David Hockney

by Christopher Simon Sykes

  With one exception, the rest of the new intake were pretty green. There was Peter Phillips who came from Birmingham, where he had studied at Birmingham College of Art; Derek Boshier, whom Hockney had befriended at his interview, and who came from Yeovil Art College in Somerset; and Norman Stevens, Hockney’s fellow Bradfordian. In addition, there was also an American ex-serviceman, Ron Kitaj, who was a few years older than the rest of them and correspondingly more worldly.

  This was an interesting collection of young men, thrown together at a time when there were stirrings beneath the surface of austerity Britain. “Growing up in the 1950s, we dreamed the American dream,” wrote the film-maker Derek Jarman thirty years later. “England was grey and sober. The war had retrenched all the virtues—Sobriety and Thrift came with the Beveridge plan, utility furniture and rationing, which lasted about a decade after the end of hostilities. Over the Atlantic lay the land of Cockaigne; they had fridges and cars, TV and supermarkets. All bigger and better than ours … Then as the decade wore on, we were sent Presley and Buddy Holly, and long-playing records of West Side Story, and our own Pygmalion transformed. The whole daydream was wrapped up in celluloid … How we yearned for America! And longed to go west.”24

  Having spent two years doing relatively little painting, Hockney was determined to make up for lost time. His problem was how to begin. “The first thing I thought,” he says, “was that I had to unlearn everything I’d learned at Bradford, because they didn’t really deal with modern art, and that was something I had become aware of.” A powerful new influence was American painting, which he’d been exposed to for the first time in December 1958, when he went to the Jackson Pollock show put on by Bryan Robertson at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and realised that here was a modern artist who was part of an utterly different tradition. “I’d become aware of how many artists came out of Picasso—Henry Moore, Francis Bacon and so many others—and suddenly there was this very free-looking art which when you looked closely at it you could see how organised it was. It was not just random splashes of paint. There was order to it. It was because it was so unlike Picasso and so American that young art students found it so lively and fresh.”25 Seeing the Pollock show made Hockney realise that his teaching had never addressed the problems of the modern movement, partly, he suspected, because his teachers didn’t really understand it.

  Temporarily at a loss, Hockney threw himself back into drawing. “I hadn’t done any drawing to speak of for a couple of years, so I thought I’d get back into it by drawing something a little bit difficult and complicated. There was a skeleton hanging up in the studio so I decided to draw that. I realised that if I was going to do it properly, drawing in detail the ribcage and the pelvis, etc., then it would take some time and get me back into the routine of work.”26 Establishing a routine was important, and as his living conditions were hardly conducive to work, each morning he would get up at the last possible moment and walk the half-mile to the college from Kempsford Gardens, to be there to start at eight. Invariably he would put his name down on the list to work after hours and stay at the college studios till ten at night, only returning home when he was ready for bed. On Sundays, when the college was closed, he would methodically tour London’s museums and galleries.

  Hockney spent six weeks on his two skeleton drawings, executing the first, a vertical study of the skeleton hanging from a rail, in pencil, and the second, a more dramatic study looking down upon it and foreshortening the perspective, in turpentine washes. Because the size of the paper he had access to was limited, as the drawing got bigger, he would just roughly paste on a new piece. Janet Deuters, another painting student, noticing how good the drawings were, told him that because he could draw so well, he should take greater care in the way he glued the paper together. She told her friends about him and word soon began to spread about this extraordinary-looking new student. The drawings rapidly drew praise. “They were a tour de force,” says Allen Jones. “They exhibited so much panache and so much language, but it was done with such authority that you didn’t view it as a trick.”27 The young American, Ron Kitaj, also came to take a look. “During our first days at the Royal College,” he later wrote, “I spotted this boy with short black hair and huge glasses, wearing a boilersuit, making the most beautiful drawing I’d ever seen in an art school. It was of a skeleton. I told him I’d give him five quid for it. He thought I was a rich American. I was—I had $150 a month GI Bill money to support my wife and son. I kept buying drawings from him …”28

  Ronald Brooks Kitaj had arrived in England from the United States in 1958 courtesy of the GI Bill, to study art at Ruskin College in Oxford, from where he had graduated to the Royal College of Art. A former merchant seaman, he was five years older than Hockney, and the younger man immediately looked up to him, both for being American and for his experience of the world; Hockney had never been abroad. They discovered a mutual love of reading and Kitaj was able to pass on his knowledge of his favourite American expatriate writers such as T. S. Eliot, Henry James and Ezra Pound; he had also read one of Hockney’s favourite books, George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. But more than anything it was Kitaj’s attitude to painting that impressed Hockney. He was by far the slowest painter at the college, because he took his time. Painting was something to be studied seriously, he passionately believed, though it was a point of view not held by every student at the college. “There were these two groups of people at the RCA,” Allen Jones recalls, “and the difference between them was noticeable. I was aware that some of the people there were behaving like men. While I was drawing away, it was often a source of wonder to me that some of my fellow students had been digging trenches in Korea only six months previously. These students were men and they handled themselves differently. They all blew their grants immediately and bought Lambrettas and hung out at the Serpentine picking up girls, and I remember thinking, ‘That’s all very well, but what will they do for buying paint?’ ”29

  Still finding his way, and not a little spurred on by the large abstract-expressionist-style canvases he saw being worked on by his fellow students Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips, Hockney decided to follow up the skeleton drawings with his own attempts at abstraction. In working on these, he was much influenced by a 1958 show at the Wakefield City Art Gallery, a retrospective of the work of the Scottish artist Alan Davie. Davie’s use of symbols and graffiti in his quite unique paintings seduced Hockney, as did the gaudy colours he employed. The fact that Davie was also a recipient of the Gregory Fellowship in Painting from Leeds University and was working in Leeds at the same time Hockney was at Bradford made him all the more real, and Davie was very much in Hockney’s mind when he started work on a series of large images painted on pieces of four-foot-square hardboard. “Young students had realised,” he later wrote, “that American painting was more interesting than French painting … American abstract expressionism was the great influence. So I tried my hand at it. I did a few pictures … that were based on a kind of mixture of Alan Davie cum Jackson Pollock cum Roger Hilton. And I did them for a while, and then I couldn’t. It was too barren for me.”30

  These experiments with abstraction lasted about three months through the winter of 1959–60, and most of what Hockney produced was either destroyed or painted over by him, or by fellow students needing a fresh supply of hardboard. The few that have survived were given proper titles, suggesting a dislike for the fashion set by Pollock of referring to paintings by numbers, which, Pollock claimed, made “people look at a picture for what it is—pure painting.”31 Thus Erection suggested the stirrings of an as-yet-subverted desire to address sexual themes, while Growing Discontent firmly stated Hockney’s ever increasing dissatisfaction with the road he was going along.

  Hockney discussed his insecurities in many conversations with Ron Kitaj who, far more than any of the college staff, he came to look upon as his mentor. “He had an incredible conscience about his work,” said Hockney, “which brushed off on other people. He
wasn’t flippant or easily put off work … He stood there in front of a canvas from 10:00 a.m. till 5:00 p.m. and worked.”32 Since Kitaj didn’t drink or smoke and liked to be in bed soon after ten, their discussions usually took place over a morning cup of tea or coffee in the cafe of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Hockney confessed that he was so frustrated by what he was doing that it sometimes seemed pointless to go on. “He told me,” Hockney remembers, “that I should look upon painting as a means of exploring all the things that most interested me, and that I should paint pictures that reflected this. This was the best advice he ever gave me.”33 Kitaj probed his interests, discovering them to be politics, literature, relationships, vegetarianism, and encouraged him to consider using these as subject matter for paintings. “I thought it’s quite right; that’s what I’m complaining about, I’m not doing anything that’s from me. So that was the way I broke it. I began to paint those subjects.”34

  The first paintings were inspired by vegetarianism. “I was a militant vegetarian at the time, and handed out leaflets about the cruelty involved in making the terrible sausages you got in the common room. At Kitaj’s suggestion I started painting vegetarian propaganda pictures and they became absurd and interesting.”35 Once again painted on hardboard, these were abstract paintings with various vegetables represented by areas of colour—red for tomatoes, orange for carrots, green for lettuce, for example—with the names of the vegetables written on them in paint. The employment of words, an idea that came from the cubists’ use of collage, also forced the spectator to confront the interests of the artist, in the same way that the words on Kenneth Hockney’s posters confronted people with his ideas. “You realise,” says Hockney, “that the moment you put a word on a painting, people do read it. It’s also like an eye. If there’s an eye in a painting, you can’t not look at it, and you can’t not read a word.”36 Using words also helped him solve a problem he had been grappling with for some time, which was his reluctance to use figures in his paintings for fear of being considered “anti-modern.” “When you put a word on a painting,” he wrote, “it has a similar effect in a way to a figure; it’s a little bit of a human thing … it’s not just paint.”37 That the vegetable paintings have long since disappeared seems irrelevant in the light of what Hockney did next, which was finally to address the one, and most important, subject that he had been till now studiously avoiding: his sexuality.

  David Hockney in Painting School (illustration credit 3.4)

  Space was at a premium in the Painting School. Once the new students had graduated from working in the Life Room and the Still Life Room, which was compulsory in the first six weeks, it was up to them to stake out a space in the studios, which were part of the old V&A. Hockney used to try and grab the biggest area by getting in before anyone else, but those who were not quite so determined ended up in the corridor, where partitions had been erected to take the overflow. It was here that Kitaj worked, in a space he shared with another, older, painter, Adrian Berg, who had previously studied at Chelsea School of Art and had already been at the college for a year. Berg was openly gay, and when Kitaj introduced the two, they immediately hit it off. Just as at Bradford, Hockney’s reputation had preceded him: Norman Stevens had repeatedly warned Berg, “You wait till Hockney arrives.”

  Adrian Berg was the first man that Hockney had met for whom being gay was not a problem. “I wasn’t confused about my sexuality,” he recalls, “though I was cautious, because you had to be in those days. I was queer and David was queer, and we were of help to one another.”38 He also appealed to Hockney because he had studied literature at Cambridge and was able to share his great knowledge of books. They discussed poetry, and Berg told him of the work of the homosexual poets Walt Whitman and Constantine Cavafy. “I suddenly felt part of a bohemian world,” Hockney remembers, “a world about art, poetry and music. I felt a deep part of it rather than any other kind of life. I finally felt I belonged. I met kindred spirits and the first homosexuals who weren’t afraid to admit what they were. Adrian Berg lived in a free world, and fuck the rest of it. I thought, ‘I like that. That’s the way I want to live. Forget Bradford.’ Once I accepted all this, it gave me a great sense of freedom, and I started to paint homosexual subjects.”39

  Baring his soul on canvas was not easy for Hockney who, though gradually blossoming, was still quite shy. Contemporaries remember him looking at his feet a lot when speaking. Searching for a way of expressing his deepest emotions in his work while retaining some feeling of anonymity, he looked to Jean Dubuffet, whose spindly figures took their inspiration from children’s art. “I got taken with the deliberate childish thing,” he recalls, “and felt I could use this to deal with a lot of subjects and ideas.”40 He also drew on graffiti as an inspiration, and reviewed for the college news-sheet the graffiti in the men’s toilet of the students’ common room, as if it were art hanging in the Latrine Gallery and he was the critic from Art Review. To begin with, he approached the subject of his sexuality in his paintings very tentatively, one of his first paintings about love being simply a picture of a heart with the word LOVE written in small letters along its lower edge. As he developed his technique, however, managing to keep one step away from his subject, he grew gradually bolder and was soon painting the word QUEER on a canvas and using the then explicit word as its title. Graffiti was also the inspiration for a series of “Fuck” drawings he produced during this period.

  By the end of his first year at the RCA, Hockney was beginning to find himself. The painting staff, however, seemed to be at a loss as to know how to deal with the class of ’59. To begin with, they didn’t like the students doing enormous paintings, and Peter Phillips, Derek Boshier and Kitaj were all painting pictures of motorcyclists, movie stars and cowboys and Indians on a large scale. Add to this the fact that the painting studio had become so cluttered with big canvases that it was like trying to enter a maze, and it is perhaps understandable that this older, wartime generation of professors came to be so antagonistic towards their charges. “The staff said that the students in that year,” wrote Hockney, “were the worst that they’d had for many, many years. They didn’t like us; they thought we were a little bolshy.”41 Allen Jones remembers the day a warning light came on. “One day Ruskin Spear, who was going round looking at the work of each student, came up to my picture and asked, ‘What’s going on here? What’s all this bright colour?’ Everyone was painting away, secretly listening to me getting a barracking, and I was thinking, ‘He’s just got to be joking.’ But then I realised he was absolutely serious and he could not understand what I was doing, and would not be able to talk about it. I asked him what was wrong and he said, ‘This is a grey day, this is grey South Kensington, this is a grey model, she’s got grey prospects, so what’s all this red and green all over the place?’ ”42

  Jones was one of the painters who stayed on regularly to paint after hours, till the doors closed at ten, and one particular evening, when they were all dying for a cup of tea, Hockney said he couldn’t be bothered to walk to the nearest cafe, and in typically anarchic style suggested they should raid the staff common room, where there was a plentiful supply of tea and biscuits. As long as they replaced whatever they used, no one would be any the wiser. “So we started going there to have a quick cup of tea,” Jones recalls, “and David would read the staff memos to all of us, and I kept thinking we were on dangerous ground. I remember there was a memo from Robin Darwin, the principal, to Carel Weight and company just saying ‘Who is running the painting school?’ ”43

  The result of the memo was that the painting students who were thought to be out of line were all gathered together and were read the riot act by Carel Weight, who told them that in their first year they were there to observe nature and prove themselves to be proficient, and that they should wait till their third year to experiment. But Darwin wanted more than this. Pour encourager les autres, he wanted a head on the block, and that head turned out to be Allen Jones. “For me it was the end
of my world,” says Jones. “I demanded an interview with Robin Darwin and he agreed to see me. He told me he had five minutes because he was going off to a lunch appointment. So I said my piece, and at the end of it he said, ‘Well, I’ve known you for five minutes and I’ve known Prof. Weight for most of my life. So who do you think I should believe?’ and that was that.”44 Most people were baffled by Jones’s dismissal, but his friend Peter Phillips always believed that they singled him out because his determination and independence made him potentially the most dangerous student. As for Hockney, of whom the same might be said, it was the skeleton drawings that had saved him.

  By the time Allen Jones learned his fate, it was the last day of term and most of the students had gone home. Hockney had returned to Bradford and a summer job as a caretaker at a school in the centre of the city and next to the library, where he went every day. Remembering his talks with Adrian Berg, he made two literary discoveries there which would inspire future work. First were the poems of the American writer Walt Whitman, many of which had explicit homosexual themes. “In the summer of 1960, I read everything by Walt Whitman. I’d known his poetry before, but I’d never realised he was that good. There are quite a few of my paintings based on his work.”45 He also explored the work of the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, whose work was not put out on the open shelves, being considered unsuitable for the general reader, and which had to be asked for specially. Hockney later admitted that he stole the library’s copy of Cavafy’s poems translated by John Mavrogordato as it was out of print. “I read it from cover to cover, many times, and I thought it was incredible, marvellous.”46