That Hockney was making his mark in more ways than one is clear from a letter the RCA registrar, John Moon, sent to his old head at Bradford College of Art, Fred Coleclough. “I am sorry not to have written to you sooner about David Hockney,” he wrote. “He has become the College’s No. 1 Character, whose influence extends out beyond the Painting School, and his work and doings are watched by all up and coming students. He still spends most of his time painting, but he has done a number of very interesting etchings which have created a great deal of notice.”36 He went on to list a number of Hockney’s achievements: first prize in a student art competition organised by London University Union, a painting being selected for the Arts Council Collection; and three prints being chosen for the Graphic section of the Paris Biennale, suggesting that these “pretty solid and impressive” details should be passed on to the Lord Mayor of Bradford.
Hockney’s growing self-confidence meant that he was less reticent than the previous year about appearing in the 1961 Christmas Revue, and Ferrill Amacker, who was passing through London en route for Italy, persuaded him to do a drag act, in the dress that Janet Deuters had made for her striptease the previous year. “He managed to get David on stage,” Derek Boshier remembers, “wearing a frock and a pair of Yorkshire clogs, and he sang a song from Oklahoma!, ‘I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No,’ changing the words to ‘I’m Just a Boy…,’ and it was the first time that a lot of people realised that he was gay.”37 Amacker was on his way to spend Christmas with Mark Berger, who was living in Florence on a Fulbright scholarship, and when the revue was over he persuaded Hockney to break the habit of a lifetime and accompany him to Italy rather than going home for Christmas. When Michael Kullman, the head of the general studies department, offered them both a lift as far as Switzerland in his little Morris van, they eagerly accepted and set off as soon as term was over.
This was Hockney’s first trip to Europe, made possible because his increasing income from painting meant he no longer had to rely on holiday jobs to get by. He was particularly looking forward to seeing the Alps, but because he had felt it only polite to offer Amacker the front seat, he was squashed in the back of the van, without windows, and saw virtually nothing of the landscape all the way to Berne. “It was Ferrill’s first visit to Europe,” he remembers, “and I was very amused by him referring to the toilets as the ‘restrooms,’ especially in France when they were just those holes in the ground. I thought, ‘I’m not sure you’d call that a restroom.’ It was a long journey and more than a little uncomfortable.”38 When they reached Berne, they bid farewell to Kullman, and took the train to Florence.
Hockney had imagined that Italy would be hot and sunny, but the reality was that the temperatures were below freezing. “It really snowed very heavily,” he wrote, “and the narrow streets of Florence with the snow on them were like a Dickensian London Christmas Card.”39
The trip was primarily an artistic one. Hockney slept on the floor of Mark’s studio in a sleeping bag and spent his days plodding round the city with his guidebooks, looking at galleries and ancient sites. He toured the Uffizi, loving the beauty of the medieval paintings while resisting any influences from them, though he did take in, from looking at a large Crucifixion by Duccio, that artists had been shaping canvases to suit their subjects for centuries. Evenings were spent with Berg and Amacker in the bars and cafes.
This trip became the basis for another delightful and funny autobiographical painting, Flight into Italy–Swiss Landscape, 1962. The fact that Hockney had seen nothing of the Swiss landscape was no barrier, as far as he was concerned, to painting a mountain picture. He would just make it up, incorporating a variety of influences of the time. Thus the main image is taken from a school geography book showing the contours of the mountains and their height, while peeking in from the back are some real mountain tops taken from a picture postcard. The unpainted canvas representing the sky has echoes of Bacon, the multicoloured lines delineating the mountaintops, of Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis. From the back of the Morris van charging across the canvas, with its three blurred and desperate-looking passengers and Hockney himself represented as a witch, come the words “That’s Switzerland that was,” a reference to a current advertising campaign by Shell.
Hockney painted two versions of this picture, the first of which, Swiss Landscape in a Scenic Style, was entered into the 1962 Young Contemporaries exhibition, one of four paintings he chose to demonstrate his versatility as an artist. On sending-in day he consolidated his friendship with Patrick Procktor, who was that year’s treasurer. “We started talking and we just became friends quickly. We simply had a lot of interests in common—painting, literature, and being gay, then. Because most people were in the closet at that time.”40 Patrick also rescued Hockney’s paintings from obscurity in the back room, insisting that they should all be hung together at the front. “Those four pictures I did,” he told the American painter Larry Rivers, in an interview published in the magazine Art and Literature, “were very concocted pictures. I deliberately set out to prove I could do four entirely different sorts of picture like Picasso.”41 The three other entries were A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style, Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style and Figure in a Flat Style, the last consisting of a canvas shaped like a figure, in which the base of the easel on which it sat became the legs of the figure. His choice of long titles for the pictures was by no means random and demonstrates his shrewdness. “By titling the pictures in this way,” he wrote, “in the catalogues there was more space between the lines, so it stood out. I knew all those tricks …”42
The 1962 Young Contemporaries show was an enormous success. “… if this year’s brilliant Young Contemporaries exhibition is any-thing to go by,” wrote the art critic of The Times, “then British Art is in for a healthy, lively period. The exhibition fairly bubbles with bright ideas and visual excitement.” He was impressed by the intelligence of the artists, and singled out “two markedly influential ‘art-school movements,’ the girder-and-iron-plate sculpture at St. Martin’s, and the raspberry-blowing ‘new-surrealist school’ (for want of a better name) at the Royal College of Art. This last dominates the first room, particularly in the person of its present star turn, David Hockney.”43 It is no exaggeration to say that this show, which was widely written about and discussed by the press, set Hockney on the road to fame.
The bright star that was the Young Contemporaries cast its light not just across London, but all over the country, thanks to a touring exhibition sent out by the Arts Council. For this a poster was commissioned from Hockney. “He produced an hilarious image,” said Mark Glazebrook, the Arts Council member who had come up with the idea, “of a scruffy youth being sick over a reproduction of the Leonardo Cartoon, the famous Da Vinci drawing that belonged to the Royal Academy. The Arts Council, out of the profits of its Picasso exhibition at the Tate, had donated a substantial sum to the Leonardo Appeal to save the cartoon for the nation, the Royal Academy being temporarily broke. My colleagues upstairs at 4 St. James’s Square, older, wiser and respected heads, were nervous of the effect of this Hockney image on ‘the provinces’—where David and I had both come from. I didn’t put up much of a fight and David didn’t kick up a fuss. We were forced to subtract the photo of the Leonardo which sadly left the youth just being sick over the blank piece of paper.”44
The exhibition inspired a multitude of ambitious, lively young people to head for the London art world. Among them was a charismatic young textiles student, Mo McDermott, who moved into a flat in Ladbroke Grove, Notting Hill, and found himself a job working for the interior designer Adam Pollock. Mo came from Salford, near Manchester, where he had attended the regional art school and gained a reputation for being both charming and mischievous. His father was away at sea, and he lived most of the time alone with his mother, with whom he had endless rows and who, disapproving both of the art school and his friends, would furiously trawl the local coffee bars looking for him. It wa
s scarcely surprising that he couldn’t wait to get out of Manchester.
Mo quickly established himself at the centre of a lively scene revolving around the Elgin pub in Ladbroke Grove, which included his flatmates, two unknown young musicians, Rod Stewart and “Long” John Baldry, as well as two of his closest friends from Manchester, Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell, both talented fashion students. At a party given by the Australian artist Brett Whiteley, who was in London on a travelling art scholarship, he was introduced to Hockney, whose work he already loved, and he almost immediately asked him for an etching. “Nobody had asked me for one before,” says Hockney, “and we quickly became friends. He was a little bit younger than me, very lively, very gay, very cocky, and confident. He was funny and he loved London, and moving in all different kinds of milieus. It was a far cry from Manchester.”45
At the time Hockney was desperately looking for a model for the life drawings he was expected to produce for his diploma. His problem was that he found the models provided by the college repulsive. “They really did have old fat women as models,” he wrote, “big tits hanging down; they sit on a chair and their ass goes falling over it … you couldn’t get further away from attractive flesh than this flesh. So I said, ‘Can’t you get some better models?’…but the idea of painting an attractive one they thought was rather wicked.”46 To make his point that all great painters of the nude have always painted models that they liked, he got hold of an American Physique magazine and copied the cover, in addition sticking onto the canvas one of his skeleton drawings as a reminder that he could draw something that was absolutely anatomically correct. To this he gave the title Life Painting for a Diploma. He then invited his new friend Mo to come in and model for him, and the college eventually agreed to pay him the set rate of £12 a week. Typically, Hockney did not do as he was asked, which was to produce a series of three different straight life paintings. Instead, he made one picture featuring Mo in three different poses and wrote “life painting for myself” across the top. When he left the painting on an easel overnight, somebody added the words “Don’t give up yet” at the bottom. “We never found out who did it,” Hockney recalled. “It’s still on the painting … I remember there was a girl opposite, a very, very quiet girl who’d never said a word, and I just couldn’t resist going over to her and saying, ‘How dare you write that?’ And I knew perfectly well that she hadn’t done it. But I laughed and so she saw the joke herself. I’m sure it was Ruskin Spear who wrote on it …”47
His teachers remained distinctly unamused, and the process of completing his diploma turned out to be rather less simple than his extraordinary talent would have suggested. There were other reasons for this, not least of which was the undercurrent of hostility that ran, barely hidden, among certain of the staff. “One of the sadder places I know,” wrote David Sylvester in the New Statesman in March 1962, “is an art school where the usual mistrust and envy between students and staff is engendered not by the students’ resentment of an established order which presents a solid barrier to their fame, but by the staff’s resentment that the students have more fame than they do.”48 Ann Martin, a painting student in the year above Hockney, remembers Carel Weight’s reaction when she showed him one of her abstract paintings for his opinion. “If I were you,” he said with barely controlled sarcasm, “I’d enter it for a competition. It’ll probably win a prize.”49
More serious was Hockney’s running battle with Michael Kullman over the general studies course, which required all students to attend a weekly lecture and produce a 6,000-word thesis in order to gain their diploma. Hockney considered it a complete waste of time. “I pointed out that there is no such thing as a ‘dumb artist,’ ” he recalls. “I was always against it because I thought that if anything was going to be compulsory it should be drawing, not this stuff. I never bothered going to the lectures, not even to sign myself in. I liked Michael Kullman, who was a bit of a mad philosopher, and I got to know him. I just didn’t approve of the system.”50
The result was that Hockney’s hurriedly written thesis on Fauvism was not considered acceptable. “Dear Hockney,” wrote the registrar on 11 April 1962, “You will have noticed from the Results Lists which have been posted on the School’s notice board that you have failed the Final Examination in General Studies which means that irrespective of the result of your professional work you will not be eligible for the award of the College Diploma at the Convocation Ceremony to be held on 12th July.”51 The letter went on to say that if he was prepared to carry out additional work and be re-examined, then it would be possible for him to gain the diploma if the new work was considered satisfactory. Hockney, however, was cocky and confident enough not to care, especially since he now had a dealer. “In a way I was set up professionally even before the diploma show,” he remembers, “so when they were going on about diplomas, I thought, ‘Well, Kasmin isn’t asking to see a diploma.’ I thought, ‘Why bother about all this in painting of all things?’ It just seemed ridiculous. I was confident enough to just simply laugh at it.”52 With characteristic wit and self-assurance, his response to the whole episode was to design his own diploma in the form of a coloured etching depicting, beneath the coat of arms of the college, a seated Robin Darwin holding up a two-faced Michael Kullman. The image is contained within a frame which rests upon the backs of five tiny figures, representing Hockney and four other failed students, bent double beneath its weight, bowing in shame.
When Hockney went home for a few days at Easter, his mother confided to her diary, “He looks well, but I’m not keen on his blond hair.”53 He gave her a cheque for £20 to buy a new sewing machine, the first of his own money that he was able to give her, and the two of them trailed round the Bradford shops in search of a new machine, to no avail as she was unable to make up her mind. “Met Mrs. Todd who was pleased to see David but not keen on the blond hair.”54 When they got home, he filled her in on his plans. “I think he will do very well when he leaves College in July,” she wrote later, “—already has made quite a name for himself. He is to make a 3 years contract with ‘London Art Dealers’ who will pay him a monthly salary—but who also have first preference to buy his pictures. He hopes to have a one-man exhibition at Geneva, Switzerland in 6 months’ time.”55 His mother’s pride was not necessarily shared by the neighbours, however. “I remember … I was walking down the street,” Hockney recalled, “and I overheard one of the neighbours saying to another, ‘Oo, look, ’e’s back again, and ’is brothers did so well, you know.’ Idle Jack back from London. It’s just, I suppose, what little people are like, who live little, ordered, quiet lives …”56
The Diploma, 1962 (illustration credit 4.3)
The diploma fiasco ended in an episode that did not reflect well on the Royal College. It was quite clear to Robin Darwin that, since Hockney was undoubtedly one of the best students they had had for decades, he should be awarded their gold medal, a rare accolade. Much to his horror, he then discovered that this was not possible for a student who had failed the general studies course, so he made it quite clear to the Examinations Board that a sub-committee should be appointed, consisting of himself, Carel Weight and Michael Kullman, to re-examine the results and come up with new ones. This they did, coming to the conclusion that, for some inexplicable reason they must have miscounted the original marks. The committee “therefore ruled that all the results be set aside and that all the students, including David Hockney, be adjudged to have passed the examination.”57 No one was convinced by this “recount” story, which cast a poor light on all the participants, and rankled with Hockney for years after.
The award of the gold medal attracted wider attention for Hockney, and the fashionable men’s magazine Town dispatched one of its star young reporters, Emma Yorke, to interview him. By now he had moved from the shed into a basement flat in Lancaster Road, Notting Hill Gate, or Rotting Hill Gate as it was then nicknamed by some. It was a tiny premises shared with a fellow painting student, Mike McLeod, that consisted
of a bedroom with two beds, a small room off it containing a Baby Belling cooker and an outside toilet. They hung their socks out of the window to eliminate their smell, and at the bottom of the steps, in the well, was a small wall with soil in the top of it, which Hockney had attempted to cheer up by planting it with the plastic flowers that came free in packets of Tide washing powder.
“David Hockney is twenty-five years old,” wrote Emma Yorke, “and has just been awarded the Gold medal at the RCA for his painting … His hair is an improbable buttercup yellow and his heavy spectacles give an air of ridiculous seriousness to his face—he looks in fact distinctly like the characters in his paintings which have a quality reminiscent of Dubuffet. ‘I have my melancholic days mind you,’ he said, but looks imperturbable—then a flash of pleasure comes across his face. ‘I wish I could dye the whole of Bond Street blond, every man, woman and child. I don’t really prefer blond people but I love dyeing hair.’ His hair glints in the sun like a newly thatched cottage … This odd Harpo-Marxist swivels his rainbow body in the chair…‘I’ve got to go to Cecil Gee’s now to buy a gold lamé coat. I’m going to wear it when they present me with the gold medal.’ ”58
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