David Hockney

by Christopher Simon Sykes

  The young Hockney drew from the moment he was old enough to hold a pencil. “My earliest memory of David drawing,” recalls John, “was when we used to get up in the morning and I used to come down to get my comics or the newspaper. The edge all the way around, where there was no writing, was usually covered in little drawings and cartoons. That was the only paper he could get, and this was before school every day and he’d already be drawing. I used to get annoyed because I was looking forward to getting my own comic and he had already drawn all over it.”23 If he couldn’t get hold of a scrap of paper, he would draw with chalk on the linoleum floor of the kitchen, and when his mother got fed up with the mess she put up a blackboard. The golden rule was “No drawing on the wallpaper!”

  On Saturday mornings Hockney would enter the painting and drawing competitions for children that used to appear regularly in the Daily Express, and when the family went on Sundays to their local Methodist church in Victoria Road, he would doodle away on the fly leaves of the hymn books. After chapel, there would be Sunday school, at the end of which the children were broken up into small classes and asked to do illustrations of what they had learned. Hockney used to draw cartoons of subjects such as “Jesus Walking on the Water,” much to the amusement of the rest of the class. At one point his mother arranged for him and Margaret to have piano lessons. “After the third lesson,” he remembers, “I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to have to put an awful lot of time into this,’24 so I said to my mam, ‘I’d rather put my time into drawing.’ So I gave up. My parents always encouraged me with my drawing.” They also put it to good use. When Laura drew up a washing-up rota, David illustrated it with caricatures of himself and his siblings in various moods, of which he was the eternally cheerful one.

  The children’s new school was Wellington Road Primary, and on 8 May 1945, a two-day holiday was announced to the children there—the war was officially over. Hockney rushed home to tell his mother who already knew from listening to the radio, which was kept on permanently. It struck his eight-year-old self, as he looked at the large console and the coloured map of Europe above it, on which they had followed the progress of the war, that from now onwards there would be no more boring news coming endlessly out of the radio, but just music and songs. “When the blackout was over,” he remembers, “and the lights came on again, Bradford Corporation Buses organised a bus route that took you along the hills round the edge so you could see the city lit up. Well, it was probably a pretty miserable sight, but to a small kid this was like Las Vegas.”25

  Many of Hockney’s early influences developed during this period. “He always seemed to be worldly-wise at a very young age,” Margaret remembers. “From the age of five or six, he seemed to know what to do in the world. He really enjoyed life.”26 With Eccleshill Library nearby, the house was always full of books and he read a lot, everything from Biggles to the Brontës, the local classics, to Dickens. His father took them all to museums, and to look at the collection of Victorian and Edwardian paintings in Cartwright Hall, the civic art gallery in Lister Park. On Saturday nights they would often go to the Alhambra Theatre in Morley Street, taking fish and chips up to the balcony, where they’d have cheap standing tickets at the back. Though pantomime and music hall were the usual acts, there were the occasional more upmarket evenings, on one of which Hockney saw his first performance of Puccini’s La Bohème, performed by the Carl Rosa Opera Company. “It stuck in my mind,” he recalls, “because it was about artists in Paris, and the music was better than usual and the orchestra was bigger. My father didn’t really care for it. He just said, ‘Well, some nights it’s like that …’ ”27

  First and foremost, however, Hockney loved the movies, his early experiences of them being during the war when, because of the blackout, to get to the cinema they had to feel their way down the street by running their hands along the wall. It was a passion he inherited from his father. “I used to say, ‘Can we go to the pictures?’ ” he remembers, “and my dad used to say, ‘You’ll have to ask your mother.’ And we knew that was fatal, because she ran everything and she didn’t like the pictures. She was very much in charge, and if she said no that meant no. I suppose she was worried about the expense.”28 For that reason, on the occasions when Laura relented, they never went in the main entrance of the cinema, but in the side entrance for the cheap seats at the front. And there were ways to get in free. Kids would often manage to push open the exit doors to let in their friends waiting outside, while Hockney remembers learning “that if you walk in backwards, people think you’re coming out.”29

  “Untitled” (date unknown) (illustration credit 1.4)

  In the 1940s Bradford had more than forty cinemas, or “picture houses.” The Arcadian and the Empress, the Odeon and the Coliseum, and the New Victoria, which stood next to the Alhambra and had the third largest auditorium in the country, showed first-run films. Then there were the “fleapits” like the Oxford, the Elysian and the Idle, which had a sheet for a screen, and films that were likely to be very scratched and have poor sound. Because by the mid-1940s he was beginning to go deaf, Kenneth sought out cinemas with the state-of-the-art Western Electric Sound System, which gave a sharper sound. The films they showed were invariably American. “I was brought up,” says David, “in Bradford and Hollywood, because Hollywood was the cinema. American films were technically superior, because they had good lighting and good sound.”30

  Saturday mornings meant Kids’ Club at the Greengates Cinema on New Line, where David and John watched serials such as Superman, Flash Gordon and Hopalong Cassidy. “There was excitement on that screen,” Hockney later wrote. “The screen, as if by magic, was opening up the wall to you. It showed you another world, even in the dingiest little cinema in suburban Bradford.”31 He also shared his father’s love of what Kenneth referred to as “comical” films, starring Charlie Chaplin or Laurel and Hardy. “He used to laugh so hard,” Hockney remembers, “that it loosened his false teeth.”32

  Though Bradford is an industrial city, it is small, and to the north and the west there is beautiful countryside that can be reached very quickly. From an early age, the young David was an avid hiker and cyclist. A tuppenny bus ride would take him to Saltaire where the great mill built by Sir Titus Salt belched out smoke, and from there it was a short walk to Shipley Glen, with its funfair, or a three- to four-hour hike to Ilkley, fifteen miles away and advertised for its “bracing air.” With Kenneth’s help, David and John built themselves a tandem from second-hand parts and they would cycle all over. York was a favourite destination because, once they’d got through the hilly country around Leeds, the journey was all on the flat. They’d set off at eight in the morning and it would take them four hours. Once there, they would climb the tower of the Minster, walk the city walls or visit the railway museum before returning home. Sometimes they went to Leeds where there was a much bigger art gallery that had French paintings, and there were stores such as Woolworths which had modern cafeterias. “Some of the trams in Leeds,” Hockney remembers, “had New York Road written on the front, meaning the new road to York, but I used to think, ‘New York! You’d never see that written in Bradford.’ ”33

  Very occasionally Kenneth took the whole family on a summer holiday, but while most people went to Morecambe or Blackpool, for which the Hockney children yearned, they went to Withernsea. There were two reasons for this. First of all it was close to Hull, where they could stay with their Great-Aunt Nell, their father’s aunt, an eccentric woman who adopted an exaggerated “posh” accent. Second, it was cheap, a short bus ride from Hull and there was nothing to spend their money on when they got there. “All Dad had to do was give us a few pennies, because there was just one tiny little arcade. I mean, compared to Withernsea, Bridlington was like Monte Carlo, which is why we weren’t allowed to go there.”34

  When he was at home, he was encouraged to study at all times. So far as his parents were concerned, it was Bradford Grammar or nothing, and his school reports show what
achievements he made. In February 1946, when he was fourth in his class of thirty-six, his headmaster, Irvine R. Bakes, wrote: “David has shown great interest in his work. He tries at all times.”35 The next term he had reached top place with an overall score for all his subjects of 274 out of a possible 280. “David has done excellent work this year,” wrote Mr. Bakes. “I could do with more like him.”36 This was in spite of the fact that he had had to scold David in front of the whole class for sketching the teacher during the problem exam, something he had been caught doing on several other occasions when he was bored in class. Drawing in class did not stop him soaring ahead, however, and the following year, at the end of the summer term, his work was judged “Excellent throughout the term. All subjects reach a high standard. Outstanding in art.”37 Parents of children at Wellington Road were encouraged to sign off the reports, with a view to encouraging their children in their work at school. “I am very pleased with his progress,”38 wrote Laura Hockney.

  This was a time when the education system in Britain was being revolutionised. Hockney and his generation were the first beneficiaries of the 1944 Butler Act, a landmark in English education which greatly expanded access to secondary education by making it free for all pupils. “The throwing open of secondary education to all,” wrote Harold Dent, the editor of the Times Educational Supplement, “[would] result in a prodigious freeing of creative ability, and ensure to an extent yet incalculable that every child shall be prepared for the life he is best fitted to lead and the service he is best fitted to give.”39 Pupils were assessed in a new exam, the eleven-plus, intended to allocate them to schools best suited to their abilities and aptitudes.

  All Hockney’s hard work paid off when, in the spring of 1947, like his brother Paul before him, he won a scholarship to Bradford Grammar School, one of the oldest academic institutions in the country, founded in 1548 and granted its charter by Charles II in 1662. For parents like his, with their great ambition for their children, this was manna from heaven. Such schools were known for their high academic standards, emulating the curriculum, ethos and ambitions of the major public schools, and retaining a classical core of Latin and Greek alongside modern subjects. Discipline was rigorous, however, and the naturally rebellious Hockney was not particularly keen on going there. “David very difficult,” Laura wrote in her diary on 7 September 1948. “Does not want to go to Grammar School.”40 He had no choice.

  While David’s first term at Bradford Grammar was spent in the old premises near the parish church on Stott Hill, the following term the whole school was moved to a brand-new building in Keighley Road, Frizinghall, opened on 12 January by the Duke of Edinburgh. Hockney’s class were asked to write an essay on the subject of the opening but, because he had been seated far to the right of the stage, and had to crane his neck to see what was going on, instead of handing in an essay on how splendid the whole occasion was, he wrote about his cricked neck. This was typical of the subversiveness that increasingly epitomised his character, along with a quick wit and an ability to answer back. There were times when he just couldn’t resist going too far. “There was a place in the school called the Long Corridor,” he remembers, “and one afternoon I was walking along the corridor and there was this prefect coming towards me. When he passed me, he didn’t say anything, so I turned round to him and said, ‘Less of your cheek!’ He came straight back to me and I got detention, but I thought, ‘It’s worth it.’ ”41

  As a scholarship boy, Hockney was expected to work hard and to do well, which would not have been a problem had he been able to study art. But he soon discovered that in the top form, art was only on the syllabus during the first year, and only for one double period of one and a half hours a week. After that there was no more art until the sixth form, when art appreciation was taught. On the other hand, boys who found themselves in the bottom form doing a general course were allowed to study art. “They thought art was not a serious study,” he recalls, “and I just thought, ‘Well, they’re wrong.’ ”42 Taking a conscious decision to do less work, he spent mathematics classes drawing the cacti on the classroom windowsill, doodled endlessly on all his notebooks, and, during a science exam, left the paper blank save for a line of writing which read “am no good at science, but I can draw,” under which was a sketch of the invigilator.43 In his class, Form 3D, which had thirty pupils, he came thirtieth. This infuriated the headmaster, Mr. Graham, who demanded to know why a scholarship boy like him was so lazy, while his form mistress, Margaret Baker, wrote in her report: “He should realise that ability in and enthusiasm for art alone is not enough to make a career for him.”44

  As a result of his tactical idleness Hockney achieved his wish to be relegated to the non-academic level of the bottom division, where he was able to continue in the art class. Here he thrived under the genial art teacher, Reggie Maddox, who encouraged him to get involved in creating posters for the various school societies—particularly enjoyable was dreaming up pictures according to the themes of the Debating Society’s debate. These ended up on the school noticeboard, where everybody saw them, and which Hockney began to regard as his own personal exhibition space. It was, he later wrote, “the first time I had the opportunity to carry out my fantasy about being an artist.”45 That people liked them so much was borne out by the fact that they were invariably stolen.

  Hockney was also greatly inspired by his English teacher, Kenneth Grose, who recognised that, in spite of his inability to work hard at anything except drawing, he was full of curiosity. He encouraged him to pursue his love of reading, and made no attempt to stifle his artistic ability. “I remember once when I was supposed to have done some essay for my homework,” Hockney recalls, “and I hadn’t done the essay—instead I’d spent all my time doing a collage self-portrait for the art class—and he said to me in front of the whole class, ‘Hockney, can you read your essay?’ So I said to him, ‘Well, I didn’t do the essay, but I did this,’ and showed him the collage. He said, ‘That’s very good,’ and I was quite knocked over. He was a stimulant and he encouraged me in my ambitions to be an artist.”46

  Grose also edited the school magazine, the Bradfordian, and often got Hockney to illustrate articles, usually with drawings done on scraperboard, since they required a high degree of contrast and the school block-makers weren’t very sophisticated. A typical cartoon ridiculed compulsory sports, one of the features of school life that Hockney most hated, showing first a caricature of him standing with a crutch, one foot bandaged up, holding a notice reading “Complaint about compulsory running,” and second one of him being pushed in a wheelchair by an able-bodied runner.

  It was becoming clear that art really was the only subject at which Hockney excelled. When he discovered that Bradford School of Art had a junior school attached to it, which took students from the age of fourteen, he pleaded and pleaded with the headmaster to let him go there, until Mr. Graham, seeing that he was never going to give up, finally caved in and wrote to his father: “David’s Form Master and those who teach him have been considering his future, and they think it worth while my writing to you to suggest that as his ability and keenness appear to be on the artistic side he might suitably transfer, before long, to a School of Art, and there prepare himself for a career in some branch of drawing or painting.”47 Kenneth and Laura gave him their full support. But they were reckoning without the forces of traditional education in Bradford.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SELF-PORTRAIT

  On 25 March 1950, at Eccleshill Methodist Chapel’s anniversary concert, the young David Hockney gave a public demonstration of his skills, sitting on the stage and doing lightning sketches of the performers and of various members of the congregation. Hockney was happy, confident both in the knowledge of his headmaster’s recommendation that he should be allowed to transfer to Bradford School of Art, and in his parents’ support. But his wish to leave grammar school early would turn out to be a pipe dream. “May I suggest that in ‘Reasons for Application,’ ” Mr. Graha
m had written to Kenneth four days earlier, “that you wish the boy to be withdrawn from the school only if he is admitted to the School of Art.”1 On 5 April after Kenneth had submitted the application, and both he and Laura had gone before the Education Committee at the town hall, the Director of Education himself, Mr. Spalding, wrote back: “After careful consideration the Committee believed that your son’s best interests would be served by completion of his course of general education before specialising in Art. They, therefore, were not prepared to grant your request.”2

  The twelve-year-old Hockney’s disappointment at this blow was deep and bitter. It is something he has never forgotten. He would have liked to go even earlier. “I would have gone to art school at the age of eight,” he says. “You learn a lot when you’re eight. I mean, how old were Rembrandt and Michelangelo when they started art? I don’t think they were much older than twelve.”3 His anger sent his schoolwork into a downward spiral, and he lingered at the bottom of the class. He did virtually no homework, spending most of his time drawing posters for the school societies. “Doing the posters at home,” he later wrote, “did save me from trouble … my mother would say to me, ‘What about your homework? Are you doing it?’ and I’d say, ‘Yes,’ when really I’d be doing a poster. I’d say, ‘This is for the school.’ ”4