One rainy April morning, Hockney left the garden shed in which he was still living to make his usual journey to Exhibition Road and noticed a taxi dropping off a fare at the Kempsford Gardens boarding house. “I had a ten-shilling note in my pocket,” he remembers, “virtually my last ten shillings, and I thought, ‘It’s pouring with rain. I’ll get a taxi,’ which would have cost about five shillings to the Royal College, rather than 6d on the bus. Anyway I took this taxi, which left me with five shillings to my name, but I knew I could always live on my wits, and cadge a lunch here, a lift there. But that day I received a letter containing a cheque for £100 for winning a prize at some print exhibition, which I hadn’t even known about, and I thought, ‘This is fantastic. That taxi did it!’ ”17
The prize was for an etching which the head of the printing department, Alistair Grant, had discovered in the drying racks of the Print Room and had entered into an exhibition called The Graven Image at the St. George’s Gallery, Cork Street, where a young Cambridge graduate, the Hon. Robert Erskine, was spearheading a revival of English printmaking. He had persuaded the hotel group, Trust Houses Ltd., to donate prize money for the best five prints of the previous year, and Hockney had won for his print Three Kings and a Queen. For him the money seemed like a fortune.
More unexpected money came when the Royal College received a commission from the P&O shipping line, whose chairman, Donald Anderson, was the brother of the RCA’s provost, Sir Colin Anderson. Their new flagship, the SS Canberra, was being built at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, and Hugh Casson, head of the School of Interior Design, was put in overall charge of this project. He brought in established artists such as Ruskin Spear, Edward Ardizzone, Humphrey Spender and Julian Trevelyan, while his senior tutor, John Wright, offered Hockney the job of decorating a room for teenagers, to be called “The Pop Inn.” “Julian and I decorated the staircase,” remembers Mary Fedden, wife of Trevelyan and one of Hockney’s tutors, “with cut-out metal figures of kings and queens. David decorated a room with an electric poker and most of it was writing, though there were also little pictures, all burnt onto the walls with this red-hot poker.”18
Living in a small hotel in Southampton, Hockney spent five days on this project, filling every inch of wall space with his characteristic graffiti, number codes and childish drawings, the cheeky side of his nature working overtime as he wondered what he might get away with. “Handsome milkman 21,” “Butch is naughty” and “Swing it Auntie” were three typical examples, while he paid homage to the current cool cigarette advertisement, “You’re never alone with a Strand,” with a drawing showing “Maisie” arm in arm with “Jack” and the words “You’re never alone in the Strand or Piccadilly.” “I finished the ‘mural’ on this ship,” he wrote to Berger. “I had a quite crazy ten days down there—the crew continually coming up to see me and watch. As I was working, a cabin boy came up and asked me to write his name up. I agreed and he told me it was ‘Jesse’…Ten minutes later he came back with all his mates (all aged about 16), all wanting their names up—‘Betty,’ ‘Judy,’ ‘Susan’ etc. All in a day’s work, eh?”19 Pathé Pictorial made a newsreel film about the Canberra’s maiden voyage in June 1961, which Hockney caught at the Forum cinema in the Fulham Road. “This is the Pop Inn,” said the veteran commentator, Bob Danvers-Walker, “a Rumpus Room for teenagers, where rock ’n’ roll has definitely replaced the sailor’s hornpipe.”20 Hockney’s idea that the teenagers would add to his graffiti with their own eventually came all too true, the majority of it, unfortunately, being better suited to a gents’ toilet, and the result was that the walls were boarded over and the Pop Inn became a camera shop.
Hockney was paid £100 for the Canberra mural. “With the money I’ll get,” he wrote to his parents, “I can have a cheap return air ticket to New York this summer—this is through the college, and I can stay with an ex-student there. I certainly seem to be getting around.”21 He had been offered a return ticket to New York for £40, and had jumped at it, having been under the impression that a ticket must cost at least a thousand pounds. He arranged to stay with Mark Berger, now back home. “The address I gave you for New York,” he wrote to his mother shortly before leaving, “will only be valid for the first fortnight—after that I will be travelling about, most likely down to New Orleans in the South and back through Texas and Oklahoma to New York … Tell John if I go to New Orleans, I’ll send him some postcards and maybe books from the home of jazz.”22
With the sale of pictures, the Erskine fee and the Canberra mural, Hockney had amassed about £300 by the time he left. “I thought I was absolutely in the money,” he remembers. He flew out on 9 July 1961, his twenty-fourth birthday, with Barrie Bates, another Royal College student, carrying with him, on the advice of Robert Erskine, a number of prints to show to the Museum of Modern Art.
Hockney had fantasised about New York ever since boyhood, when “New York Road” was displayed on the Leeds trams, and more recently, after looking at Mark Berger’s Physique Pictorial magazines, his fantasies had taken on a more sexual tone. The city did not disappoint him. “I was taken by the sheer energy of the place,” he recalls. “It was amazingly sexy, and unbelievably easy. People were much more open, and I felt completely free. The city was a total twenty-four-hour city. Greenwich Village was never closed, the bookshops were open all night so you could browse, the gay life was much more organised, and I thought, ‘This is the place for me.’ ”23 Berger was in hospital with hepatitis when Hockney arrived, but had arranged to come home to Long Beach in Nassau County, where he lived with his rather uptight father Benjamin, a pharmacist, and his glitzy stepmother Helen, who had big eyebrows, wore lots of jewellery and had once harboured ambitions to be an actress. “My father could not figure out David at all,” Berger remembers. “He enjoyed his company, but he just found him so offbeat in many ways. One of the things my father disliked was things being shifted from where they belonged. One day, for example, Hockney was told off for not putting the blueberries back in the refrigerator exactly where he had found them. Later he did a wonderful drawing based on this scene.”
It was not a match made in heaven, particularly because Hockney was still a radical pacifist vegetarian who was shocked by his host’s habit of going round the house killing ants with a spray gun. This oft-repeated scene was the inspiration for both a drawing of the spraying of the insects, and for a painting, The Cruel Elephant, which depicts an elephant treading on the words “crawling insects” and flattening them. Hockney almost fainted one day when Mark’s father returned home carrying a live lobster which he intended to cook for dinner. Helen Berger also had her differences with Hockney. “David didn’t care where he worked,” Berger recalls. “He would work anywhere where he was inspired. My parents had this really nice wall-to-wall white broadloom carpet and David loved to sit on the floor and draw with pen and ink or pencil. One day he was busy drawing when, plop, a big blob of ink dropped on the carpet. My stepmother nearly had a heart attack. ‘Look what David’s done,’ she wailed, ‘he’s messed up my carpet.’ I just said, ‘Look, Mother, cut it out and have him sign it and it’ll be worth couple of hundred thousand in a few years.’ David just laughed, but was so unique in his work and his personality that there was no question to me that one day he was going to be famous.”24
This was a view shared by William S. Lieberman, the legendary curator of the print department at the Museum of Modern Art. He was so impressed by the etchings that Hockney showed him, Kaisarion with All His Beauty and Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, both inspired by Cavafy poems, that he not only bought one of each for the museum, but sold all the rest of the edition on his behalf. Lieberman also sent him to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, one of America’s leading undergraduate art colleges, where Hockney set to work on a new etching, My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, an expression of his continuing unrequited pining for Peter Crutch. “Dear All,” he wrote to his family on 19 July, “I’m having a fine time here, although the weather
is very uncomfortable. (It seems to be always above 90°.) I will be staying in New York for quite a while now, as I am doing some work at the Pratt Institute here … New York is a rather confusing city as all the streets are absolutely straight—there are no curved ones—making it difficult to find your way about … The museums here (and there are many of them) are quite marvellous, and will take some time to absorb. Still I’ve plenty of time left.”25
This New York trip marked another significant moment: the dramatic transformation of Hockney’s appearance. A friend of Berger’s called Ferrill Amacker, “droll, very funny, quite camp and exotic” in Hockney’s words, came over to the Long Beach house one evening when Mr. and Mrs. Berger were out, and the three boys settled down to watch TV. When during one of the commercial breaks there was an advertisement for the hair dye Lady Clairol, with the catchphrase “Is it true blondes have more fun?,” Hockney became very animated. “This completely captivated David,” Berger recalls, “because to him the American image was butch football players and blondes, so he decided he was going to become blonde. We were all very excited and in the end all three of us went out and had our hair dyed. My father nearly had a fit when he came home and saw us all sitting there with our bleached hair.”26
With the $200 he made from the sale of his etchings Hockney bought himself a real American suit. He also moved in with Amacker, who lived in the Fruit Street area of New York in Brooklyn Heights, which was convenient for the Pratt Institute. “Ferrill had lived in New York for two or three years,” Hockney remembers. “He was young and had a bit of money, so he didn’t have to work. He had a proper little apartment with a television and a bathroom, things we certainly didn’t have in London. He was a bohemian and lived a marvellous bohemian life, and we became occasional lovers. People came and went in his apartment. I didn’t quite know who they were. People would get into the bed. It was just like that and I thought it was great. I thought, ‘This is the life.’ It’s a long way from Bradford, and London is dreary by comparison.”27
Hockney drank in everything about the city, staying up all night with Amacker, watching TV, cruising the gay bars, visiting Madison Square Gardens, exploring Harlem and the Bowery, taking part in an anti-nuclear march in Greenwich Village, and visiting all the museums and galleries. He was also thrilled to find plenty of fellow vegetarians, a discovery he enthused about in a letter to Ron Kitaj. “Ron Old Chap,” he wrote soon after his arrival, “I like this town—Vegetarian restaurants on every street corner. I haven’t been in the Empire State Building yet—but I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole of that wasn’t one big Veg restaurant. The funny thing is that New Yorkers don’t look like animal lovers.”28 It was 1961, and New York City seemed like the capital of the world.
When Hockney finally returned to London in early September, “with a yellow crew-cut, smoking cigars and wearing white shoes,”29 he was a different person. Donald Hamilton-Fraser, a landscape artist who taught one day a week at the Royal College, noticed that while previously he had come over as edgy and wanting to plough his own furrow, he was now more relaxed and had definitely found himself. He was also more energised than ever, his head swimming with “thousands of subjects.” Arriving a week before term started, he decided that his first painting was going to be really big, using a large stretcher, eleven feet by seven feet, which he had bought from a fellow student at the end of the summer term. While in New York, all the paintings he had seen had appeared enormous. Another good reason for painting a large picture was the purely selfish one that it would guarantee him a bigger working area in the studio, where people were already beginning to grab places. Among those who saw the work while it was in progress was Grey, 2nd Earl of Gowrie, a student at Balliol College, Oxford, who was brought along by David Bathurst, a former colleague of Kasmin’s at the Marlborough Gallery. “David took me one day to the Royal College of Art,” Gowrie remembers, “and there I saw this very interesting young man in wonderful clothes actually painting a practical joke, and the joke was, he told me, that all the other students were enamoured of large paintings, which was the result of the big backwash of Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still and people like that, so he thought he’d better shape up and do one himself, and I watched him paint A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Manner. It was a wonderful work, a very remarkable picture, and anyone could see that.”30
Once again, a poem by Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” was the inspiration for this picture, the first painting of his final year at the RCA. In this, his first ever three-figure composition, he set out to paint a highly theatrical picture, using Egyptian tomb paintings as his stylistic source, depicting three officials—a clergyman, a soldier and an industrialist whose stiff and pompous outward appearance hides the truth that inside they are very small and ordinary. In its use of raw canvas rather than paint to provide background “colour,” it drew on influences ranging from Bacon and Kitaj to American painting. “This painting,” he wrote, “and the big works of 1961 … are the works where I became aware as an artist. Previous work was simply a student doing things.”31
While Hockney was in America, Kasmin had written to tell him that he had left the Marlborough Gallery and was dealing temporarily from home. The Hon. Sarah Drummond, the well-connected debutante who was the receptionist at the New London Gallery, had introduced him to a rich young man who wanted to invest in art, and Kasmin had gone into partnership with him. His name was Sheridan Blackwood, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, a shy, diffident and immensely charming young man, with a penchant for fast and expensive cars, and one of the heirs to the Guinness fortune. Still a student at Oxford, where he inhabited a vast suite of rooms hung with good pictures in the Christ Church Quad, he dreamed of becoming a serious art collector. “He really wanted to be helped to get deeper into modern art,” Kasmin recalls. “I liked the idea of having someone around who would listen to what I liked and of having someone I could advise, and he liked the idea of being a collector and buying things at a good price.”32 Within a matter of months, Kasmin had told Dufferin that the time had come for him to strike out on his own. In the autumn of 1961, with the sum of £25,000 put up by Dufferin, they started Kasmin Ltd., and among the first artists they approached was David Hockney.
In spite of his recent successes, Hockney was still extremely short of money, and Kasmin decided to take him out for a business lunch to discuss some kind of contract. His years at the Marlborough had given him plenty of experience of expense-account entertaining, but he hadn’t accounted for Hockney being a vegetarian. “ ‘Lunch in the West End?’ said David. ‘Well, there’s a vegetarian place I like very much off Leicester Square called the Vega.’ Well, we went to this restaurant, and when I got the bill at the end it was something like one and ninepence. I couldn’t believe it. I was used to having a very good lunch at Wilton’s with a bill for two people for five quid. David saw me looking at the bill and said, ‘Oh, Mr. Kasmin, is it too much?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s certainly not, but it is very difficult to explain a bill like this to anybody.’ ”33
The result of the lunch was a contract forward-dated to when Hockney left college, it being illegal for a student to sign a financial contract. Since Kasmin didn’t want him to feel completely signed up, he generously excluded from it the territories of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in the Western Pacific.
The contract with Kasmin opened up a whole new world. “If you have someone who is keen on your work,” says Hockney, “you should follow them. It was exciting for me. He was incredibly energetic and I quickly noticed that he had a good eye, especially for drawings. He was an interesting man, very knowledgeable about pictures, and I was part of his eccentric taste. He used to have a kind of salon every Tuesday night, and this is where I began to meet interesting people. All kinds of people came, and I found myself meeting the art world for the first time.”34
Kasmin’s gatherings were open-house evenings of food, drink and conversation, and the occasional sale of p
ictures, which would be on show in the ground-floor rooms. These would be anything from traditional “bread and butter” works by Klee, Miró, Léger or Ben Nicholson, to newer work by Ellsworth Kelly, Allen Jones and David Hockney. Hockney drawings cost between £10 and £20 each, sold in these early days on a non-profit-making basis to give Hockney an income.
At the Royal College, people passing through could buy prints directly off Hockney for two or three pounds, with no edition number and often in a pretty grubby condition, sometimes with footprints clearly visible on them where they had been trodden on. There was no sense of things being valuable; they were after all just work in progress. Since his time at the Pratt Institute in New York, however, Hockney’s interest in printing had intensified as he began to discover its power as a means of expression. He put all of himself into these early prints, creating images of his inner life. He cast himself, for example, in the title role in a version of William Hogarth’s celebrated series of paintings and prints, The Rake’s Progress, in which he reimagined the follies of high and low life in eighteenth-century London as a tale of a young gay man trying to find his place in 1960s New York. Thus The Seven Stone Weakling, in America for the first time, visits gay bars and lives the high life until The Wallet Begins to Empty.
“One of the things that struck me in New York,” he remembers, “was that in the Bowery you did see bums on the street, which you didn’t see in London at that time, and of course that was perfect for The Rake’s Progress.” His original plan was to copy Hogarth and produce eight etchings, but when Robin Darwin got wind of this, he approached Hockney with a plan for the Royal College to produce a book of the work for its own imprint, the Lion and Unicorn Press. They would, however, require twenty-four prints. Hockney considered that this would mean padding the story out too much, as well as being far too big a task for a student working without an assistant, and so they compromised on sixteen, some of which would be based on the Hogarth original and some on his own experiences. “The Gospel Singing, with the Good People wearing ties with God is Love on them,” he recalls, “is based on a trip I made to Madison Square Gardens to hear Mahalia Jackson, and there was a choir jumping up and down singing ‘God is Love.’ It was amazing, pure Americana. The Door Opening for a Blonde was the Lady Clairol advert. Receiving the Inheritance was selling etchings to the Museum of Modern Art. Bedlam, right at the end, is when they’re all plugged into the first transistor radio. I’d seen these people with earplugs, and I thought they were hearing aids, like my father used to wear. In fact they were the first transistor radios, which you wouldn’t have got in England then. So it was a combination of things that happened to me.”35
David Hockney Page 11
