By far the most important thing that happened to Hockney, however, as a result of this show was that he attracted the attention of an extraordinary young dealer, John Kasmin, who was to change his life forever.
CHAPTER FOUR
“WE TWO BOYS TOGETHER CLINGING”
Portrait of John Kasmin (illustration credit 4.1)
John Kasmin was the 27-year-old son of a family of Jewish immigrants from Poland. He had grown up in Oxford, where his father ran a garment-manufacturing factory, and had been happily studying classics at Magdalen College School until the business ran into financial difficulties. He was withdrawn from school, put to work in the family business and made to take night classes in accounting, going from a delightful life reading Greek poetry to a miserable one on the factory floor. Determined to escape and get away as far as possible from this dreary existence and a deteriorating relationship with his father, at seventeen he used his bar mitzvah money to travel to New Zealand, where he attended university for a while before dropping out and joining the bohemian fringe of New Zealand life. “I became a sort of roving character,” he recalls. “I made many friends and had a very varied and interesting life, rather like being a character in Kerouac’s On the Road.”1 In 1956 he returned home, calling himself a poet, and settled in London, soon assimilating himself into the artistic life of Soho, where he would take coffee at Torino’s, hang out in David Archer’s poetry bookshop in Panton Street, and drink at the French House pub, the Colony Room or the Cave de France. Among his favourite places to visit, particularly in the afternoons, was an art gallery in D’Arblay Street, Gallery One.
In the art scene of the 1950s, money was never the principal consideration, and many galleries were pretty shambolic, often run by slightly rakish gentlemen who spent as much time on the telephone to their bookmakers as they did in the gallery. Victor Musgrave, the owner of Gallery One, was an eccentric bohemian poet married to the portrait photographer Ida Karr, who was renowned for her pictures of artists. Theirs was an open marriage and the whole set-up at 20 D’Arblay Street, where the gallery was on the ground floor and the basement rented out to a picture framer, reflected the bohemian world that Soho then was. On the first floor, Colin MacInnes, the author of City of Spades and Absolute Beginners, had a room, while Ida had her studio, sitting room and bedroom on the top floor. She and Victor both had very active sex lives, he with a variety of prostitutes who inhabited the neighbourhood, she with lovers of both sexes who would come and go at all hours. “… lovers, lodgers and friends became all mixed up in the sleeping arrangements as those with not enough money to eat stayed to eat, and those with nowhere to stay stayed over, lovers came and went and lodgers brought in their own companions.”2
“I was sitting in my gallery,” Victor Musgrave recalled, “when a small, eager, enthusiastic figure erupted into it and said in this eager breathless way, ‘Hello, hello, are you Victor Musgrave? Where can I meet painters, writers, artists?’ ”3 As a result of this surprising introduction Kasmin soon found himself working as an unpaid assistant to Musgrave, as well as being both lover and studio manager to his wife. He was also paid half a crown a day to do the cooking, and was allowed to sleep in. One room on the top floor served as sitting room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, the last being created by means of a board placed over the bath at night. There was an outdoor lavatory in the backyard. “I liked being there,” Kasmin remembers. “It was one of the hot spots of Soho, a meeting place for writers and artists, and after four or five months I managed to prove my worth in the gallery.”4
The show that finally made Gallery One famous internationally was called Yves le Monochrome and was of the work of the French postmodernist Yves Klein. It took place in 1957, by which time Kasmin had been promoted and was sleeping in the guest bedroom, often with a variety of women. “There was a tremendous amount of sex life that went on in and around the gallery,” he recalls. “Victor was very into prostitutes and had a busy fantasy life, and at that time a lot of the women who went round galleries were very much open to proposition, so there was a lot of action. I would take the under twenty-eights. It was a curious and interesting life.”5
Having cut his teeth at Gallery One and built up a wide range of contacts and friendships, Kasmin moved on in 1959 to work at the Kaplan Gallery in Duke Street, St. James’s, under the distinguished Marxist dealer Ewan Phillips, with whom he shared dalliances with the gallery receptionist, who liked to measure their penises during her coffee break. It was a lively scene, and they put on the first London show of Jean Tinguely, featuring his Meta-Matics, robot-like machines which painted their own pictures, as well as early shows by Leonore Fini and Jean Atlan. During this year, Kaplan also recruited a third employee, a young Jewish refugee of great taste called Annely Juda, who would one day become David Hockney’s dealer.
By now Kasmin had married into art royalty, his wife Jane being the granddaughter of Sir William Nicholson and the niece of Ben Nicholson, and was living in a cold-water flat off Regent Street. He was also the father of a six-month-old son, Paul. The necessity of supporting his family now pushed him in a new direction.
The most commercially minded gallery in London in 1960 was the Marlborough, founded after the war by two Viennese émigrés, Frank Lloyd and Harry Fischer, who were both feared and disliked on the art scene for their habit of poaching artists from other galleries. Their two greatest coups had been to lure Francis Bacon away from his long-standing dealer, Erica Brausen of the Hanover Gallery, who had nurtured him throughout his career, and Lynn Chadwick, Kenneth Armitage and Ben Nicholson from Peter and Charles Gimpel of Gimpel Fils. Among cash-strapped young art lovers, they were also well known for the excellence of the canapés served at their openings. They planned to open a new gallery, across the road from the Marlborough, in Bond Street, to be called the New London Gallery. Its premises were above Lloyds Bank, which appealed to Frank Lloyd, who had anglicised his name from Levy. Though they failed in their attempts to recruit Ewan Phillips to run it, who considered them ungentlemanly and driven by naked greed and power, he did recommend Kasmin for the job. “My instincts told me,” Kasmin remembers, “that it would be dreadful to enter into what was going to be the other side of the art world, the world of money, in which they behaved in a completely contrary fashion to most English art dealers of the time, but I decided to go for the job, and I went along and was interviewed by Mr. Lloyd. My brief was to look for artists as well as to run the shows they sent over to me. They gave me an expense account to take out to lunch people whose goodwill would improve the prospects of the Marlborough Gallery, so I immediately set up accounts in Wilton’s, Prunier’s and a cigar store near Wilton’s. I was constantly looking about for new artists whose work I liked and who might be available.”6
Kasmin worked at the Marlborough for a year, during which time he attempted, with little luck, to promote the work of artists he liked. The problem was that Fischer did not share his taste. Kasmin’s attempt to push John Latham, for example, a conceptual artist who worked in a form of three-dimensional collage called “Assemblage,” was disastrous. Latham’s chosen subject at the time was books, which he would torch and paint, producing walls of burned, blackened and coloured books. “I loved his work and I considered him a visionary,” says Kasmin. “Fischer, on the other hand, who was a lover of books, absolutely hated him, and on the occasion when I took him into Latham’s studio, he was speechless with horror.”7
Kasmin also tried to interest Fischer in David Hockney. As part of his brief to search for new talent, Kasmin had gone to the Young Contemporaries show, and out of the extraordinary and exciting crop showing there had identified Hockney as the best of the bunch. “I liked his touch,” he remembers. “He seemed to have a really original approach to painting that was between figuration and abstraction. It had cheekiness and bravado and it was lively.”8 Of the paintings Hockney was exhibiting, Kasmin particularly loved Doll Boy, which he bought for £40. “I liked the writing, the sty
le, the spirit … and felt very pleased with myself.”9
Keen to get to know the artist better, Kasmin contacted Hockney and invited him to his home in Ifield Road, Fulham, for a cup of tea so that they could talk about the picture. “I told him I’d like to get to know him a bit and talk about possibly buying some more of his work.”10 Late home from the gallery that day, he arrived to find his wife Jane sitting alone with Hockney in the kitchen. “We were both rather shy,” she recalls, “and didn’t know what to say to each other. Our teacups were rattling in their saucers.”11 Kasmin’s first impression was of a rather gauche young man with National Health glasses and crew-cut hair, who was poorly dressed but clean, and spoke with a strong north country accent. Once they got talking and Hockney started to relax, he found him delightful, quickly warming to his open, trusting nature and wry sense of humour. They discussed his lack of money to buy canvas and paint, touched on the subject of what the Marlborough Gallery might be able to do for him, and arranged that Kasmin would look at more of Hockney’s work. He was left with a strong sense of a young artist destined to be a success.
Kasmin’s attempts to sell Hockney as a potential new star to Fischer, however, were a failure. Like most London galleries, the New London Gallery had a room for showing clients pictures that were not hanging up, complete with floor-to-ceiling grey velvet drapes on runners, an armchair, a sofa and an easel that could be lit from a spotlight. It was a style that might have been suited to showing off a van Gogh portrait or a Cezanne watercolour but for contemporary work it was the most inappropriate setting imaginable. Kasmin, however, persuaded Hockney to bring in some more of his pictures, and stored them behind the curtains. “Some were particularly scruffy,” he recalls, “painted on the cheapest canvas with ordinary white household paint, often unfinished, sometimes shaped with bits tacked on. Being so enthusiastic about them, I would have them out quite often, and Mr. Fischer would come in and say, ‘What is all this rubbish? I said you could have it here, but you were to keep it behind the curtains. Get rid of all this stuff!’ ”12 Apart from Kasmin, the only person at the Marlborough who liked the pictures was a fellow employee, James Kirkman, who would later buy several for only a few pounds.
*
If the critics were impressed by the work of the RCA students at the Young Contemporaries show, then their tutors were less so. “The faculty told us, in their own words,” Derek Boshier remembers, “to ‘stop all this pop art nonsense.’ They told us we had to take an old master or classical painting and do a painting based on it. We all thought this was a really boring idea, but in reality we got a lot out of it.”13 Derek chose a painting by William Blake, Elohim Creating Adam, which directly led to him using falling figures in his paintings, while Hockney chose Ford Maddox Brown’s The Last of England, which depicts the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner and his wife emigrating to Australia. Hockney’s version cleverly followed the exercise in hand without slavishly copying it, transcribing it into his own work, complete with coded numbers and letters and turning the figures of the man and woman into two men, their faces smudged in the style of Francis Bacon. His justification for this was that, in real life, no onlooker would ever see from a distance the faces in such razor-sharp detail as they appear in the original painting.
The moment that the RCA faculty ceased to dismiss Hockney’s work was when Richard Hamilton came to the Painting School and awarded him a prize. Often referred to as the father of pop art, the London-born Hamilton had trained at the Slade before joining the Independent Group and becoming a key figure at the ICA. Here he organised a number of influential exhibitions, such as The Wonder and the Horror of the Human Head, curated by Roland Penrose. In 1956 he was a major contributor to This Is Tomorrow, a landmark show at the Whitechapel Gallery, which featured a giant cut-out of Marilyn Monroe, Robbie the Robot from the film The Forbidden Planet and a jukebox; his poster for the show, a collage of 1950s American consumer culture titled Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? has become an iconic image. Hamilton was teaching in the interior design department of the Royal College when the painting students asked him to come and judge their sketch club. “He came and talked about the pictures,” wrote Hockney, “and gave out little prizes of two or three pounds. He gave a prize to Ron and a prize to me, and from that moment on the staff of the College never said a word to me about my work being awful … Richard had come along to the college and seen what people were really doing, and recognized it instantly as something interesting … Richard was quite a boost for students; we felt, oh, it is right what I’m doing, it is an interesting thing and I should do it.”14
Mark Berger continued to be an important influence on Hockney and encouraged him to further develop his burgeoning skill at etching. Berger had written a gay fairy tale, called Gretchen and the Snurl, for his boyfriend in New York. It told the story of an innocent young boy, Gretchen, who goes out into the world fortified only by a cake made by his mother, and meets an alien creature called Snurl. Together they are rescued from a fearsome monster with terrible teeth called the Snatch, which tries to engulf them both. “I think that in my mind David was Gretchen,” Berger remembers, “and Snurl was his boyfriend, and I showed it to David and he really liked it, so I asked him if he would do some illustrations. The interesting thing is that one of David’s best paintings came directly from the final etching in the story, which is a picture of the two boys hugging each other having been saved from what is really a monstrous vagina.”15 The painting to which he refers, and which was to become one of Hockney’s most iconic images, was called We Two Boys Together Clinging.
In his second year at the RCA Hockney was extraordinarily productive, creating a large body of work much of which was of an extremely personal nature. Many of the pictures feature two men embracing, and they manage to be both touching and funny. “Cheeky” is a word that Hockney often uses about himself and it could be said that it was barefaced cheek which enabled him to tackle such material, together with the use of humour. We Two Boys Together Clinging is a perfect example, though when Roger de Grey first saw it, his only comment was: “Well, I hope they don’t get any closer than that!”
The painting was inspired both by a press cutting and by a beautiful poem. On the wall close to where Hockney worked were a number of pin-ups of Cliff Richard, together with a newspaper clipping with the headline “TWO BOYS CLING TO CLIFF ALL NIGHT,” which told the story of a bank holiday mountaineering accident. Hockney’s quirky imagination naturally gave the story another interpretation; it also brought to his mind Walt Whitman’s poem “We Two Boys Together Clinging,” which has the lines:
We two boys together clinging,
One the other never leaving…
Arm’d and fearless—eating, drinking, sleeping, loving…
His painting, which was preceded by an experimental watercolour study, depicts two figures embracing, their bodies bound together by “tentacles” of desire emanating from both of them. In the bottom left-hand corner of the canvas, the numerals 4.2 link the painting to Doll Boy, while the figures are also identified by codes—the left-hand one, 4.8, being a self-portrait, while his partner on the right has both 3.18, for Cliff, and 16.3, for Peter Crutch, a student on whom Hockney had a huge crush. The word NEVER painted across the lips of the Hockney figure, however, hints at the inevitable unrequited passion, in the case of Peter Crutch because he was completely straight.
Peter Crutch with Peter C (illustration credit 4.2)
“David developed this incredible crush on Peter Crutch,” Berger recalls, “which was perplexing for him because he was still quite shy about his emotions.” Crutch was studying design in the furniture department, and had caught Hockney’s eye while in the college bar. “Oh! He’s just so beautiful,”16 Hockney had said to Berger, immediately besotted. They soon became friends and Hockney began t
o hang out with Crutch and his fashion-student girlfriend, Mo Ashley, who turned out to share Hockney’s love of Cliff Richard. Though Hockney kept his strong feelings of sexual desire strictly sublimated, he transferred them into a number of paintings, notably We Two Boys Together Clinging and The Most Beautiful Boy in the World. In the latter painting, which features a young man naked except for a “baby doll” nightie, made all the rage in 1956 by Carroll Baker in Elia Kazan’s film Baby Doll, he expresses his desire quite openly, using his usual code of numbers and graffiti. “I love wrestling,” he scrawls, and “come home with,” the inferred “me” hidden by a poster for Alka-Seltzer, which also presumably hides the word “love” at the end of “let’s all make,” which is written above a large red heart pushing against the boy’s head. The identity of the figure is made clear by the numbers 16.3 written just above his buttocks. Crutch, whose friendship with Hockney remained entirely platonic, was the subject of a number of pictures, including Cha-Cha-Cha that was Danced in the Early Hours of 24th March, 1961 and Peter C, a portrait on a shaped canvas which was Hockney’s first since Portrait of My Father in 1955.
David Hockney Page 10
