Hockney returned to college that autumn for the start of his second year fired with enthusiasm, and looking forward to the fact that his friends from Bradford Art School, John Loker and Peter Kaye, were taking up places at the Royal College, while Dave Oxtoby was going to the Royal Academy Schools. Since Norman Stevens had now graduated, they all moved into the Kempsford Gardens flat, creating an extra room by erecting a partition across the tiny bedroom. It was horrendously cramped and when the landlord, John Bennett, fresh from playing the part of the Marquess of Queensberry’s Friend in The Trials of Oscar Wilde, wanted to move in an actor friend of his who had fallen on hard times, he offered Hockney the opportunity of sleeping in the shed at the bottom of the garden at a cheaper rent. “I liked being on my own, so I jumped at it,” he recalls. “It was literally a garden shed with one bed and an electric heater. It had to have electricity because I needed a light, but it was probably quite illegal. It really wasn’t very comfortable, and there was no water. Every three weeks I would have a bath in the house. I did everything at the Royal College. I would wash there in the sink, because it had hot water. In fact, Carel Weight once caught me having a bath in the sink! I had my mail delivered there, even my milk.”47
Hockney had a clear two hours before anyone else arrived: people would start coming in and chatting at 10 a.m., and it was then time to have a cigarette. He knew the times when he couldn’t get work done, and which were the good working hours, and he was always making sure that he would have the space to work and the time to work. He also figured out that you could only work for about an hour after lunch. “I noticed that most people began to end the day about three o’clock and then they started to put things away and would go round and talk to the other students. I noticed that they’d come to me at around three for cigarettes, because I always had plenty of cigarettes. So at three o’clock in the afternoon I started to go to the cinema. Anyway, it was the best time to go because the cinemas were empty and I could put my feet up on the seat in front and be quite carried away, and if I wanted an ice cream the usherette would come straight to me. Then when I came out of the cinema at six, I would go back to the college and they had all gone home. I would then have the place to myself again. So I got to see the films and missed the times when they were pulling me away from the easel.”48
The autumn term saw the arrival of another American who was to have a profound influence on Hockney. Mark Berger was a thirty-year-old mature student on a year-long scholarship break from teaching painting at Tulane University in New Orleans. His first day at the college is still etched upon his mind. “I arrived there before the semester began,” he reminisces, “and they gave me a cubicle. I was totally alone in this building, when suddenly this character walks in wearing striped clothing and looking like a prisoner. It was David Hockney and he had been assigned a cubicle right next to me. We were the only two people there.”49 Hockney took to Mark immediately because “he was openly gay, very American and very amusing.” He also had a collection of American “beefcake” magazines such as Physique Pictorial and Young Physique that Hockney picked up on right away. “We never said to each other ‘I’m gay’ and ‘You’re gay,’ ” Mark remembers, “but it was just so obvious we were. It was just never discussed.” Mark saw Hockney as a true English eccentric, a man who liked to be regular, but did the irregular. “One time he went shopping because he needed to buy some socks, and he bought a pair of socks which were in fact women’s leggings and they were bright pink, and he said to me, ‘God forbid I should be in an accident and they find me wearing bright pink stockings!’ But he enjoyed the idea.”50
Before the summer holidays, Hockney had been developing a series of “Love” paintings in which he further explored the theme of homosexuality. “They were inspired,” he recalls, “by the fact that the sex life of London had opened up to me, rather than by any one particular lover.”51 These were not yet figurative pictures, but abstract compositions in which words and phrases were used to help make his meaning clear. While the first two of these feature a large red phallic shape rising from the lower edge and the word “love” prominently displayed, it is the third one, titled The Third Love Painting, that is the most extraordinary, for it brings the subject of homosexual desire to the fore and invites anyone looking at it to become a voyeur. Hockney achieved this effect by scattering the canvas with the kind of crude graffiti he had seen in the public toilets of Earls Court Underground station. “… you are forced to look at the painting quite closely,” he wrote. “… You want to read it … When you first look casually at the graffiti on a wall, you don’t see all the smaller messages; you see the large ones first and only if you lean over and look more closely do you get the smaller more neurotic ones.”52 Thus a close look reveals an invitation to “Ring me anytime at home”; a saucily ambiguous propaganda slogan, “Britain’s future is in your hands”; and the information that “My brother is only seventeen,” while the artist’s inner self calls out, “Come on David, admit it.” Alongside these base sentiments, written on the same phallic shape as appears in the previous works from the series, are the closing lines of “When I Heard at the Close of Day,” a poem by Walt Whitman which celebrates the perfect love that can exist between men:
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness, in the autumn moonbeams, his face was inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was happy.
The Third Love Painting was completed in the autumn of 1960, a time when Hockney was beginning to show a new self-confidence rooted in the knowledge that he’d finally reached a point at which he could make paintings for himself about the things that excited him. One of his crushes at the time was the young singer Cliff Richard. Though classical music had always been Hockney’s first love, his brother John had given him an early Elvis Presley record, and this had started him off listening first to Elvis, then to Tommy Steele and finally to Cliff Richard, who in 1959 had released his number-one album, Cliff Sings, and starred in the gritty movie Expresso Bongo. With his greased-back hair, leather jackets and skin-tight trousers, Cliff was, Hockney remembers, “a sexy little thing,” a line echoed by a Daily Sketch headline that asked: “IS THIS BOY TOO SEXY FOR TELEVISION?”
Cliff’s latest hit single was the Lionel Bart song, “Living Doll.” In a series of studies and drawings connected to a new painting, Doll Boy, Hockney made Cliff himself the object of adulation rather than the girl implied in the song’s lyrics. Doll Boy is an important picture because it is one of the first of his paintings in which a figure begins to emerge, clothed in a white dress on which is written the word “QUEEN,” leaving one in no doubt as to the meaning of the title. The figure is identifiable as Cliff Richard by the notes emanating from his mouth signifying a singer, and by the figures 3.18, which are written beneath him; these are based on a childish code used by Walt Whitman to disguise the name of his lover, Peter Doyle, in which 1 = A, 2 = B and so on. 3.18 therefore translates as C.R.
This code came into play again in a painting executed at about the same time in which the use of the figure is further explored, and which Hockney referred to as his “first attempt at a double portrait.”53 Its title, Adhesiveness, is a word used by Walt Whitman to describe friendship; in the poem “So Long!,” he writes:
I announce adhesiveness—I say it shall be limitless, unloosen’d;
I say you shall yet find the friend you were looking for.
Adhesiveness is the first picture in which Hockney portrays himself and thus explicitly declares his homosexuality, for it depicts two men engaged in the act of lovemaking, apparently interlocked in the 69 position. One figure is identified by the numbers 4 and 8 for David Hockney, the other by 23 and 23 for hi
s hero, Walt Whitman. “What one must remember about some of these pictures,” Hockney later wrote, “is that they were partly propaganda of something I felt hadn’t been propagandised, especially among students, as a subject: homosexuality. I felt it should be done.”54 It was an attitude that was to establish him as something of a hero to campaigners for gay rights over the next few years.
“David was very erudite,” wrote Peter Adam, a young friend of the artist Keith Vaughan, after a visit to Kempsford Gardens, “and could talk for hours on almost any subject: Walt Whitman, Gandhi, Duccio, Durrell or Cavafy. He struck me as a strange mixture of modesty and self-assurance. He was so intensely alive that ideas just came toppling out, interlacing the most contradictory ideas in a logical pattern.”55
Charged with energy, Hockney was quite happy to draw on an enormous variety of influences. At the time, Ron Kitaj, Peter Phillips and Derek Boshier were all drawn towards pop art, depicting the everyday objects of mass culture. “We weren’t interested in wine bottles and fruit,” Boshier recalls. “We were interested in the world we lived in, in sex and music and culture and advertising. There was a painting by John Bratby which had a cornflakes packet in it, and so I started to paint cornflakes packets and got into pop art.”56
Hockney, too, dipped his toes into these waters, in a series of three “Tea” paintings. Arriving at college before the Lyons Corner House at South Kensington had opened, he always made sure he had a small teapot and a cup, a bottle of milk and plenty of tea—his mother’s favourite variety, Typhoo, “The tea,” as the advertisement ran, “that puts the ‘T’ in Britain.” The distinctive red-and-black packets, piled up on the floor when they were empty along with the tubes and cans of paint, became his inspiration. “This is as close to Pop Art as I ever came,” admitted Hockney,57 whose questing nature would never allow him to become too narrowly concerned with solely contemporary images. These paintings were closely followed by a number of pictures based on playing cards, inspired by a book on the history of cards given to him by Mark Berger.
David Hockney and Derek Boshier in Painting School (illustration credit 3.5)
So prolific was Hockney’s output at this time that he ran out of money to buy paint, the consequences of which proved to be extremely important for his subsequent career. Discovering that the printmaking department—headed by the distinguished Edwin La Dell, a fellow Yorkshireman—gave out free materials to the students, and armed with the knowledge of lithography he had gained in his first two years at Bradford, Hockney decided to try his hand at some printing. Under the tutelage of a fellow student, Ron Fuller, he learned the basic techniques and produced three masterful etchings. The first of these, Myself and My Heroes, shows the figures of Walt Whitman, Mahatma Gandhi and David himself standing against a background of three panels, as though they are figures in a medieval triptych. Whitman and Gandhi both have halos, while Hockney, wearing an army cap, stands admiring them. Once again, words and phrases play an important part. “For the dear love of comrades,” from his poem “I Hear It Was Charged Against Me,” is written on Whitman. Gandhi has the words “Mohandas,” “love,” and “vegetarian as well” around him, while Hockney, at a loss to know what to say about himself, has simply written, “I am 23 years old and wear glasses.” This etching was followed by one based on playing cards, Three Kings and a Queen, and by The Fires of Furious Desire after William Blake’s poem “The Flames of Furious Desire.” The three completed prints demonstrate a mastery of the craft that was to serve him well in the future, even after so short an apprenticeship.
At the end of the autumn term Mark Berger tried to involve Hockney in the annual Royal College Christmas Revue, the idea being to parallel the satirical comedy that was being pioneered by people such as Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett in Beyond the Fringe, the hit show of the 1960 Edinburgh Festival. The revue was produced by Berger, with the theme of the Hollywood musical, but attempts to persuade Hockney to dress up in drag and sing a number fell on stony ground. This was primarily because only a few weeks previously a young painter called Patrick Procktor, who was studying at the Slade, had talked Hockney into attending their drag ball. “So I went to Woolworths,” Hockney later told Gay News, “and I got these eyelashes and makeup and I had a T shirt printed with Miss Bayswater on it. I had these rubber tits and I shaved my legs. I thought, ‘I’ll swish into the Slade at 9.30.’ I arrived and I was the only one in drag. I thought, ‘Fucking hell, what a terrible dull lot of people. Even Patrick had let me down.’ ”58
The Christmas Revue featured an imaginary conversation in Heaven between Beethoven and Errol Flynn, performed by Roddy Maude-Roxby and Derek Boshier; Janet Deuters, in a costume of her own design, doing a striptease to “You’ve Gotta Have a Gimmick” from Gypsy; and Berger himself, got up in top hat and tails, singing “I’ll Build a Stairway to Heaven” with Pauline Boty, who was studying stained glass, and was known as “the Wimbledon Bardot” because of her resemblance to the French film star. Berg also wrote a skit making fun of the kind of avant-garde theatre that was going on in New York at the time. “I had Janet Deuters sitting up on a chair eating a banana, and someone crawling under her speaking nonsense poetry. David didn’t like it at all. I remember he was up in the balcony drinking beer shouting ‘What a crock of shit! What is this lousy stuff?’ He was definitely not into avant-garde, though strangely enough he began to do things in his paintings that were extremely advanced.”59
The revue also served another purpose in that it brought together students from all the different departments—fashion, graphics and industrial design—creating a great feeling of camaraderie. Favourite out-of-hours haunts included the Hoop and Toy pub round the corner in Thurloe Place, later to feature as a location in Roman Polanski’s film Repulsion, and, once last orders had been called, the Troubadour on the Old Brompton Road, a popular hangout for artists, poets and musicians, or the Hades coffee bar on Exhibition Road. “They served spaghetti in bowls for half a crown,” Hockney remembers. “You had to sit at any table, so if there were six of us and there was a table which already had three people sitting at it, they’d send in me and Norman Stevens to go and sit at it and talk loudly to drive the other people away, so our gang could take it over.”60
Cinema was another uniting influence. The Royal College had its own film club, whose unmissable weekly meetings introduced them to the films of Eisenstein, Buñuel and Renoir. “We used to go to a lot of movies,” Hockney recalls. “As well as the college film club, there was the International Film Theatre in Westbourne Grove, the Classic in Notting Hill and the Paris Pullman in Drayton Gardens. We saw French films, Russian films and Italian films. Though I could be quite dismissive of French pretension, I was very taken with L’Année dernière à Marienbad.”61
In February 1961, Hockney exhibited in the annual “Young Contemporaries” exhibition at the galleries of the Royal Society of British Artists in Suffolk Street. Started in 1949 by Carel Weight as a showcase for student work, it was to give successive generations of young artists their first professional outing. Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, John Bratby, Edward Middleditch, Richard Smith, Robin Denny and Peter Blake had all cut their teeth at it. Peter Phillips was that year’s president, and Derek Boshier, Allen Jones—now doing teacher training at Hornsey College of Art—and Patrick Procktor were on the organising committee. Together they appointed as judges Anthony Caro, Frank Auerbach and the influential critic Lawrence Alloway, who was assistant director of the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) and the originator of the term “pop art.”
“At first we hung the show like a sketch club,” Allen Jones remembers, “pasting the walls with paintings as best we could. But when it had been hung and everyone had gone home, I was left with Peter Phillips and we looked around and we thought this is not the way to do it. We thought we should put all the pictures that we liked and identified as an idea on one wall, and all the rest on another wall. So we gave Kitaj a complete wall, and then we had th
e other Royal College paintings facing the Slade. The Slade at the time was all under the influence of Bomberg, so it was all what I called ‘struggled mud,’ while on this other wall there was just this vibrant range of paintings.”62
The paintings chosen by the committee included images of toothpaste tubes by Boshier, fruit machines by Peter Phillips and a big red bus by Allen Jones. Hockney’s work in the show, Jones believes, was particularly inventive. As well as Doll Boy, he showed The Third Love Painting and the first two “Tea” paintings. In the catalogue, Lawrence Alloway drew attention to the group’s use of “the techniques of graffiti and the imagery of mass communication. For these artists the creative act is nourished on the urban environment they have always lived in.” Though he didn’t use his term “pop art” in the introductory essay, this is precisely the label that was given by the press to the work of the Royal College group in this show, and it was one that stuck. Suddenly the attention of the art world was drawn to a collection of young artists who were producing remarkable work while they were still at college, a previously unheard-of phenomenon. “This year’s Young Contemporaries at the RBA,” wrote Keith Sutton in the Listener, “is a particularly good and lively one. The pictures … confirm at least one tentative hope, that things have got better since the war; namely that English artists can cope with scale in painting without diminishing content.”63
This exhibition was the first really significant moment in Hockney’s student career. “It was probably the first time,” he commented, “that there’d been a student movement in painting that was uninfluenced by older artists in this country, which made it unusual. The previous generation of students, the Abstract Expressionists, in a sense had been influenced by older artists who had seen American painting. But this generation was not.”64 People began to beat a path to the Royal College painting studios. “They used to come in and wander round,” Hockney remembers. “You would have finished paintings lying around and people would stroll in and look at them, so it was a bit of an exhibition space. You could show off in it, and I’m sure I did.”65 One person who stopped by was the photographer Cecil Beaton, himself a talented artist. “When I went to the college to take a few lessons,” he wrote in his diary, “David and his friends were referred to by the professors as ‘the naughty boys upstairs.’ I visited them up there and found David at work on a huge Typhoo Tea fantasy. Everyone seemed to be doing what they wanted and loving it … I bought an indecent picture, Homage to Walt Whitman,66 by Hockney who brought it round when Pelham Place [Beaton’s home] was in the throes of building alterations. The workmen were startled at his appearance.”67
David Hockney Page 9
