Life of David Hockney

by Catherine Cusset

  Her childlike innocence seemed to her son the most precious thing in the world. Only a child looked at the world that way, without being distracted by the stupid preoccupations of adults. Only a child observed ants that gathered crumbs, ladybugs, drops of water falling on leaves, puddles, and stones. David liked the company of Byron, who, an only son raised by a divorced mother, talked as well as an adult, but with the logic of a child. David had known him as a baby and had watched him grow up, since Ann lived nearby in Notting Hill, and he went to see them often when he was in London, but he had never lived with them for two full weeks. Byron, whose hair was as dark brown as his mother’s was red, a nice-looking boy with large eyes who looked somewhat Italian, was interested in everything, asked a thousand questions, but also knew not to interrupt a conversation or a silence, and watched David paint without bothering him. He passionately wanted to win when they played cards. When he was with him, David felt both like a father and like a child.

  Their stay, which he had anticipated with some trepidation, turned out to be wonderfully harmonious and lighthearted. They all got along so well, and California pleased his mother, Ann, and Byron so much that he invited them all to return as soon as they could. They would stay in more comfortable quarters, because he planned to move into a house, now that he was certain he would stay in Los Angeles, where he had found the perfect balance between solitude and community. During the summer Gregory found one in the Hollywood Hills. Located at the end of a cul-de-sac called Montcalm Avenue, hidden by vegetation, the property, not very luxurious but certainly spacious, was made up of several bungalows and had a pool. They moved into the house. It was decided that Laura, Ann, and Byron would come for Christmas.

  David was working on a future show at the Metropolitan Opera, a triptych of French music from the first half of the twentieth century. It included a ballet by Satie, Parade—whose set had been designed by Picasso when the piece was created in 1917—Les mamelles de Tirésias by Poulenc, and L’enfant et les sortilèges by Ravel. The work as a whole would be called Parade. It was his third opera, and the first one in America. He had not yet found a solution for his large painting and needed a distraction. Designing a set was easier than painting; he just had to listen to the opera for hours and let his imagination take off. The music dictated the colors and shapes. The work was all the more agreeable since the New York director had had a model of the Met stage constructed for him, which even included miniaturized scaffolding, ropes, and lights.

  This little theater delighted Byron when he returned to spend his Christmas vacation in Los Angeles with his mother and Laura. Everything enthralled the teenager: the new house hidden in dense vegetation that attracted raccoons, possums, and deer; the pool in the shape of a bean which he jumped into all day long, shouting with joy; the constant fine weather that allowed him to swim in December; and above all the extraordinary toy theater, thanks to which David was able to test his creations with exclusive performances for his little favored audience, during which he was seconded by his new fourteen-year-old assistant. Gregory, tired of rehearsing the show almost every day, was glad to be replaced. For Christmas, David, happy to finally have someone with whom he could share one of his greatest pleasures, took his guests to Disneyland. Byron and he went on all the rides and ended with David’s favorite, Pirates of the Caribbean. When the boat shot into the darkness, and amidst the clanking of chains something brushed against their faces with a sinister sound, the child screamed and dug his fingers into David’s arm; David was also shouting, out of joy, not terror, since he knew this ride by heart. Twenty minutes later, they met up with their English ladies—one with silver hair and the other with red—on the bench where they were waiting for them, and Byron hurried to his mother, yelling that she should have come, that it wasn’t scary at all. David smiled. He didn’t want a child, would hardly have had the time to raise one, but if he had had one, he would have wanted him to be like Byron: lively, curious, open, sensitive. A bit later, when they were headed to the park’s exit at dusk, the two women arm in arm, David and Byron walking in front of them eating their cotton candy, Ann burst out laughing: “You’re quite the pair, you two. I wonder who is the youngest!” David couldn’t have been more flattered. At the end of the two weeks, which went by much too quickly, he promised Byron he would take him to the Grand Canyon next time he came. The boy’s eyes lit up. He turned to his mother: “Can we come back at Easter?”

  The adults laughed.

  “Thank you, David. Now I’m going to hear the same question every day. Honey, let me point out that we have come twice this year and Los Angeles is not just around the corner! And you’re spending the Easter holiday with your father.”

  “When you turn fifteen, Byron.”

  “That’s too far away!”

  David was sad to see them go.

  On a trip back to England a few months later, he stopped in New York, where a large Picasso retrospective had just opened at MoMA. The Spanish painter’s work filled the forty-eight rooms of the museum. Drawings, prints, etchings, paintings, sculptures, everything was there, and from all periods: blue, pink, cubist…The extent of the exhibition was stunning. It was as if Picasso had painted the entire contents of the Louvre, as if he had been at the same time Piero della Francesca, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Degas. A genius. A grand body of work, in every sense of the term. During the five days David spent in New York, he went to MoMA every day, particularly struck by a painting from 1951 that he hadn’t known, Massacre in Korea, which Picasso had painted in the middle of the Korean War, inspired by Goya’s Tres de mayo and Manet’s L’exécution de Maximilien. Picasso’s painting—which portrays a group of women and children with faces deformed by terror opposite masked soldiers that look like robots who are getting ready to gun them down—combined everything that mattered to David: perfect composition, reference to other works, a sense of time, humanity, and the importance of the subject.

  He was almost forty-three. He was in the middle of his life. What had he done since his retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery ten years earlier, in 1970? He had worked a lot, that was true. Lots of drawings and prints, sets for three operas, but how many paintings? Did he want to go down in history as a sketch artist or a theater designer?

  The exhibition exuded too much positive energy for him to feel sad or worried. The pressing urge to paint swelled his veins. When he arrived in London for the summer, he quickly did sixteen paintings on the theme of music, inspired by his opera sets. He had but one desire: return to California, where he would be less distracted, and get back to his large work.

  The day he returned, he received a phone call from the opera director informing him that a strike at the Metropolitan Opera would delay the performances of the triptych he had worked on with so much pleasure, and even threatened to cancel them. He was in a bad mood when he walked into his studio and saw Santa Monica Boulevard, hoping that the summer would have given him the distance necessary to understand what was wrong with it.

  The painting seemed lifeless to him. A disaster.

  In a corner of the room there was a little canvas that he had painted quickly, haphazardly, with no other goal than to try out new acrylic colors. That painting, which by chance resembled a canyon, seemed more alive and more interesting than the huge clunker on which he had been working for almost two years. To encourage him to paint more quickly, Henry had told him one day that there was no connection between the time one spent on a work and the result. Once again, his friend was right.

  David abruptly turned to his assistant, pointed at Santa Monica Boulevard, and said, “Please take it out. Destroy it.”

  That night he couldn’t sleep. He tossed and turned in his bed wondering how he could have spent a year and a half on a painting only to realize that it was a failure. He had entirely redone Portrait of an Artist and My Parents. But Santa Monica Boulevard was irredeemable, he was sure of it. Had he undertaken that work for th
e wrong reasons—just to do a great painting? Had his drive to paint left him at the same time Peter did? In healing from Peter, had he given up the desire that was at the origin of creation?

  He had two hands, two legs, two eyes, an excellent technique, and yet nothing was under his control. Maybe he had lost his blue guitar. He was powerless to do anything about it. Maybe he would just design sets—for operas that would never be performed. He had to accept it. It was better than creating mediocre paintings.

  He thought again of the Hilton Kramer review still tacked up on the wall of his studio and of what another great critic of American art, Clement Greenberg, had said eleven years earlier, when he went to the Emmerich Gallery for one of David’s solo exhibitions: “This is no art for a serious gallery.” He had always laughed at the scorn of the critics and at that notion of “serious.” He suddenly wondered what they had seen in his work that he didn’t. Didn’t see, really? Hadn’t Kramer’s review struck his Achilles’ heel, which was his fear of not being a good painter? David had always been aware of his weaknesses. He drew beautifully and was an excellent colorist, but there was something stiff in his paintings; he didn’t have the freedom of a Picasso and never would. He wasn’t able to create the form that went with his vision. Out of laziness or because it was easy, he fell back on the conventions of bourgeois naturalism, and it looked like he was just painting realistic portraits like those of a nineteenth-century artist. Kramer wasn’t wrong. That was the entire problem with that new painting which, far from communicating the movement he had envisioned, remained flatly realistic—lifeless. Realism in painting wasn’t the Real; it was a mere convention.

  Wide awake, he was looking in the semidarkness at the ceiling of his bedroom when he remembered what Byron had said last Christmas as he was standing in front of the painting: “I like it, but it looks like a picture.”

  “A picture?”

  “Yes. It doesn’t look real. It’s too…straight.”

  Ann had added: “I understand what he means. It’s because of all those horizontal lines that are parallel to the edges of the painting.” At the time, David had paid little attention to the remark, but it must have intrigued him enough to stay lodged in a corner of his memory. The teenager’s words suddenly seemed luminous to him. Byron had identified the problem. David had composed his painting from photos he had taken on the boulevard. That was a mistake. The photos were limited by the fixed angle from which you were taking them, whereas eyes move around and change their focus when you look at something. And above all, you don’t see only with your eyes, but also with your memory and moods.

  He felt like a little light was blinking at the end of the tunnel through which he had been traveling ever since he had noted the failure of his project. Maybe there was still some hope, if he managed to change radically his way of painting. If he no longer composed from photos, but from his memory. If he no longer sought to create a great painting, but simply painted what mattered to him. He would be closer to the truth and to life.

  His heart was light when we went into his studio the next day.

  Since he had moved to the Hollywood Hills he drove twice a day between Montcalm Avenue and West Hollywood while listening to music, played on the excellent sound system he had had installed in his car. At the end of the day, after leaving the expressways of Santa Monica and Hollywood behind, he would climb the steep canyon roads bordered by luxurious and fragrant vegetation that reminded him of the south of France, and suddenly, after a turn in the road, he would see a brilliant ball of fire or the radiant blue of the ocean. He adjusted his speed in order to synchronize an aria of the opera he was listening to with the stunning view. It was not just a car trip; it was the most beautiful moment of his day. That is what he was going to paint.

  He did a little trial piece that showed the route he took through the canyon. A winding road was depicted vertically in the middle of the canvas, surrounded by spots of vibrant colors that represented the hills and the vegetation with, here and there, trees or a house. This painting was completely unlike anything he had painted up to then—except the works he had done just to try out acrylic colors—and looked like a child’s drawing. The second one was bigger, more ambitious: he painted the route from his house to his studio, in softer colors, with a technique that was somewhat pointillist. The undulating road went through the canvas horizontally, bordered by a more complex landscape that included hills, trees, low vegetation, but also a tennis court, a pool, an electrical pole, a grid map of downtown L.A., with the ocean on the horizon. Everything was on the same scale, as in maps drawn by children. These two paintings, and those that followed, were not traditional landscapes, but journeys through time, lively tales that charmed the eye with the balance of warm colors and geometric shapes. The critics would think he had regressed into childhood. But David had no doubt he was on the right path.

  He hadn’t wasted his time working on Santa Monica Boulevard, since he now knew why his old way of painting didn’t work, or creating opera sets, because that work in three dimensions had changed his relationship with space.

  The triptych was finally going to be performed, after a yearlong delay. In January 1981, in New York, where he was attending the final rehearsals for Parade, he met a cute, blond student at a dinner at Henry’s, on Ninth Street, where David had recently moved with a young lover. He invited the student to come to the rehearsal at the Met that evening. When they left the opera at the end of the performance, the city was plunged in darkness: there was a blackout. The subway was closed, there weren’t any buses, it was impossible to get a taxi. They had to walk from Lincoln Center to the West Village. David took out a Walkman, which impressed his new friend, because the gadget had just come on the market; he even had two sets of headphones. It was very cold, steam came out of their mouths when they breathed. The only light came from the moon and the headlights of cars as they walked down Broadway through Times Square and the Garment District, and passed the Flatiron Building; they were connected by the wires affixed in their ears, and by the music that exploded in them. The young man was handsome, he seemed sensitive and intelligent. Was a new love affair possible? Ian was twenty-two and David almost twice that. Ian lived in New York and David in Los Angeles. A generation and a continent separated them.

  The premiere of Parade was a triumph. All the critics agreed that it was his Parade, that his set and costumes had transformed the triptych into a visual enchantment. When the director invited him to collaborate on a new show, David agreed, even though Henry had pointed out that it would be impossible to achieve the same success twice in a row, and that creating sets would again divert him from painting. That was true, but this work gave him a pretext to return to New York often.

  Ian made himself available as soon as David called. They went to see exhibitions or films, and ate out in restaurants. David knew that Henry had met him in a gay bar and that the young man wasn’t bashful, but he feared ruining their budding friendship with an unwelcome move. At the end of the year he suggested that Ian come to live in Los Angeles. He could study at the Otis School of Design, the equivalent of Parsons in New York, live at David’s, and work for him. He would learn more in the studio than in classes. The idea appealed to Ian, who obtained his transfer and moved to L.A. in January 1982. It was the proof David needed. They soon shared his upstairs bedroom.

  Life still gave you gifts at the age of forty-five. You just had to maintain a sense of fun and be daring: dare to shout out in pleasure or in fear, dare to say that you liked Disneyland, dare to eat cotton candy, dare to follow your desire of the moment, dare to destroy your work, dare to try something new, to play, to do everything adults don’t allow. To stay connected with the child in you. He and Ian painted the house on Montcalm Avenue, which he had recently bought. They chose such striking colors that when you walked in you had the feeling you were entering a Matisse painting: bright red and green walls, a floor and balustrades of Prussian blue. They
emptied the pool, and David painted little wavy, dark blue lines at the bottom.

  Gregory didn’t like the new arrangement, and David had to remind him that they had an open relationship, which Gregory couldn’t deny since he had taken advantage of it. “But not at home, not under your nose!” his lover exclaimed. “It doesn’t make any difference,” David replied, somewhat dishonestly. But he was sincere when he begged Gregory to accept a situation that in no way diminished the strength of their bond. He loved him, they worked together, they were both traveling on the same path, pointing to the same future, a future that was indeed assured them by the pact they had made, basing their relationship on a more solid foundation than carnal desire. Faithfulness was a bourgeois notion. He had suffered too much with Peter, from being abandoned, from solitude. To no longer be alone, you had to keep a partner beyond desire. What they had between them—friendship, mutual respect, aesthetic affinities, work, tenderness—was more important. Gregory let himself be convinced, but as night approached and he became morose, to improve his mood he often resorted to drinking, smoking pot, or doing stronger drugs.

  Right after Ian arrived, a curator at the Centre Beaubourg in Paris came to ask David to participate in an exhibition on photography and art. Once there the curator bought a large quantity of Polaroid film to photograph the photos whose negatives David couldn’t find. When he went away, he left behind a large number of those expensive cartridges. The next day, David gave in to the impulse to use them. He photographed details in different rooms of the house from various angles.

  While he was gluing together the photos for My House Montcalm Avenue Los Angeles Friday, February 26th 1982, he felt a sort of tingling in his veins. He recognized the sensation: he had had the same feeling when he had introduced letters and numbers into his paintings at the Royal College or, more recently, when he had created his paper pools in New York. There was nothing more important than that sensation of pleasure in work, which absorbed him the way a game absorbs a child. He had to follow it, without yet knowing where it would lead him. His grouping of thirty Polaroid photos allowed the viewer to move around from room to room, through space and time, unlike a single photo, which would have fixed only one moment. So it wasn’t really photography, strictly speaking, rather “photographic painting.” Ten years earlier, he had been shocked by an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London called ‘From today painting is dead’: The Beginnings of Photography. He was taking his revenge by using the photographic medium against itself. He was subverting its use by reinjecting time spans and movement into it.