Life of David Hockney

by Catherine Cusset

  He worked with the same frenzy that pushes someone to take drugs without being able to stop, except this was a creative frenzy, and it lasted for years without showing any signs of abating. Margaret had taught him how to use an iPhone. The Brushes app, which enabled you to draw on a screen with your thumb, gave him the same pleasure as that of a child finger painting. The iPhone offered an incomparable advantage early in the morning, when it was still too dark to draw without turning on the light, which would have destroyed the subtle nuances of tone seen in the rising sun. Each morning he sketched sunrises that he sent to his friends in London, New York, or Los Angeles. He was certain that Van Gogh would have sketched on an iPhone, if he had had one, the little drawings that dotted his letters to Theo, and that Rembrandt also would have used the technology if he had had access to it. When Steve Jobs announced the creation of the iPad a year later, David bought one immediately. The screen was four times bigger; he no longer drew with just his thumb, but with all his fingers or with a stylus. The device enabled him to immediately sketch everything that caught his eye—a glass ashtray filled with butts, a lamp and its reflection in the window, a faucet, his cap on a table, his foot next to his shoe when he got up in the morning, a bouquet of flowers. He had large pockets sewn into all his jackets so he would be able to bring his tablet everywhere, in any weather.

  With the little high-definition cameras that JP attached to the sides of the Toyota, he filmed the transformations of nature from nine different angles along the same road, and created a work composed of a hypnotic multiplicity of screens that he called The Four Seasons. He would also choose not to use technology. He continued to paint trees, and dressed a large stump that looked like a totem pole, which he was getting attached to, in purple, like a bishop. He painted in bright colors the beautiful cut-down trees, transformed into logs piled up along the road, whose orange-hued slices resembled palpitating flesh. He made a huge painting of thirty-two canvases, a stylized depiction of the arrival of spring, that season when each plant, each bud, and each flower seemed to rise up, when all of nature was erect. The American critic Clement Greenberg had said that it was no longer possible to paint a landscape. He was going to put a genre that had fallen out of fashion since Constable and Turner back on the map.

  Happiness didn’t come from success, nor from the satisfaction of having achieved it against all odds, nor from the honors—shortly before his seventy-fifth birthday, the queen honored him with the Order of Merit, which at any one time can only be bestowed on at most twenty-four living people in all of the Commonwealth, and David accepted it even though he didn’t care about medals, because he couldn’t have refused without offending the queen. Nor did happiness come from money. His paintings were now selling for insane prices, and David had become very rich. But the fortune served only to provide a certain comfort and did not deliver what was essential, which was the desire to paint. Happiness came from working, of course, and from the awareness that the infinite was in the eye of the viewer. But above all, it came from friendship.

  There was the circle of loyal friends who worked for him in Los Angeles and London—Gregory, Graves, and a few others—in whom he had absolute trust. There was the family circle: the brother and sister who still lived in Yorkshire, and with whom he had remained close over the years—Margaret, who lived near him and whom he saw almost every day, and Paul, who had retired and moved an hour away. And in Bridlington he had an intimate circle, which had finally chased away the specter of solitude. His team. A small number of close friends who shared his daily life in the brick house three minutes from the sea, who worried about him, who would never leave him.

  Every day John bought flowers that he arranged artistically in various rooms of the house, walked their dogs, and cooked exquisite meals that he served in the dining room, whose walls were painted carmine red. He took care of them all like a mother. His room was on the second floor, at the other end of the hallway from David’s. JP, who had become David’s chief assistant, was like an adult and independent son. He lived in a studio on the ground floor, and on weekends often returned to London, where he had an apartment near the St Pancras train station. He still drove David through the countryside, and David felt blessed to have found such a patient ally, whose gaze had been heightened through the years and who was now as delighted at observing a landscape as David was. Another assistant spent a few days a week with them to take care of technical and computer matters. Then there was Dominic, Dom, the child of the house—the young man from Bridlington whom John had met at a barbecue when Dom was seventeen, and who had begun to work for David when he was painting his huge Bigger Trees Near Warter. Dom was now twenty-three, had left his university in his second year to work full time for David, and contributed his youthful energy and freshness to the team. His delight when David did his portrait, or when he gave him a key to the house, a sign of the confidence he had in him, reminded David of Byron’s enthusiasm, even if physically the blond Dom with curly hair and athletic body didn’t look anything like the dark and delicate Byron.

  They were a family.

  And they were more than that. They were a community of free spirits and bodies. In a world in which the individual was increasingly controlled by the media, the Internet, and the government, David had created an island of freedom. His Bridlington house was the last refuge of a bohemian life. They could smoke, drink, create all the artificial paradises they wanted, as long as they didn’t harm anyone. By mutual agreement, John and David had ended their sexual relationship a few years earlier, when David turned seventy-one. John and Dominic had become lovers. Dom was twenty-five years younger than John; John was twenty-nine years younger than David. David could no longer drink or take hard drugs, or have an erection worthy of the name, but, far from feeling jealous, he was delighted at that transferal of desire under his roof. Tolerance was a virtue that was becoming extinct. The brick walls of the house with cantilevered windows three minutes from the sea sheltered a paradise.

  It was a freedom that was difficult to preserve as one grew older. Age encloses you in rigid habits and instills in you all sorts of fears and neuroses. David had noticed this recently when he had had dinner with Peter and his partner in New York, for the first time in years. David’s former lover was still living with the Danish fellow for whom he had left David, and the two men, ten years younger than he, no longer drank or smoked, couldn’t stand the smell of cigarettes, ate only organic, and kept an eye on their watches so they wouldn’t go to bed after 10 p.m.! You would have thought they were two old spinsters. After they said their goodbyes, David wondered how he could have been madly in love with that man.

  He had been living in Bridlington for nine years. Nine years of ceaseless creativity. He had never had such a long cycle, even in California. Monet had lived forty-three years in his modest house in Giverny, with his cook, his gardener, his pond, and his wonderful studio: forty-three springs and forty-three summers. David couldn’t imagine a better life. The office that took care of his business was in Los Angeles and opened at ten in the morning, 6 p.m. in Bridlington. He spent long, peaceful days, without any administrative concerns to disturb him. He worked without pause and felt no fatigue. One October morning, he went to get the newspaper, walking as usual along the vast beach that stretched toward the east, bordered by the white cliffs of Flamborough Head. While he was contemplating the gray expanse and the icy roiling of the North Sea, he smiled when he remembered what his sister had said: “Sometimes I think that space is God.” It was an idea that was as true as it was poetic. He, too, felt happy only when he had space around him. He suddenly stumbled, for no reason—there wasn’t a dip in the sand or a stone that had tripped him—and fell without hurting himself, then got up. After buying the newspaper, he went home and noticed that he couldn’t finish his sentences. He made the connection between that sudden incapacity and his fall on the beach. John called an ambulance, which arrived in less than ten minutes. He had had a stroke. Fo
r the second time in his life John accompanied him to the hospital, holding his hand, in the ambulance this time.

  It took David weeks, even months, to be able to talk normally again. He was aware of his luck: his right hand had been spared. That was more important than speech. It was his second attack, and it hadn’t killed him any more than the first one had. Instead of pancreatic cancer like his friends Christopher, Henry, and Jonathan, he had suffered from a simple pancreatitis, which wasn’t fatal. He had escaped the scourge of AIDS. Death was playing tricks on him, but at the end of the day those tricks merely reminding him that he was mortal. The time he had left to paint wasn’t infinite.

  After having used technology so much, he again wanted to go back to a traditional technique: charcoal. He began by drawing the stump that resembled a totem pole. Vandals had recently carved it into pieces and had covered it with graffiti. The profanation caused David a sadness that he expressed in his black-and-white drawings. Charcoal was perfect for depicting the nudity of winter, but he gave himself a challenge: to draw the arrival of spring in black and white, he who had forever loved strong, bright colors. Fatigued by his stroke and by the big landscape exhibition that had just taken place at the Royal Academy, which had been a huge popular and critical success, he went to bed at nine o’clock and got up later than before. In his car, sitting next to JP, who read or listened to music, he worked for hours, extremely concentrated. He had slowed down his rhythm, but life remained exciting at seventy-five, after two close calls with his health.

  After spending the whole day outside with JP for the second consecutive day, he had only one desire: to close his eyes and sleep. Drawing demanded intense concentration and it exhausted his eye muscles. In his bedroom he took out his hearing aids and, barely lying down, fell into a sleep from which he emerged almost ten hours later. Coming into the kitchen in the morning, he saw JP sitting at the table, his head in his hands, in a pose that wasn’t like him.

  “You’re already up, honey?”

  JP raised his head. He had a strange expression on his face.

  “David…”

  He recognized the voice in a second. A white voice, metallic. He thought of John and was afraid.

  “What happened?”

  “Dom…Dom is dead.”

  “Dom?”

  Impossible. He had seen him ten hours earlier in this very kitchen, when he had come to get a glass of water before going to bed. Dom, leaning in the open fridge door, wearing a T-shirt and underpants that showed his athletic thighs covered with fine blond hair, had started when he heard David come in, then turned around, an apple and a yogurt in his hands. Dom said he wouldn’t be there Tuesday because he had to train for a rugby match.

  David sat down. JP told him what had happened during the night. John and Dom had been on a drinking-and-drugs binge for the past two days. Dom had awakened John at four in the morning to ask him to drive him to the hospital. He was pale but didn’t seem to be in pain and had been able to get dressed by himself, so John hadn’t panicked. They left the house around five. On the way to the hospital, Dom passed out. They couldn’t revive him. JP didn’t know any more.

  “Where is John?”

  “At the hospital.”

  John returned home in a state of shock and had to be hospitalized a few days later. David and JP had seen the bottle of drain opener on the bathroom sink, empty, and had understood that Dom must have killed himself.

  David forced himself to start drawing again. Only drawing took him out of himself. Art had that power. His eye concentrated on a blade of grass, the world disappeared. In May he drew every day, every new leaf, every new bud, every new petal, in black and white. Then he left for London with JP. He couldn’t stay in Bridlington, a place haunted by memories of Dom, anymore.

  It was the first death since his friend in Los Angeles. The first in twelve years, when he thought death had finally released its fangs. It was also the most horrible. Happening under his roof while he was sleeping. A child had killed himself next to him. He had seen nothing, heard nothing. It was the end of a life. The end of their team, their family, freedom, joy. The dark, morbid, moralistic world had won. At a time when the AIDS epidemic created a hecatomb among his friends, they were all victims. They didn’t want to die. Now one of them, the youngest, had killed himself. The myopic nannies of England could rejoice. So could all the health terrorists on earth.

  David and JP left for California. The Montcalm Avenue house hadn’t changed, with its bright colors, nestled in tropical vegetation so green and so brilliant that it seemed to have been painted in acrylics. Nor had California changed; it was still just as luminous, fragrant, and sunny. There was the same vast blue sky, indifferent to tragedies. It felt good to wake up in the morning and feel the heat on his skin, go down the Prussian-blue stairs to the pool sparkling under the sun in the middle of palm trees, fuchsias, agaves, and aloes. David didn’t leave the house and saw no one. He couldn’t paint anymore.

  Sitting on the wooden terrace with the Prussian-blue balustrade, he saw Dom in front of the refrigerator and the expression of surprise on his child’s face when he turned around and noticed David at the entrance to the kitchen. He heard Dom tell him that he wouldn’t be there Tuesday because he was training for a match. He played over and over in his head the scene he hadn’t witnessed. Dom waking up in the middle of the night in John’s bed, going to the bathroom, taking the plastic bottle from under the toilet, pressing the top on each side with two fingers while pushing and turning it. That safety cap that protected children from accidentally ingesting the dangerous liquid was like an ad for mortal danger. Dom ignored it. He had brought the bottle to his lips and tilted it up. Drank, like water or whiskey, the sulfuric acid that served to unclog pipes. Dom drank his death the way Socrates drank the cup of hemlock. Hadn’t the pale yellow liquid burned his lips, his throat, and his esophagus right away? When he had gone into the bathroom was it to piss or to kill himself? Had the bottle of drain opener given him the idea, the way the void attracts someone with vertigo? Had he regretted his act in the second that followed it? Apparently, since he woke up John to take him to the hospital. That idea horrified David. There was no turning back. Even if John had called 911, they couldn’t have saved him. The acid had already done its work. Did the loss of consciousness come before the pain, as David hoped?

  Why had death been content to brush by him only to strike down a twenty-three-year-old next to him? Why had Dom been sacrificed? Questions kept spinning in his head.

  One day he saw JP sitting in a yellow chair with wooden arms, his head in his hands, in the exact position David had found him when he entered the Bridlington kitchen five months earlier. He suddenly felt like painting him. He asked him not to move, went to get his sketchbook, and got to work.

  He now wanted friends or acquaintances to come over so he could do their portraits, sitting in the same yellow chair with wooden arms, against the same blue-green background, even brighter than in the watercolors he had done ten years earlier, before his landscapes. He didn’t paint them with their heads in their hands, like JP. He painted their faces looking at him. While he worked, he managed not to think of Dom. Rather, thinking of Dom was transmuted into lines, strokes, colors. These portraits of the living didn’t cover up the dead; they were his tomb.

  He was once again engaged in life. Capable of drawing and painting the living. Able to prepare the big exhibition that was opening at the de Young Museum in San Francisco in October, and the many others that would take place in galleries in London, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Beijing…Able to say to the journalist who had come to interview him, to the filmmaker who came to film him for a documentary: “I am an optimist.” He was seventy-nine. His deafness prevented him from having a normal social life: as soon as there were more than three people in a room he couldn’t hear a thing. He no longer left his house except to go to the dentist, the doctor, the bookstore, or a mar
ijuana dispensary. He had been given a card for medical marijuana, to calm his anxiety—the anxiety of no longer having access to marijuana, he thought, smiling. In a year there would be a major retrospective at the Tate, which would then travel to Paris, to the Centre Pompidou, then to the Metropolitan Museum of New York. It would be a journey through six decades of his work. Preparation for such an event involved enormous work. The Montcalm Avenue studio was again transformed into a hive of activity. David spent his days there with his assistants, busier than ever.

  He contemplated his most recent work while smoking his legally obtained joint. Inspired by two paintings, one by Caravaggio and the other by Cézanne, the drawing done on the iPad that he had then printed out represented three men of mature age playing cards. He had placed under that image the three screens on which he had created the portraits of those men, and activated a function of the iPad that enabled him to replay at high speed the execution of the drawing from the first stroke to its completion. David, like the spectator who would soon look at that work, saw himself drawing in an accelerated mode. Each stroke was made quickly, a face appeared, the hand changed direction, erased, turned the face in another direction, changed its expression. The work hanging on the wall opposite him represented at the same time the completed drawing and the movement of creation: it was perfectly consistent with his whole work, and it was something new he had created at the age of seventy-nine. Tomorrow he would undertake another project: three men smoking. Tobacco or marijuana? There wouldn’t be any smell to betray them. A bit of propaganda wouldn’t hurt. A new idea was already taking shape: to paint an Annunciation in the style of Piero della Francesca. A Californian Annunciation with psychedelic colors, like his Sermon on the Mount after Claude Lorrain. To celebrate birth, love, the cycle of life, in an explosion of color. After the dark charcoal landscapes of England, this return to California was a return to the brightest and most audacious of colors.