Life of David Hockney

by Catherine Cusset

  He spent two months observing. Freud’s manner of painting, so different from his own, so slow, apparently as disorganized as his studio, was actually meticulous and profound. He also observed Holland Park, which he walked through twice a day between Pembroke Gardens and Freud’s house on Kensington Church Street. From the end of March to the end of April he witnessed the birth of spring, which he had forgotten after several decades in California.

  He went into the park by Ilchester Place and came out at Duchess of Bedford Walk. Every day he took the same route, and every day what he saw was different. He had never noticed so many varieties of trees, bushes, leaves, and flowers. Colors were perhaps brighter in California, but flatter, too. In England, the fog created a whole gamut of greens and infinitely diversified the palette. Some trees were already covered with white or pale pink flowers, like the cherry trees, the apple trees, and the magnolias. Others were hardly budding, and the myriad little leaves unfolding day by day formed a delicate lacy veil. In others, like the chestnut trees, the maples, and the beeches, an abundance of light green leaves weighed the branches down to the ground; finally, some, like the ash or the weeping willow with intertwined branches, took their time, like Lucian Freud, not in a hurry to leave winter. The lilacs, rosebushes, thyme bushes, sage, and bays scented the air.

  David hadn’t been expecting to enjoy himself so much when he was still recovering from 9/11, from the death of a friend, from the violence and the horror of the world. By eight in the morning, no matter the weather, the park was swelling with life. Schoolchildren in their uniforms ran and played with multicolored balls, dogs leapt freely, buds opened and trees became green, as living as the children and the dogs whose shouts and barking he didn’t hear. One probably had to be deaf, and perceive one’s surroundings only by seeing, to capture each detail with such acuity. He had never been so relaxed. How could a humble English park make him feel an exaltation greater than he had felt seeing the Grand Canyon or the desert? He was almost disappointed when Freud told him that the portrait was finished. An excellent portrait, by the way.

  Was it that state of beatitude that led him to watercolors, that specialty of Sunday painters that he had always carefully avoided?

  He was becoming senile.

  It happened at the beginning of May, in New York, where spring arrived later. While he was looking out the window of his hotel room at the budding trees, becoming greener every day, he suddenly wanted to paint them—in watercolors. Back in London, his desire to use watercolors continued, starting with the view from his garden in Pembroke Studios, then, naturally, with Holland Park. It took him six months to master the technique. Watercolors forced him to work quickly and to anticipate the next five moves, as in playing chess, because you can’t change anything. More than three layers and the colors lose their brightness. It was like painting and drawing at the same time. From landscapes he moved on to portraits. He did a series of thirty large double portraits, quickly, almost one a day, having his models pose in the same office chair, against the same light-green background. When the paintings were exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, the critics found them unequal, clumsy, and caricatural. But he felt that by forcing him to paint quickly, by allowing an uninterrupted flow to come from his hand, watercolor had freed something in him. A process had been set in motion that was leading him somewhere, even if he didn’t yet know where, as happened twenty years earlier when he had begun the photomontages. He just had to open himself up to it. For that, he had to return to Los Angeles, his place of work and inspiration for decades. In February 2003 he flew to California with John and pursued the watercolors in the studio on Montcalm Avenue. He was waiting.

  He hadn’t taken fate into account. In May, John went to London for a week to take care of some business; when he returned he was stopped at customs, questioned, held, then sent back to England. In the past, he had stretched the expiration date of his visa by a day or two; after 9/11 the immigration laws had become much stricter. David thought the ridiculous incident would only result in lost time and money. He called lawyers, collector friends who had contacts in the Bush administration, people in high places in his own country. He was one of the best-known living English painters, but the American bureaucrats didn’t make any exceptions. Even if it was proven that John didn’t represent a terrorist threat of any kind, he would not be allowed to return to the United States—to his home. David suddenly became aware of a reality that he hadn’t experienced before: that of all the immigrants who were arrested daily and deported by force even though they had American children, a house, work. If they expelled his lover, they were expelling him too, because he couldn’t live without John.

  It was the country he had chosen. The country of freedom. Where was the California of his youth? After the Patriot Act, the Clean Indoor Air Act, which prohibited smoking in public places, had been enacted, reducing individual freedom a bit more. For your own good, said those health terrorists who had replaced tobacco with antidepressants and who held their noses as soon as they saw a cigarette, even extinguished, in the hand of a disgraceful old man. Picasso smoked and he died at ninety-one; Matisse smoked and he died at eighty-four; Monet smoked and he died at eighty-six; David’s father, a militant antismoker, died at seventy-five. So…

  He went back to England.

  Because of the Patriot Act he had to leave the place that had been his source of inspiration for more than three decades. He couldn’t even live where he wanted to. A painter, in this world, was nothing—just a rudderless ship tossed by the waves.

  He settled for the summer in Yorkshire, in Bridlington, in the brick house near the beach that he had bought for his mother, to be close to his sister, Margaret, whose partner was very ill. After the man died, David stayed to keep Margaret company. Every day the brother and sister took long drives through the countryside and David felt particularly attracted to the Wolds, the low, undulating chalk hills of Yorkshire that he had known as a child. They ran into very few people, just a few farmers, no tourists, and Bridlington was far enough from London so that no one came to bother him. John, even more loving since David had left the States for him, joined him, as did the young French accordionist whom David had hired as an assistant on the recommendation of Ann and her husband. Jean-Pierre, whom they called JP, was no doubt the only Parisian in Bridlington. He served as David’s chauffeur, driving him through the countryside in his car, stopping here and there so he could do a few sketches in a Japanese notebook that opened like an accordion. He grew to like even more that valley-filled landscape unsullied by any electric pole or billboard, and which they often drove through without seeing another car. In an hour and a half, he could fill an entire notebook with sketches of blades of grass. In drawing grass, he learned to see it—which he would never have been able to do taking photos—because when you draw it takes time to look and thus you become aware of space. Unlike the Yorkshire landscapes painted for Jonathan, his watercolors didn’t represent the panoramic views or travels through the countryside, but cultivated fields along the road and the changing colors of the seasons.

  Passing through Los Angeles in the spring of 2005, he suddenly wanted to paint oil portraits. After years with watercolors, this technique seemed so rich and so easy! Why deprive himself of it? Back in Bridlington, he started painting landscapes again, but with oils. There was no mistaking the energy and the joy that drove him. Since his strolls through Holland Park in April 2002, since he had been touched by grace—because that was exactly what it was: religious, spiritual grace—his subject was becoming clearer and clearer. He was burning, as is said in that game when a blindfolded child is getting closer to the goal. From farm fields he moved on to trees. A road bordered by trees, whose branches came together forming a natural arch, especially pleased him, and he painted it in each season, recording each variation of light and color. Nothing was as beautiful as the seasons. They were the very essence of change. Life.

  He painte
d outside, from nature, like the painters of the Barbizon School in nineteenth-century France. In the winter, JP and he had to wear several layers of thick clothing that made them look like Michelin Men. In the summer, the light was most beautiful from six to nine in the morning, so they got up early. When it started to rain, JP opened a large umbrella, and the painting sometimes had traces of raindrops. David bought a Toyota pickup truck, a model used by soldiers in Afghanistan, which enabled them to take any path in any weather; they fitted it with wide shelves in the back so they could slide in the canvases when they weren’t dry. He liked solving these concrete problems; they reminded him of activities at the scout camps of his youth. But above all, the more he painted the better he could see. And the better he could see, with more precision and intensity, the more he wanted to paint.

  He had often noticed that moving from one continent to another entailed a change of perspective and brought new ideas. In Los Angeles, where he had gone for a retrospective of his portraits at LACMA in July 2006, he stuck reproductions of his landscapes up on the large wall of his studio. Each painting was made up of six juxtaposed canvases, and he put nine of them side by side. When he looked at them from a distance, he noticed that they seemed to form a single huge painting made of fifty-four canvases, and he wondered whether such a painting could be done. A painting that would measure more than twelve feet by forty feet. Gigantic, it would be almost twice as big as his biggest work, A Bigger Grand Canyon. The human eye couldn’t handle such a voluminous work—but the computer, yes. His sister, who had a knack for computers, a year earlier had shown him how to scan his watercolors and email them to his friends in London and Los Angeles. The scanner was the solution to the problem. David could do a drawing by hand, divide it into rectangles of equal size, and scan it, creating a puzzle on the screen. He could then paint the parts one by one, without having to climb up on a ladder, all the while visualizing the whole.

  He was euphoric when he returned to Bridlington. First, he had to find the right scene to paint. He looked for it while driving slowly with JP through the countryside. On the outskirts of a village called Warter, he saw a thicket of smaller trees around a very old, very big sycamore, as august as a patriarch. The branches of all those trees divided into a thousand smaller branches that were intertwined delicately, apparently not touching each other, all rising up to the sky. Those complex lines that resembled blood vessels or the convolutions of the brain went off in all directions, not following any rules of perspective.

  He had found it. He was quite simply going to paint a tree. The painting would be almost as large as the tree in nature. The tree would be the heart of the painting—not the road, as in his canvases depicting his journeys. The tree was the hero. It humbly served humankind by releasing oxygen, by heating with its wood, and by providing shade. It incarnated the cycle of life by being covered in turn with buds, leaves, flowers, fruit, snow. No tree was like another. From observing them, David felt close to trees, as if they were his friends. Their twisted branches and knotty trunks reminded him of the arthritic hands of his mother, who, at the end of her life, could no longer even turn on a light. The trees were like his mother: patient, serene, rooted, devoted. They had a discreet, mysterious, and majestic presence.

  He called the head curator of contemporary art at the Royal Academy and asked her to reserve the large wall at the back of Gallery III for him for the summer exhibition. Most of the hundred or so academicians hoped to hang their works there. The curator would have to persuade the exhibition committee and the Royal Academy’s board. He had to convince her.

  “I am going to create the largest plein air picture ever painted, Edith, and the largest painting ever shown in the 239 years of summer exhibitions at the Royal Academy.”

  His exaltation didn’t come from the records he was going to break, but from the awareness that he was out to tackle his great work, finally. The painting would be mighty not only in size but also in what it portrayed. It would be the greatest painting of his whole career, the one up to which everything he’d ever done had been leading.

  He had to hurry because there were only a few weeks left of winter, and in winter there were only six hours of light each day. He wanted to paint his tree in that season—when the branches, naked of the leaves that weighed on them and dragged them to the ground where we all end up, were alive. They rose up to the sky, light and free, and seemed to converse with it. Nothing was more elegant and more dignified than a tree in winter.

  David wanted gallery visitors, when they walked into the room, to have a feeling of religious veneration, as in a cathedral. The painting should encompass the viewer, so that he would intuitively feel empathy with the work. That’s why it needed to be so big. Its size would remind viewers of their smallness before immensity. He wanted to reproduce space, much more mysterious than the surface that a photo would show.

  There was so much work that he had to have his former assistant come from Los Angeles to help. On-site he also hired an eighteen-year-old whom John had met at a barbecue and who sometimes walked their dogs to make a little pocket money. Then he rented a huge storage space in the industrial outskirts of Bridlington, where he could view his painting in its entirety.

  Life was a puzzle in which, contrary to what he might have believed, nothing was left to chance. He was just beginning to understand how the pieces fit together. In the great book of nature, it was written that he would return to the land of his ancestors and of his childhood after decades in California in order to paint a tree that would be his great work. A series of circumstances as rigorous as a mathematical axiom had led him there: the new, very strict laws of American security that had forced John to return to England; his love for John, which had brought about his own return; his deafness, which enhanced his vision; the death of his mother; his sister’s gift for computers; the detour through watercolors that had brought him closer to nature; the months he had spent posing for Lucian Freud while observing his slowness and precise eye; his daily crossing of Holland Park, whose spring transformation had enchanted him.

  The painting that was exhibited at the Royal Academy was as impressive as he had hoped it would be, and the museum curator offered him the whole space of the museum for a large exhibition of his landscapes for 2012, the year of the Olympic Games in London. He had five years to prepare for it.

  There was so much to see, so many variations in shapes and colors to record, that he hardly knew where to begin. Drops of rain falling in a puddle were enough to fascinate him. In the spring, the blooming of the hawthorns overwhelmed him. It lasted only two weeks, during which he could scarcely sleep: how could he miss even a moment of such a masterpiece? The most beautiful light was between five and six in the morning, so he left before sunrise. David and JP got up at five o’clock, like Monet at Giverny. From one day to the next, the bright green was magically transformed into white, and the white gradually covered the green entirely, a white made up of thousands of delicate flowers with the delicious scent of honey. There was an explosion of petals of such a creamy white that they brought to mind cream éclairs, and that’s how he painted them, like a voluptuous thing that could be eaten—nature was transformed into a huge feast offered up to all the senses. In Japan, thousands of people drove to see the cherry trees in bloom; for the blooming of the hawthorns in Yorkshire he and JP were the only spectators. He spent two weeks painting nonstop and had to stay in bed afterward, because he had fallen ill, had contracted a high fever, without even realizing it. The following spring, he went even further: the hawthorn bushes assumed a fantastical and almost anthropomorphic shape, leaning over the road as if they were going to devour the passerby.

  He was seventy years old, soon seventy-one, and felt more alive than ever. “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite,” wrote the poet William Blake. Old age was the cleansing of perception, the time when you wanted to snatch beauty from oblivion, a beauty
you never saw better than when sexual desire and social ambition had faded. The Chinese said that painting was the art of old men, because their experience—of painting, of observation, of life—has accumulated throughout their lives and surges up in their works. David had finally discovered the infinity of the universe: not in the desert, not in the panoramic view from the north side of the Grand Canyon, or from on top of Garrowby Hill, but in the naked branches of trees, in a blade of grass, in the flowering of hawthorns. He no longer sought to dominate nature with his gaze; he had learned to look at it from below, humbly, and to blend into it by leaving his ego aside, as if to be swallowed by the hawthorn bushes. For the first time, it wasn’t his work that enabled him to forget himself, but a contemplation of nature.

  A painting in the Frick Collection in New York by Claude Lorrain, The Sermon on the Mount, with dark shading because it had been damaged in a fire, had caught David’s attention. In it Jesus, on top of a little hill surrounded by his disciples, is talking to the shepherds below in the field, and the point of view is not from Jesus but from the shepherd and his wife in the foreground, who are contemplating the mountain in the middle of the canvas, the tiny Christ, and the huge sky, from below. The work accomplished that extraordinary feat: it attracted the gaze to the top and suspended the subject in the sky. David recognized his own new focal point. A high-resolution digital image of the painting the curator of the Frick gave him allowed him to restore it virtually and to retrieve its original colors, and he painted ten versions of it in a row, with increasingly bright, almost psychedelic colors. Once again, he had seized an ancient subject, renewed it, made it explode with color and life. Who painted religious scenes anymore?