Copyright © 2011 by Christopher Simon Sykes
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Toronto.
www.nanatalese.com
Originally published in Great Britain as Hockney: The Biography by Century, an imprint of the Random House Group Ltd, London, in 2011. Published by arrangement with the Random House Group Ltd.
DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Cover design by John Fontana
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sykes, Christopher Simon, 1948–
[Hockney]
David Hockney : the biography / Christopher Simon Sykes.—1st United States ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: Hockney: the biography. London : Century, the Random House Group, 2011
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Hockney, David. 2. Artists—Great Britain—Biography. I. Hockney, David. II. Title.
N6797.H57S95 2012
740.92—dc23
[B]
2011041629
eISBN: 978-0-385-53145-0
v3.1
For my family—Isabella, Lily, Ditta and Joby.
And in memory of Christopher IV.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
INTRODUCTION
1: MY PARENTS
2: SELF-PORTRAIT
3: DOLL BOY
4: “WE TWO BOYS TOGETHER CLINGING”
5: MAN IN A MUSEUM
6: A HOLLYWOOD COLLECTION
7: IN THE DULL VILLAGE
8: A BIGGER SPLASH
9: PETER 1969
10: MR. AND MRS. CLARK AND PERCY
11: PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST
12: CONTRE-JOUR IN THE FRENCH STYLE
13: THE RAKE’S PROGRESS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
A Note About the Author
Color Illustrations
Endpapers
Other Books by This Author
INTRODUCTION
I first met David Hockney when I was seventeen, up in London for a day from school and hanging out at the Kasmin Gallery, whose owners, John Kasmin and Sheridan Dufferin, were friends of my mother. As a rather innocent and conventional Etonian, I was intrigued by Hockney’s bleached-blond hair, his brightly coloured clothes and the fact that he was so obviously homosexual. His Yorkshire accent reminded me of home, for I had been brought up on the East Yorkshire Wolds, though my southern schooling meant there was not a trace of dialect in my own voice. I was immediately fascinated by his paintings, with their childish figures, and the words and numbers scrawled on them. I tried to persuade my mother to buy one for me, but she had no intention of spending over £200 on what she considered a foolish whim, though she did fork out a fiver for a small etching of a man’s head perched precariously on two enormous legs. It was the first work of art I ever owned.
Man, 1964 (illustration credit itr.1)
Over the next few years, though I did not get to know Hockney himself any better than as an occasional acquaintance, encountered at parties and openings, I did get to know and love his work, and was thrilled when three friends, Bobby Corbett, Rory McEwen and Henry Herbert, all bought paintings by him, respectively Two Men in a Shower, The Room, Tarzana and Great Pyramid at Giza with Broken Head, which from time to time I could look at enviously. Then Hockney disappeared to California, and I followed his career through exhibitions and TV programmes, the likelihood of my ever owning another of his pictures receding into the distance as the prices of his work soared. I remained a fan and loved the fact that though the extraordinary images he continued to produce, of swimming pools and Hollywood and the Grand Canyon, seemed to redefine him as a Californian, he remained first and foremost a Yorkshireman. “I’ve got Bradford,” he told his old friend R. B. Kitaj; “they’ll never take that from me.”
Then one August afternoon in 2005, I was at home in Yorkshire when the telephone rang and it was my friend, the artist Lindy Dufferin, saying that she was at the bottom of the drive with David Hockney and could she bring him up for tea. It turned out that he had moved back to England and was living and painting in Bridlington, only half an hour’s drive away. He had quite fallen in love with the landscape of the Wolds, where he used to take summer holiday jobs as a farmhand when he was a pupil at Bradford Grammar School. For my wife and me, this was the beginning of a new friendship, and we have since spent many happy hours in his company, always marvelling at his ability to refresh one with his enthusiasm. I have never known anyone so engaged in his work and in the exploration of all the possibilities it throws out. Recently his childlike excitement at discovering what he can achieve firstly on his iPhone and latterly on his iPad has been a wonder to behold. “Turner would definitely have used one of these if they’d been around then,” he says breathlessly. When I asked him how come it took a 73-year-old to be the first artist to have a major show using this device, he said, “That’s because none of the young ones can draw anymore.”
CHAPTER ONE
MY PARENTS
The life of David Hockney almost ended when it had barely begun. Sometime in the small hours of 31 August 1940, a German bomber on a raid over Bradford in West Yorkshire released a stick of bombs, one of which fell on Steadman Terrace, a steeply inclined street on its northern outskirts. In number 61, the second house from the top, the seven members of the Hockney family and their neighbour, Miss Dobson, were huddled in a tiny space beneath the stairs, barely seven foot long. As the bomb came down, filling their ears with its high-pitched whistle and electrifying them with fear, three-year-old David’s older brother Philip clambered over his siblings, threw his arms round their mother and cried out, “Mum, say a prayer for us.” Laura Hockney clutched at a small “promise box” containing verses from the Bible before being hurled forward by the force of the bomb as it exploded, letting out a piercing scream that her children were never to forget. A timber merchant at the bottom of the street had taken a direct hit which all but destroyed it and left the road littered with wood. Every house in the street had its windows broken or the roof damaged. Yet miraculously number 61 was untouched. Forever after Laura was convinced it was the promise box that had protected them.
Kenneth and Laura Hockney’s wedding, 1929 (illustration credit 1.1)
The city in which the family huddled that night, and in which David Hockney had been born three years earlier, on 9 July 1937, was the thriving centre of England’s wool trade, with a population of close to 300,000. Commonly thought of as a Pennine town, like its neighbours Halifax, Wakefield, Dewsbury, Shipley and Huddersfield, Bradford can in fact be considered as part of the Yorkshire Dales, lying as it does in the valley of the Bradford Beck, known locally as Bradforddale. Before the advent of steam, it was a market town with a population who raised sheep, sold home-grown fleeces and made cloth on handlooms. Then came the Industrial Revolution and, benefiting from the water power provided by the many streams rushing down the steep surrounding hillsides, the small town began to grow. As the hills became covered with woollen mills rather than sheep, there was a shortage of local wool, and Bradford looked to the empire for its raw material, importing from South America, India, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. It was not long before it became one of the world’s central markets for wool and wool products.
The city was immortalised in the popular imagination of the day as “Brud
dersford” in J. B. Priestley’s best-selling novels The Good Companions and Bright Day. “Lost in its smoky valley among the Pennine hills, bristling with tall mill chimneys, with its face of blackened stone,” wrote Priestley, “Bruddersford is generally held to be an ugly city; and so I suppose it is; but it always seemed to me to have the kind of ugliness that could not only be tolerated but often enjoyed.”1 Travellers on the London Midland railway, perhaps following in Priestley’s footsteps, would have spilled out of the Exchange Station to find themselves in the heart of the city, in an area dominated by public buildings such as St. George’s Hall, where Dickens gave his first reading of Bleak House; the Wool Exchange, a great Gothic-revival building with a tall clock tower which was the centre of all the wool-trading; and, most striking of all, the Venetian Gothic town hall, with its 200-foot-high tower inspired by the campanile of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Whether they would have seen the top of the tower is a moot point, however, for the two hundred or so chimneys of the woollen mills were belching out fumes all day, which sank slowly into the basin in which the city lies, and made Bradford then one of the smokiest cities on earth. “When you come down into the centre of Bradford,” wrote a local author, Lettice Cooper, in 1950, “dipping into that cauldron of smoke, your first impression is that everything is black, everything is solid, every doorway bears some legend connected with wool—‘Wool Merchants,’ ‘Wool Staplers,’ ‘Tops and Noils,’ ‘Textile Machinery,’ ‘Dyers and Spinners Association.’ ”2
Bradford Town Hall (illustration credit 1.2)
Though there was some wool in the blood of David Hockney’s parents, their forebears were engaged in a variety of different professions, beginning with that of agricultural labourer. Robert Hockney, his paternal great-grandfather, was born in Lincolnshire in 1841, one of the twelve children of a farm worker, and his first job was as a carter on an isolated farm at Ottringham in East Yorkshire. By 1881, the agricultural depression had driven him, his wife, Harriet, and their two sons to Hull, where he got himself a job as a “rullyman,” driving a horse and wagon delivering goods to and from the docks. It was a profession he remained in until his death in 1914.
Seeking to better himself, his younger son, James William, David’s grandfather, worked as an insurance agent in Hull, which suggests that he must have been clever as well as ambitious. He also appears to have had little regard for the conventions of the time, since he lived out of wedlock with Louisa Kate Jesney, the daughter of a Lincolnshire farm labourer, for eleven years, during which time she bore him three children. They were finally married in Leeds in November 1903, Louisa being pregnant yet again, and soon after moved to Bradford where their fourth child, David’s father, Kenneth, was born on 9 May 1904.
Everyone who knew Kenneth Hockney had the same thing to say about him, which was that had he had the benefit of further education there was no knowing how far he might have gone. As it was, he was born at a time when the ethos of his class demanded he should get through school and out to work as quickly as possible, and in this the Hockneys were no different from the other families in the neighbouring terraced houses of St. Margaret’s Road. Like his sisters, he left school at fourteen, taking up a job as a telegram boy; it was 1918, and he had already suffered the trauma of seeing his beloved older brother come back from the war a broken man, having been gassed in the trenches.
Kenneth had too much of an enquiring mind to want to spend his life delivering telegrams, and as soon as he was old enough he became a clerk for a local firm, Stephenson Brothers, a company of dry-salters, trading from a large Victorian warehouse, who sold chemical products, and goods such as flax, hemp, glue and dye. His wage was three pounds a week, out of which he paid twenty-five shillings to his mother. One of his first jobs was to sit in a small cubicle at one end of the store and open the container with the money that was catapulted along a wire from one end of the store to the other. It was a mindless activity from which he was able to escape in his spare time when, rather than go drinking down the pub with his father and his brother, who had managed to get a job working in a pawnbroker’s, he pursued artistic hobbies. He took evening classes in art and developed a serious interest in photography, moving on from a box Brownie he had had since childhood to buying a serious quarter-plate camera, complete with tripod and hood, which he took everywhere. He often practised on his colleagues, taking a series of portraits of them at work at Stephenson Bros. The family had moved up in the world, to a more spacious house in St. Andrew’s Villas, Princeville, once a street for the smarter citizens of Bradford; the servants’ bells in the hallway indicated the social standing of its former owners.
Kenneth was carrying his camera when he met Laura Thompson properly for the first time, on a Methodist ramble on the moors. Methodism played an important part in Kenneth’s early life, following his conversion by Rodney “Gipsy” Smith, a celebrated evangelist, at the vast mission, Eastbrook Hall, which was at the centre of the social and religious life of hundreds of local working-class young men. After the Sunday-afternoon meetings, the “Brotherhood,” as they were known, would walk home, crowds of them in their best suits, “their faces radiant with joy, some of them humming over the strains of the last hymn they had been singing, others discussing the address they had heard,”3 a scene that was being repeated outside all of Bradford’s seventy-four Methodist halls and chapels. The Methodist hope was that the experience would have uplifted them so much that it would keep them out of the pubs and clubs that proliferated all over the city, and were the ruin of many poor families, for whom drink obliterated the reality of the appalling conditions in which they worked and lived. Kenneth, a teetotaller, was so inspired by the Brotherhood that he eventually became both a lay preacher and a Sunday school teacher.
Since one of the Brotherhood’s aims was the fostering of a spirit of community, they would organise various social events for this purpose, among the most popular of which were rambles up onto the moors above Bradford. “No Bruddersford man,” wrote Priestley, “could be exiled from the uplands and blue air; he always had one foot on the heather; he had only to pay his tuppence on the tram and then climb for half an hour, to hear the larks and curlews, to feel the old rocks warming in the sun, to see the harebells trembling in the shade.”4 One Saturday afternoon in 1928, Kenneth loaded his camera onto a tram to the Exchange Station, to catch a train up to Ilkley, his intention being to walk to Bolton Abbey, a local beauty spot, to take some photographs. It was pouring with rain when he reached his destination, and as he stood on the platform he noticed a group of four girls laughing and staring at him, two of whom, Laura Thompson and her friend Doris, he recognised from chapel. Realising that they must be on a Brotherhood ramble, he decided to follow them. “He soon caught up with us,” Laura later remembered, “and we all went together. He had this great big box camera which he carried about with him everywhere, and I can remember him putting it down in the wet and taking our photograph, right in front of Bolton Abbey. So he took our photograph and after that he just stayed with us.”5
Laura came from a similar background to Kenneth. Her grandfather, Robert Thompson, was an agricultural labourer at Scarning in Norfolk who fathered eight children and ended up living on poor relief from the parish. His son Charles, Laura’s father, escaped this life of poverty by joining the Salvation Army, and when he was in his early thirties set up as a coal merchant in Bradford. In 1894, he married a fellow Salvationist, Mary Sugden, the daughter of a family of weavers. Laura was the youngest of their four daughters, and by the time she was born, on 10 December 1900, her father was working as a “manufacturer’s carter.” He soon had his own cart and set up as a second-hand furniture dealer. Her earliest memories of home were of a house in Ripon Street. “The house had a central door,” she remembered, “and on one side of it my dad had a second-hand shop, while the other side my mother used as a sweet shop. She made her own jam and sweets and her own bread and she sold them at all hours. There were no opening and closing times, and
she did all her baking and cooking in the evenings. Dad was out a lot on his horse and cart, often going to sales out in the country where he would buy furniture. Sometimes he would take me to school on his horse and cart.”6
Naturally clever, Laura won a scholarship to secondary school. She left at sixteen, however, to take up a job as a pattern-maker at Tolson’s, a firm owned by a friend of her father’s. Her sharp mind soon got her promoted to being in charge of the pattern books, earning seven shillings and sixpence a week for an eleven-hour day, from eight thirty in the morning to seven at night. She loved the work, which gave her a wide knowledge about different kinds of cloth, but her happiness was short-lived when a bullying colleague had her pushed out of her job, and put back on to more menial tasks. This deeply undermined her confidence, and the girl’s continuing unkindness became so bad that Laura fell ill with what were then referred to as “nerves,” and she had to leave work. In effect, she had a nervous breakdown and it was a long time before she was able to think about looking for work again.
At the time she and Kenneth met, about eight years later, Laura had returned to work in a draper’s shop in Manchester Road, earning twelve shillings a week. She was happy in the job and it had given her back her confidence. Religion played as important a role in Laura’s life as it did in Kenneth’s. She read the Bible every day, as she had done since she had learned to read, was an active member of the local Methodist chapel and taught beginners’ class at Sunday school. Inspired by seeing her Salvationist parents going out among the slum-dwellers, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights when drunkenness was rife, she harboured a genuine, if secret, ambition to become a missionary. This was forgotten, however, when she met Kenneth and discovered that they had so much in common. Like her, he was an ardent Methodist, and she was impressed at how proud he was to have been converted by “Gipsy” Smith. He too taught at Sunday school, and was a lay preacher to boot. They held the same unswerving views on the perils of drinking and smoking. She decided there and then that she was going to marry him and have a family.
David Hockney Page 1
