and her babies, even the sound of the waves seemed grim to him. He went back to Europe. On April 8, when he heard on the radio that Picasso had died in Mougins, France, at the age of ninety-one, he burst into tears. It had been almost two years since Peter had left him, two years of which he had no memory: the emptiness seemed to have swallowed time. In contrast, he saw as if it were yesterday his arrival in Cadaqués and the hard, cold, loveless look that Peter had given him when he had gotten out of the car. “Go away.” He now understood that he would never meet Picasso and that Peter would never come back to him. The world would forever be without Picasso and Peter. It was a world in which he didn’t want to live.

  He didn’t kill himself. He received an invitation to participate in an homage to Picasso. The man who had been the master printmaker for the Spanish painter, Aldo Crommelynck, taught him a new technique that he had just perfected and that enabled him to create color etchings as quickly and spontaneously as in black and white. By teaching the English painter a method that he hadn’t had time to teach Picasso before his death, he made David Picasso’s heir in printmaking. For the first time in two years, David managed not to think of Peter. The pleasure that this new technique brought him, the long days spent collaborating with the printmaker, absorbed his negative energy.

  Henry joined him again in the summer and they spent a month together in Italy, in a villa that David had rented in Lucca. They were supposed to write a book together on David’s life and work—it was Henry’s idea. David drew his friend while they chatted aimlessly, drank exquisite wine, listened to operas, and smoked enormous cigars by the pool. The book didn’t get very far, but David didn’t feel alone, and life was beginning to flow in his veins again. He even found the strength to play a trick on Henry one day when, his notebook on his lap, he saw Hen
ry sitting a few meters away, posing. Henry, who was a bit vain, liked having his portrait done. For more than a half hour David alternately studied him, then leaned over his page, back and forth, with a concentrated look, while his friend hardly dared to move so as not to disturb the session. “Can I see?” he finally asked, and when David held up the drawing of Mickey Mouse he had spent the half hour fine-tuning, the surprise and anger mixed on Henry’s face was so comical that he burst into joyful laughter.

  Perhaps, after all, life was possible without the man one loved. Perhaps he would never again experience the passion he had felt for Peter, perhaps there would never again be a perfect union, but there remained the perfection of friendship, the beauty of the cypresses on the hills, and the joy of working. And if he forgot Peter, if he managed to live without him, mightn’t he return? No one was attracted by sadness and melancholy, but by lightheartedness, strength, happiness. David swam in the pool an hour every day, got tan, his shoulders became muscular, and he took care of his body. He knew that Peter needed him. He had heard of his financial difficulties and couldn’t help thinking of him when he read the terrible ending of Madame Bovary.

  The day following his return to London he let Peter know through a common friend that he would be happy to see him and help him out. The response was that Peter didn’t need or want to see him.

  Alone in the big silent Powis Terrace apartment, he was stricken with depression. He realized that he had spent the summer deluding himself. Whereas he thought he was regaining his strength and finally distancing himself from Peter, he was only waiting for him. He had even managed to convince himself that Peter must have changed his mind during the summer and was going to run back to him!