Hockney saw order where others saw chaos, and his ability to carry on working surrounded by friends or by untidiness served him in good stead. “When I moved into Powis Terrace,” he remembers, “the biggest room was where I painted, and I had my little bed in the corner. At the end of the bed was a chest of drawers on which I painted a message rather carefully that said in large capital letters ‘GET UP AND WORK IMMEDIATELY.’ So the first thing I saw every morning when I woke up was the sign, and not only did I read the sign but I remembered that I had wasted two hours painting it, so I jumped out of bed.”16 In his first few months there, he was amazingly productive. One of the early pictures he worked on, The First Marriage, was an elaboration of Man in a Museum, his first double portrait. This time he placed the couple together, in an exotic honeymoon-style setting suggested by a simple palm tree, injecting life into the stylised Egyptian figure of the woman by making her look like the man’s wife “who is a bit tired and therefore sitting down.”17 A Gothic window in the bottom left-hand corner of the canvas was added to make an ecclesiastical connection with the title of the painting. In the more complex follow-up, The Second Marriage, painted on a cut-out canvas suggesting the walls of a room, the woman became more realistic, wearing a white dress and high heels, and the couple, the man in a suit and dark glasses, were placed in a stage-like domestic interior complete with curtains and wallpaper. It is a tour de force that draws viewers in and forces them into a meditation on the nature of illusion and art.
A trip to the cinema in January 1963 inspired another painting using two figures, which was even more theatrical, further developing the canvas as a stage-like setting, complete with curtains round the edge. The film was Roger Corman’s comedy horror The Raven, based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe, in which two magicians, Dr. Erasmus Craven and Dr. Adolphus Bedlo, battle for supremacy, and culminating in a scene where Dr. Craven, played by Vincent Price, uses his hands like a hypnotist and causes green electric bolts to fly between his fingertips and Peter Lorre’s. The resulting picture, The Hypnotist, shows an evil-looking practitioner casting his spell upon an innocent-looking boy who, in his long red robe, has the appearance of a young priest. The model for the hypnotist was Mark Berger. “I had just arrived in England,” he recalls, “and decided to go and visit David. As I walked in he said, ‘Quickly Mark, come here and just stand and hold your hands out in front of you like that.’ I stood there for hours, and it looks exactly like me.”18 An etching made at a later date also taught Hockney a useful lesson. “I drew the etching plate,” he wrote, “with the figures in the same positions as in the painting, but of course when it was printed it was reversed. Seeing both pictures together made me realize that even pictures are read from left to right.”19
His inventiveness knew no bounds, though he was quick to acknowledge his debt to other work. Kasmin had been badgering him to paint his portrait, but not till he saw Apollo Killing Cyclops by the Italian baroque artist Domenichino in the National Gallery did Hockney figure out how he could do it. It portrays an elderly man seated on a chair, his cat at his feet, in front of a tapestry depicting a dramatic episode from Greek mythology. The floor space between the bottom of the tapestry and the edge of the canvas is shallow, just enough for the cat to sit on and to create a trompe l’oeil effect whereby you can imagine the old man getting up and walking out of the picture. No such luck for Kasmin in Play Within a Play, which depicts him standing in front of a tapestry of Hockney’s own invention, yet trapped behind a sheet of glass. David’s thinking was, “Well, he’s been pressing me to do his portrait. I’ll put him in and I’ll press him.”20 The glass was real and to depict the effect of Kasmin’s face, hands and clothes pressed against the back of it, David added another level of unreality with painted marks on the front of the glass. “I must admit,” he wrote later, “I think of it as one of the more complex and successful pictures of that period.”21
Bradford seemed a long way away now to David, and his parents were seeing little of him, something they both took for granted. Laura wrote him weekly letters, though she didn’t always get a reply, but he was usually home for Christmas. “David arrived about 8pm,” she wrote in her diary on 21 December 1962. “He has made 10 special etchings of Rumplestiltskin [sic]—his version—not to sell, but as gifts, which makes them more valuable. We received the No 1 copy, Paul and Jean no. 2 and so on to others. I have bought a very nice telephone list for David …”22 After Christmas he returned to London, and the unusually harsh winter of 1962–63 in which the temperature often sank to minus sixteen degrees, and in Earls Court there were reports of milkmen doing their rounds on skis. There was no central heating in Powis Terrace, which relied solely on the warmth from two coal fires.
As well as painting, Hockney was all the while still working on A Rake’s Progress, printing all the proofs himself at the Royal College, since it was now commissioned for their Lion and Unicorn Press, and the colossal workload began to affect his health. “I got ill because I was anaemic and not eating enough,” he remembers. “I was living on tins of cold baked beans.”23 Things came to a head one evening when he failed to turn up to meet Kasmin at a private view at the Rowan Gallery in Lowndes Street, Belgravia. Kasmin then telephoned Powis Terrace and got Hockney’s doctor on the line, Patrick Woodcock, a charming homosexual and socialite who relished the arts and numbered John Gielgud and Noël Coward among his patients. Woodcock insisted that Kasmin come round straight away because Hockney was complaining of pains in his right arm, and wanted to make a will in case he was having a heart attack. When Kasmin arrived at Powis Terrace, Dr. Woodcock assured him that Hockney was no more than just severely run down. “He wanted to talk to me,” Kasmin remembers, “so I went in to see him, and I said, ‘David, it seems you are feeling quite ill and your right arm hurts. I think it’s worth considering that you’ve probably been masturbating a lot and that it’s possible you’ve got a pain in your arm from overdoing it.’ ‘Oh, do you really think that?’ he asked. ‘Well, it’s possible,’ I replied, ‘and I think it might help if you got dressed and we went out to dinner.’ So I took him out to a Chinese restaurant and I said I thought it would be a good idea if we got him off the diet of bean curd and that kind of thing, so I suggested that we would eat a lot of vegetables, but that he should try one thing from the animal world. He said, ‘Well, I don’t know about that.’ I said that it could help cure his anaemia. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ I said, ‘we will go gently into it, and we’ll just share a small dish of prawns.’ So I got him to eat the prawns, and he discovered that he quite liked them.”24 It was the end of Hockney’s vegetarianism.
Life in Powis Terrace, though often chaotic, and not helped by Hockney’s lack of skills in running a house, was beginning to inspire his work. “I started painting the domestic scenes,” he recalls, “because I realised I was having a more domestic life, which is something that I needed.” Since he had also started painting figures again, he felt that doing something from life would fit nicely into this pattern, but there is a touching naivety and disconnection in these paintings, scarcely surprising considering the lack of experience that he so far had in living with anyone.
In Domestic Scene, Notting Hill, the first of these pictures, he used as models two regular visitors to Powis Terrace, Mo McDermott, now working part-time as his assistant, and his friend Ossie Clark, who was studying fashion under Professor Janey Ironside at the RCA Fashion Design School. The painting is striking in that the interior is brought to life without walls or a floor, but just through the few objects that happened to catch the artist’s eye. The truth, as Hockney explained, is that if you enter a room in which somebody is standing naked, you certainly don’t notice the wallpaper. “When you walk into a room you don’t notice everything at once and, depending on your taste, there is a descending order in which you observe things. I assume alcoholics notice the booze first, or claustrophobics the height of the ceiling, and so on. Consequently I deliberately ignored the walls, and I didn’t paint th
e floor or anything I considered wasn’t important.”25 Domestic though the scene is, it is not a cosy domesticity, the figures, one naked, Mo, and one clothed, Ossie, being curiously alien to one another.
He followed this up with another domestic fantasy combining his love of America with his deepest erotic desires. Painted long before he went to California, Domestic Scene, Los Angeles was taken from a photograph he had seen in Physique Pictorial, which he had been collecting since he was first introduced to it by Mark Berger. Though the magazine, published in Los Angeles by Bob Mizer of the Athletic Model Guild, was aimed at homosexual men, it had to be careful not to openly proclaim its market, so the resulting images, usually of virile young men pretending to be engaged in everyday domestic activities such as vacuuming, showering and washing-up, have a coyness that amused Hockney no end. “I painted Domestic Scene, Los Angeles,” he later wrote, “from a photograph in Physique Pictorial where there’s a boy with a little apron tied round his waist scrubbing the back of another boy in a rather dingy American room; I thought, that’s what a domestic scene must be like there.”26 When he finally got to LA, he found much to his delight that his picture was quite close to life.
The shower in Domestic Scene, Los Angeles was painted from life. Hockney had longed for a shower of his own ever since his first trip to New York and had one installed as soon as he moved into Powis Terrace. Almost immediately he began to include it in his pictures, and did various experiments using Mo as a model, drawing and painting both through the shower curtain and without it. “The great thing about showers,” he says, “is that you can see the body. The body is more visible in a shower, so it’s more interesting to watch somebody have a shower rather than take a bath, and that was the appeal, and of course the technical thing of painting water has always interested me, the whole subject of transparency. A lot of the paintings I was doing at that time, like the painting of Kasmin, Play Within a Play, were all about making pictures.”27
*
Ken and Laura heard nothing from Hockney till April when she recorded, “At last we have a letter from David who is still busy—says he may be up after Easter for a few days—but is using the College whilst students are on vacation for working on his etchings.” A few days later Hockney telephoned and invited his father to come down to London for the annual Aldermaston march. Laura decided this was the perfect opportunity to see her son and check out his living conditions. “We discussed my going with Ken on Thursday and staying with David,” she noted. “He has two beds, but I wrote to ask if it was convenient. He told us Anthony Armstrong-Jones, Princess Margaret’s husband, is going to photograph him for the Times on Wednesday.”28
In fact, Laura meant the Sunday Times, and this photo shoot and subsequent article were to prove one of the turning points in Hockney’s career, bringing him to the attention of a huge new audience. On 4 February 1962 the Sunday Times had launched its magazine, the first ever colour supplement to accompany an English newspaper and the brainchild of Roy Thomson, the Canadian owner, who had seen such supplements work successfully in North America. It was a colossal gamble, but the paper’s editor, Denis Hamilton, knew exactly what was wanted, “a magazine that would have little interest for anyone over forty. I had watched the build-up of brilliant new graphic design—the outpourings of art schools in the late forties and fifties. No newspaper was storming away in this field and I wanted the magazine to do so.”29
To bring reality to his vision, Hamilton appointed as editor a talented thirty-year-old, Mark Boxer, who even as a Cambridge student had developed a reputation “for being bright and gifted in an undefined way, with a suggestion of … naughtiness”30 and who recently had been editing the ultra-stylish Queen magazine. “I felt he had the necessary kind of iconoclastic attitude,” Hamilton wrote in his memoirs, “a chap I’d have to restrain rather than ginger up.”31 Boxer caused controversy almost immediately by appointing Armstrong-Jones as photographic and design adviser. Despite the rows that followed over whether or not it was right for a member of the royal family to work for a newspaper, it turned out to be an inspired choice, for not only was he a brilliant photographer, but he was brimming with ideas.
Thomson was distinctly underwhelmed by the magazine’s first issue. He “came up to Watford,” Hamilton recalled, “specially to see the first copies off the machines, and was appalled…‘This is a disaster, we’ll be a laughing stock.’ I said, ‘It doesn’t really matter, people will look at it because of its novelty. It’s what’s coming ahead that matters.’ ”32 Hamilton was right. The first six months were a disaster, with the magazine having to put up with losses running as high as £20,000 a week, together with the almost total derision of Fleet Street. One commentator, however, absolutely got the point. “Though most of the people I talked to did not like it much …” wrote Francis Williams in the New Statesman, “those under 25 liked it a good deal more. ‘You’re all much too stuffy,’ exclaimed one young woman. ‘It’s fun and it’s new. It’s interesting and it makes me want to look inside.”33 Luckily Thomson was determined to stick with it, having a cast-iron certainty that it would get better and better with each issue. His gamble paid off and after a year, with its profits and circulation finally rising, the Sunday Times had the pleasurable experience of watching the rest of Fleet Street falling over themselves to imitate it.
By the time Hockney appeared in it, the magazine was hitting its stride, introducing millions of people each week to a glossy world of youth and style, art and culture, and creating celebrities out of pop singers, hairdressers, photographers, fashion designers, writers and artists. The Sunday Times article for which Snowdon photographed him was “British Painting Now” by the art critic David Sylvester, which appeared in the 2 June edition, and in which he appeared alongside established artists like William Coldstream and Francis Bacon, and the up-and-coming school such as Harold Cohen and Frank Auerbach. While expressing his view that “David Hockney … is usually less effective in his large paintings than in his graphic work, where he is working on the scale of illustration,” Sylvester also described him as being “as bright and stylish a Pop artist as there is,”34 a label Hockney did not take kindly to, having once astonished visitors to a private view of one of his shows by shouting out loud, “I am not a pop painter!” In the accompanying photographs he was pictured wearing his gold lamé jacket. “I regret buying that bloody gold coat,” he later wrote. “For I think people thought I had worn it every day. In actual fact I only ever wore it twice. I wore it for that Gold Medal and my mother thought it was an official coat. And I wore it for some photographs Snowdon took.”35
Two days after the photo shoot, his mother got her first look at Powis Terrace, taking a taxi to carry Kenneth’s Aldermaston paraphernalia after arriving at St. Pancras just after five in the morning. “Cost 10/3d,” wrote Laura. “Ken had so much baggage and banners. David had tea and toast in a jiffy & wasn’t it welcome! He went back to bed at 6.00am—I washed up and generally cleaned up the kitchen which is very nice and modern. As soon as I thought the world was up, I vacuumed my room—a gorgeous room with such possibilities—but dowdy and in need of much attention—a divan bed but no sheets.”36 Over the next two days, while Hockney was working on his etchings at the Royal College, and Ken was busy getting everything ready for the march, Laura passed her time shopping for sheets at Pontings and sightseeing—she walked through Hyde Park, explored Portobello Road, and spent a frustrating time failing to find a Methodist chapel. Then on Saturday night “about 11:15 p.m. door bell rang & there was Kenneth—looking very tired and worried. His rucksack and contents—also large banners—had been stolen—value nearly £20 from behind a tent where he had foolishly left them unattended.”37
After this unfortunate event things began to look up. While Hockney and Kenneth went off marching, on Easter Sunday Laura spent her time in the local Salvation Army chapel, and went to a service at Methodist Central Hall in Westminster. On Monday she visited the Houses of Parliament and took a trip
up the Thames before making her way to Hyde Park in time to see the CND marchers arrive at Marble Arch. Before they returned home on Tuesday night, Hockney gave each of his parents a special treat. For Laura it was lunch at the Vega (“I enjoyed that very much!!” she noted in her diary), while for Ken this was followed by a trip to the pictures, to see The Best of Cinerama at the Casino Cinerama cinema in Soho.
Laura mentions Hockney’s work several times: he was almost finished with A Rake’s Progress. After his parents had left, however, he felt that he had to make one more trip to New York in order to successfully complete the series. In return for one edition of the completed work, Kasmin paid for the voyage, and at the end of April, Hockney set off on the Queen Elizabeth, one of the two transatlantic liners of Cunard’s White Star Line. On arrival in New York, he went to stay with Jeff Goodman and spent time looking around for ideas. He made two more etchings at the Pratt Institute: number 7, titled Disintegration, in which the dissolution of the Rake is presented graphically through his depiction as a limbless bust; and 7A, in which the bust is then Cast Aside, to be devoured by a dragon. With these the series was finally complete.
One afternoon, Hockney and Goodman went down to look at a show on East 74th Street at the Stable Gallery, the name of which derived from its original location in a former livery stable on West 58th Street, a place where on damp days the smell of horse urine was said still to linger. It was owned by the New York art dealer Eleanor Ward, who had nurtured the careers of many abstract expressionists and had employed Robert Rauschenberg as a janitor before eventually giving him his own show. In November 1962, she had given Andy Warhol his first New York exhibition of pop art, which included paintings of Marilyn Monroe, Campbell’s soup cans, Coke cans and dollar bills. On the day Hockney visited, Warhol happened to be in the gallery and they were introduced. Warhol immediately invited him and Goodman to come that evening to his Upper East Side house on Lexington Avenue.
David Hockney Page 14
