David Hockney
Page 13
Bradford, 1962 (illustration credit 4.4)
In the end Hockney was proud to receive the medal, if only for the sake of his parents. “David rang up on Friday evening,” wrote Laura in her diary on 6 July, “to tell us he is being given a GOLD MEDAL & has a First CLASS HONOURS. He is so unconcerned—but it is a wonderful honour & he has evidently been persuaded to attend the ceremony, which previously he had no intention of doing. We are very proud of him & would like to go to London to see the ceremony & share the honours. I’m so glad David is still humble—but he has earned the prize. His only love is to paint, so far.”59
The convocation ceremony, at which various outstanding individuals in the world of the arts had honorary awards and titles conferred upon them, took place annually in the hall of the Royal College of Music, and was attended by all the college students, as well as graduates, family and friends. It was an event that engen-dered some nervousness among the staff, as it was traditionally the occasion for elaborate practical jokes. “When I was awarded my diploma,” Roddy Maude-Roxby recalls, “I organised placards with the words APPLAUSE, LAUGHTER and SILENCE written on them, which the graduates, who were sitting behind the principal and staff on a raked platform, hid under their gowns, only to produce them at the most inappropriate moments possible.”60 On another occasion, at a signal, the graduates all donned heavy-rimmed glasses and moustaches and imitated in unison the gestures of the principal, while perhaps the most outrageous stunt was when the Duke of Edinburgh was giving a lecture on the importance of “Artist-engineers,” and as he took his place on the rostrum, every single student and graduate released a red plastic toy helicopter which rose in unison to the ceiling.
Hockney, watched by his proud parents, shared his day with the distinguished critic and poet Sir Herbert Read, the architect of Coventry Cathedral, Sir Basil Spence, and the designer of the Mini, Alex Issigonis, all of whom were being awarded fellowships. When it came to his turn to be awarded the gold medal for work of outstanding distinction, he went up to collect it, to deafening applause, resplendent in the gold lamé jacket as well as the traditional and requisite academic gown. “David looked fine,” wrote Laura in her diary, “in his gold lamé jacket, and gold-banded black gown and cap—his white (gold) hair to match. The Principal in his speech said that under Hockney’s eccentricities his heart was in his work, & that not only was he honoured by the College, but would he thought be one day an honour to his country. I’m glad David is humble enough not to care too much about the presentation, but realizes that his work alone will get him a place in the world.”61 Laura also recognised that she was witnessing the end of an era and the beginning of a new one: her words were tinged with both pride and regret. “Oh for the happy days,” she wrote, “when we all had such fun at home together. We shall never see those days again, but the memory is a tonic.”62
CHAPTER FIVE
MAN IN A MUSEUM
“MARILYN MORTA” exclaimed the headlines of the daily papers prominently displayed on the newspaper vendor’s stall on the promenade in Viareggio, the Italian seaside town where Hockney was staying in August 1962. He would always remember hearing the news of the blonde goddess’s death in the middle of this idyllic Italian holiday. With his final term at the Royal College over, he had decided to celebrate by visiting Mark Berger and Ferrill Amacker in Florence, taking with him a new love interest, a young artist called Jeff Goodman. “Jeff was a very handsome, attractive Jewish New Yorker,” he remembers. “He was very American, with crew-cut hair. I didn’t really think of him as a lover. We were just sexy friends.”1 It was a carefree summer. Florence was very different from what it had been like on his last trip there in the winter, and Hockney’s spirits were high. “I had a little motorbike,” Berger recalls, “and one evening when driving about in central Florence, after David had had a few drinks, he became very exuberant and he was sitting on the back of the motorbike shouting out ‘Pizza Pie’ and ‘Anna Magnani’ and all these kind of Italian phrases, and I kept saying, ‘Oh my God, David, they’re going to beat us to death.’ It was his spirit and his exuberance. He just wanted to sound a little Italian.”2 Amacker had an open-top car and at the end of July they decided to drive to Viareggio. There they enjoyed long tranquil days lying on the beautiful beaches.
Left to right: Andy Warhol, Henry Geldzahler, David Hockney, Jeff Goodman, 1963 (illustration credit 5.1)
From Italy they took a train to Munich, and then to Berlin, drawn there by reading Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. Hockney was greatly disappointed to find that the world of the young Weimar Republic invoked by Isherwood, with its eccentric characters and sleazy nightclubs, had been largely swept away; the shadow of the Berlin Wall, erected only one year previously, hung heavily over the city. They did, however, stumble onto one of Isherwood’s old haunts, the Kleist Kasino, on Kleiststrasse, a gay nightclub where men could dance together in a room that had blue-and-white-striped awnings hanging from the ceiling, maroon wallpaper, and a bar that was illuminated by two lamps supported by half-size torsos without fig leaves. The other highlights of their tour were eating at numerous Wurststands, and a visit to East Berlin to see the Pergamon Museum, so named because it contains the monumental reconstructed Pergamon Altar, built in the first half of the second century BC, as part of the Acropolis of Pergamon in Asia Minor. “It was quite amazing,” Hockney recalls, “and looked very splendid in one great big room, but just looking at East Berlin in those days made me realise that communism was a failure. Everybody looked downtrodden and there didn’t seem to be a spark about anything or anybody. It was as if a dead hand had come over it.”3
When Hockney returned to London alone, Goodman having flown back to New York, it was to face the reality of his new life. His education was finally over and a career as an artist beckoned. His reputation was beginning to spread, partly because he had won the Royal College gold medal, but mostly because of relentless propaganda by Kasmin. In a letter to Hockney, the American painter Larry Rivers mentioned that “Kasmin, your gallery dealer, came to see me in Paris and when your name came up he just happened to have 500 photos of your work in his inside pocket.”4 By the autumn of 1962, Hockney’s work had featured in at least ten group shows at many distinguished galleries, including the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, the ICA, the Musée d’Art Moderne and the National Museum of Art in Tokyo.
Kasmin had a deft touch when it came to organising Hockney’s exhibiting life, and his Tuesday-night gatherings continued to spread the word and sell the odd painting or drawing. An early client was Grey Gowrie, who had wanted to buy a Hockney ever since he had seen A Grand Procession of Dignitaries, and now, appointed as art buyer for Balliol, his Oxford college, with a brief to find suitable works to hang in the junior common room, was in a position to do so. Unfortunately things did not quite work out as he might have hoped. “Balliol was then in the vanguard of political correctness,” Gowrie remembers. “They didn’t like you smoking Rothmans, for example, because of their South African connection. Their taste in art at the time was social realism and they had a rather good, though gloomy, Derek Greaves of an industrial landscape. Anyway, I went and bought for £75, which was quite a lot of money for an undergraduate college, The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, and it was hung in the JCR where it caused a great deal of uproar and a cup of tea was thrown at it.”5 Nor did it end there. So much fun was poked at the painting and endless missiles directed at it that Gowrie asked Kasmin to come up and talk to the students about it. “I had to try and explain what was going on in the picture,” he recalls, “and put it into some kind of current context with Larry Rivers and Dubuffet, and explain that this wasn’t just some kind of one-off madness or childish prank.”6 At the end of his talk, he asked for a show of hands on whether they liked it or not and the answer was no, so he agreed to buy it back for £80.
The Most Beautiful Boy in the World was one of fifteen pictures sold by Hockney to Kasmin that year. Others included A Grand Procession of Dignitaries
, sold for £100, Typhoo Tea No. 4 for £50, Swiss Landscape for £60, Teeth Cleaning for £55 and Cha Cha Cha for £120. The total income Hockney declared to the Inland Revenue was £563 with zero profits. “I’m sorry I can only find about £30 of bills,” Hockney wrote to his brother Paul, who was now acting as his accountant, “but if you look at the dates of them you’ll notice they only cover about 2 months (average expenditure on materials is about £20 per month). ½ my rent is 35s per week—my visit to Switzerland for inspiration for Swiss Landscape was £60 + trips to Bradford £8 per year. If they don’t believe how much I spend on materials tell them to inquire about the high cost of canvas and stretchers and Artists quality oil paint.”7
As well as selling from his own front room, Kasmin also allowed Hockney’s work to be shown by a few galleries who he considered to have an enlightened attitude. One of these was the Grabowski Gallery in Sloane Avenue. Mieczyslaw Grabowski had come to England with the Polish Army in 1940, and after the war opened a pharmacy in Chelsea, and a mail-order business to send medical supplies to Poland. A keen lover of art who liked to promote the work of young and unknown artists of different nationalities, according to the principle of “art without borders,” in 1959 he opened a non-profit-making gallery at 84 Sloane Avenue, next to Grabowski’s Pharmacy.
Hockney was showing there in the summer of 1962 as part of a group show also featuring Derek Boshier, Allen Jones and Peter Phillips. What distinguished this particular show was that Grabowski invited each of the participants to write a personal statement for the catalogue on the theme of “the strange possibilities of inspiration.” Hockney wrote: “I paint what I like when I like, and where I like, with occasional nostalgic journeys. When asked to write on ‘the strange possibilities of inspiration’ it did occur to me that my own sources of inspiration were wide—but acceptable. In fact, I am sure my own sources are classic, or even epic themes. Landscapes of foreign lands, beautiful people, love, propaganda, and major incidents (of my own life). These seem to me to be reasonably traditional.”8 It was a philosophy he has adhered to all his working life.
One of the first things Hockney had to do on his return from Berlin was to look for a studio. In the meantime he worked out of a rented lock-up near Lancaster Road. His head was buzzing with ideas from his trip. A small drawing of a leaping leopard, for example, noted in a Berlin museum and quickly sketched from memory on his return to his hotel room, became Picture Emphasizing Stillness, which presents the viewer with a conundrum. Two nude men are enjoying a quiet talk close to a small semi-detached house, oblivious of a leopard, which is about to leap upon them. Just as you are getting caught up in the action, you notice a line of type between the leopard and the men which reads “They are perfectly safe, this is a still.” The inspiration for this picture also came from some battle scenes which had caught his eye in the Tate. “In spite of one’s immediate impression,” he told Guy Brett from the London Magazine, “there is of course no action in these paintings at all. Things don’t actually move—the figures are and will always remain exactly where the painter put them. The same thing that struck Keats when he saw the Grecian Urn.”9
The Pergamon Museum provided a curious image of duality that lodged in Hockney’s mind the germ of an idea that was later to develop in his joint portraits. “I never seem to be able to go round a museum at the same pace as anybody else,” he later wrote, “and when I went with Jeff … we got separated. Suddenly I caught sight of him standing next to an Egyptian sculpted figure, unconcerned about it because he was studying something on the wall. Both figures were looking the same way, and it amused me that in my first glimpse of them they looked united.”10 He immediately consigned the image to paper with a couple of drawings, and as soon as he got back to London painted it on to canvas, titling it Man in a Museum (or You’re in the Wrong Movie). This was a theme he would return to and concoct into two much more elaborate pictures at the end of the year, the Marriage paintings.
Since it was considered de rigueur at the time for a young painter fresh out of art school to do some teaching, as well as beginning to pursue his own career, Hockney also started teaching at Maidstone School of Art. He was offered this work by the flamboyant head of the fine art department, Gerard de Rose, a portrait painter of part Russian descent who had taught at various art colleges and liked to bring fresh young talent into the school (he gave jobs, at one time or another, to Patrick Procktor, Dave Oxtoby, Michael Upton and Norman Stevens). He employed Hockney to teach etching one day a week, for which he was paid £15, and Hockney brought with him not just his talent but his work ethic, painting the word “WORK” in large letters on the studio wall. “I taught for one year at Maidstone,” Hockney remembers, “then I gave it up because I would rather have been working on my own work. I didn’t mind teaching once I was there, but in the end I began to resent it.”11
The search for a proper studio bore fruit in the autumn when Don Mason, both a fellow student at the Royal College and a resident of Kempsford Gardens, was offered his aunt’s flat at 17 Powis Terrace, round the corner from Ladbroke Grove. Since he couldn’t afford the five pounds a week rent, he asked Hockney whether he might like to take it on. As soon as he saw it, Hockney jumped at the opportunity. It was on the first floor of a narrow street of four- and five-storey late nineteenth-century houses, and consisted of two large rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom. For the first time in his adult life, he would be able to live and work in the same place.
Notting Hill in 1962 was a far cry from the chic place that it is today. The streets around Powis Terrace consisted mainly of slum properties, with large houses divided into bedsits, mostly for West Indians who had recently arrived in London, or for poor students. Many of these were owned by the notorious slum landlord Peter Rachman, a Pole who had come to England in 1946 and set up a property empire. “I was amazed at the area,” remembers Kasmin, who had put up the key money for Hockney, “because opposite where he was living were buildings owned by Peter Rachman. He used to buy properties with sitting tenants at low prices, the sitting tenants being almost always older people who had the right to live there protected by the rent act. He would then move in many large groups of young black people, prostitutes and party people, and encourage them to give parties, which would make life intolerable for the tenants. Opposite 17 Powis Terrace was a whole block of houses that he was gradually emptying out, so there was the constant sound of shrieks of laughter and gorgeous black girls coming in and out of the buildings and walking up the street in a precocious manner. It was like a constant party, with an atmosphere of a Trinidad town at night.”12
The street may have been noisy, but it was friendly and neighbourly, and it suited Hockney down to the ground. There were shops, including a chemist’s, an off-licence, a motor repair garage, and, on the ground floor of number 17, a grocer’s, run by Mrs. Evans, where Hockney used to buy his tea, eggs, butter and milk. It was not unusual to see a rag-and-bone man’s cart trundling down the road.
Being gregarious by nature, he found himself a lodger, a fellow Yorkshireman called John Pearson, who came from Boroughbridge, and word soon got round that Hockney now had somewhere he could entertain his friends. Charismatic and funny, Hockney made new friends easily, and among the most important of these were a number of strong women. The first great woman friend that he made in London was Anne McKechnie, an extraordinary red-haired Pre-Raphaelite beauty, who wore long corduroy skirts with hooped petticoats and had run away from her convent school at sixteen with the ambition to become an existentialist, even though she was uncertain quite what that meant. After waitressing and a stint at Harrods, she had been employed as a model by John Bratby and then Roger de Grey, through whom she first heard about Hockney.
“I was asked by Roger de Grey to pose for him at the Royal College,” she recalls. “Nobody seemed to do any work, but the staff obviously found Hockney funny because I used to hear them saying, ‘Oh, let’s call Hockney and see what he’s got to say about so-and-so.’ They didn
’t do it to tell him off. They just found him amusing.”13 Her boyfriend, Michael Upton, an ultra-cool and devastatingly handsome painter from the Royal Academy Schools, was sharing a flat with Hockney’s friends Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips, which is how Anne met Hockney: she was instantly smitten. “The reason I liked David was because of his sense of humour,” she says. “I remember once seeing a mouse and jumping on the bed in my tiny little bed-sitting room, and David, instead of saying ‘Oh dear, was that a mouse?’ just said ‘Was it Minnie or Mickey? You can tell by the shoes.’ ”14 They also shared a passion for the movies and Anne became his regular companion on outings to the cinema.
By the time Hockney moved into Powis Terrace, Anne was living with Upton down the road in Colville Square, in a row of derelict houses that had been taken over by students from the Royal Academy Schools, and were heated and lit by paraffin stoves and lamps. Because Hockney had a bit of money and a nice flat, all the friends graduated there for tea parties and evenings of beer and tittle-tattle, and “going over to Hockney’s” soon became the norm. “As I suddenly had this big apartment,” Hockney recalls, “it was very attractive to all my friends and the doorbell was always ringing. They knew I was always there, and they would come in and sit down and I would just carry on painting, but I would say to them, ‘Well, if you’d like a cup of tea, make a cup of tea and I’ll have one too.’ That started almost as soon as I got Powis Terrace, and there was a time when I actually got rather fed up with the amount of people who came to visit.”15