David Hockney

by Christopher Simon Sykes

  He flew to Chicago to meet Hockney, who was under the impression they were heading for New Orleans. “No, we’re going to California to see the Beatles,” said Clark. “I realised,” Hockney remembers, “that as Ossie couldn’t drive, I would be doing all the driving, and it’s a very long way, about two thousand miles. I remember saying to him, ‘Well, we’ll have to drive long, long hours, so can you keep me entertained?’ In those days you couldn’t pick up that much music on the radio. It was mostly apple pie recipes and things like that so I asked him to make up gossip, anything to keep me awake, which he did for the most part, though there was one moment driving through Nevada when I fell asleep and we ran off the road. Well, we got there and then I found out that he didn’t have tickets, just this note, and I thought, ‘This is the Hollywood Bowl. Will we get in?’ ” Epstein’s note worked: they did get in, and saw the Beatles in style. “We were sitting in the front row, and it was terrific.”36

  Derek Boshier was living in San Francisco at the time, and after the show, Hockney called him and asked if he would like to join the trip, to which Boshier readily agreed. While they waited for him to arrive, Hockney showed Clark the sights. “Disneyland,” Clark noted in his diary; “mistaken for a Beatle on a trip to the moon to escape the excitement of the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl. Bette Davis in the flesh; Mrs. Dennis Hopper; Beach Boys, Surf City; art hype; The Tumble Inn Motel, Santa Monica; Hard Days Night—6 no 1 hits, The Beatles.”37

  Three days later, the trio set off, their first stop being the Grand Canyon, where Hockney did a tiny drawing in a notebook, Ossie and Derek in Grand Canyon, which he gave to Boshier. In 1964, the U.S. counterculture hadn’t spread much beyond the big cities, so both Clark and Hockney had to put up with ridicule throughout the 1,300-mile drive, particularly in the more redneck areas. This was especially true of Clark. “I remember that wherever we went,” says Hockney, “whenever we sat down in a restaurant, everyone thought Ossie was a woman, because he had long hair, and nobody had long hair in those days. None of us really cared when they made fun of us. We thought it was quite amusing and we gave up on it.”38 Clark also had a penchant for wearing crushed-velvet coats and chiffon scarves, and in the Neiman Marcus store in Houston, where the gang had stopped to buy mirrors which looked like the front cover of Time magazine, the assistant who served them said she didn’t need their addresses to ship the mirrors: “Don’t worry, I’ll just send them to Camelot.”

  As they drove through the Deep South, they saw another side of life in America. “We passed through terrible areas of rural poverty,” Boshier recalls, “and it was very noticeable that all the blacks we saw had their heads bowed.” When they finally got close to New Orleans, and passed the sign welcoming them to the city, they did what had become routine, which was to switch on the radio to the local station so that they would get the music of the area. “So we turned the radio on when we saw the New Orleans sign,” Boshier remembers, “and the first song that came on, which had just been released that very week, was the Animals singing ‘There is a house in New Orleans,’ the opening lines of Bob Dylan’s ‘House of the Rising Sun.’ I’ll never forget that. The New Orleans sign was there and the record was playing, and I thought that was great.” Here Boshier decided it was time to part company. “I said to the others I was going to go off and find some girls, and I was going to leave them to do whatever they wanted.”39

  After a short stay with Ferrill Amacker in New Orleans, Hockney and Clark drove to New York, where Hockney had his first American show at the Alan Gallery, selling all the paintings he had completed in Los Angeles as well as Iowa, Arizona and Cubist Boy with Colourful Tree, which were painted in Iowa. Clark, on a permanent high, was thrilled to meet Paul Newman, Diana Vreeland, then editor of American Vogue, and Andy Warhol at the opening. He also hung out with the band of the moment, the Velvet Underground, got an appointment with John Kloss, one of the hottest young designers in New York, and met the artist Robert Indiana, who gave him a bolt of cloth printed with his own op art design, which he was to use to great effect in his degree show the following summer.

  Hockney used the time to consolidate his friendship with Henry Geldzahler, who took him round the galleries and amused him with tales of his various adventures, which had included starring in one of Warhol’s films, in which he had to sit on a sofa in the Factory smoking a cigar and staring at the camera for hours while Andy busied himself making phone calls, occasionally returning to check that the camera was still running.

  Yet despite the excitements of the trip, when Hockney and Clark finally returned to London in early October, they were barely speaking. “I think he found David very difficult to be with all the time,” Celia Birtwell recalls. “I think he didn’t like the fact that the trip was very much on David’s terms. He had won £150, and that was all the money he had, so after that ran out he really had to do what he was told.”40 He called Birtwell and begged her to come back to him, telling her how much he had missed her and how tired he was of the lifestyle he had been leading. Within a few weeks he had moved in to the flat she was renting in St. Quintin Avenue, where they were to enjoy their happiest months together. Hockney returned to Powis Terrace, which he set about smartening up in expectation of an imminent visit from his parents, whom he had not seen for nine months.

  Kenneth and Laura Hockney had two reasons to visit London in November 1964: firstly to meet Margaret, off the boat from Australia, where she had been visiting Philip, who had emigrated there. Secondly, Ken had a demonstration to attend. “We found David’s flat beautifully decorated,” wrote Laura in her diary on 12 November; “unfortunately heater not fixed in lounge—but kitchen was complete and warm.” Over the next few days, while awaiting Margaret’s arrival, she filled her time shopping in the Portobello Road, visiting the Commonwealth Institute, attending the Lord Mayor’s Show and engaging in her customary maternal tasks. “After meal, gathered up David’s washing & took to launderette—what a wash! Guess he’s been so busy decorating, no time to launder.”41

  When Ken and Laura departed to met Margaret at Tilbury Docks, Hockney got back to work in his Powis Terrace studio on a picture that would remind him of what he was missing. It was Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool, and was based on drawings that he had done on his return to California after Iowa, when he had become fascinated by the squiggly lines created by the reflections of water in swimming pools and the problems of how to paint water. “It is a formal problem to represent water,” he wrote, “to describe water, because it can be anything—it can be any colour, it’s moveable, it has no set visual description. I just used my drawings for these paintings, and my head invented.”42 He was happy to admit that in these first paintings of water, when struggling to work out the best way to depict it, he was influenced by some of the later work of Dubuffet, and by what he referred to as Bernard Cohen’s “Spaghetti Paintings,” such as Fable and Alonging. This influence is also clearly seen in another pool painting, California, with its squiggles and jigsaw-like shapes.

  While his fascination with swimming pools was to become a major theme of Hockney’s work, at this very moment he was temporarily distracted by a niggling anxiety that his work might not be considered sufficiently contemporary. Though this was partly just the insecurity of the young, it was also boosted by the fact that he only had to look at Kasmin’s other artists, such as Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella, Jules Olitski and Anthony Caro, to see that he was the only figurative artist in the stable. “I have never thought my painting advanced,” he commented, “but in 1964 I still consciously wanted to be involved, if only peripherally, with modernism.”43 So he fleetingly flirted with abstraction, beginning with Different Kinds of Water Pouring into a Swimming Pool, Santa Monica and following on with a series of still lifes, such as Blue Interior and Two Still Lifes and Portrait Surrounded by Artistic Devices, in which he explored the different possible interpretations of Cezanne’s famous remark that he wanted to “treat nature by the sphere, the cylinder, the
cone.” “The ‘artistic devices,’ ” Hockney wrote, “are images and elements of my own and other artists’ work and ideas of the time … All these paintings were, in a way, influenced by American abstractionists, particularly Kenneth Noland, whom I’d got to know through Kasmin who was showing him. I was trying to take note of these paintings. The still lifes were started with the abstraction in mind, and they’re all done the same way as Kenneth Noland’s, stained acrylic paint on raw cotton duck, and things like that.”44

  A second series of still lifes, titled A Realistic Still Life, A More Realistic Still Life and A Less Realistic Still Life, was completed in Boulder, Colorado, in the summer of 1965, where Hockney had been invited to teach at the university. He flew first to New York, accompanied by Patrick Procktor, who was fresh from his second one-man show at the Redfern Gallery and on his way to follow in Hockney’s footsteps teaching in Iowa. Patrick was a flamboyant figure, an eighteenth-century dandy transported into the twentieth century. Born in Dublin, the son of an accountant for Anglo-Iranian Oil, he chose to do his national service in the navy, where he learned to speak Russian. He eventually graduated to becoming a Russian interpreter with the British Council, in which post he was quite happy to indulge the fantasies of those of his friends who thought he was a spy. Openly homosexual and a talented artist, who studied at the Slade under the landscape painter Kyffin Williams, he was immensely tall, with gangly legs, a long sensitive face, expressive hands and slim fingers which he used to eloquent purpose, and a sharp fantastical wit. Hockney had found him stimulating company since they first met at the Young Contemporaries show in 1962. They were part of the same bohemian circle, and Procktor was the occasional lover of Michael Upton, now married to Hockney’s great friend Anne McKechnie. “The thing that I loved about Patrick was his flamboyance,” Hockney remembers. “I also liked him because he could mock the art world. He felt he was a bit more outside it than I was, and anybody who mocks pomposity I’m attracted to.”45

  It was Patrick’s first trip to New York, which he initially hated. “It seemed hideously ugly, hard and rude,” he later wrote, “and their art was repulsive to me … Apart from looking at art, David and I rushed through a lot of low life, downtown.”46 They stayed with Mark Berger in his apartment in the Bowery, a loft with enormous rooms to paint in, and Hockney gave Procktor a four-day whirlwind tour, visiting all the museums, meeting artists and eating out a lot—they were constantly hungry as Mark had nothing in his refrigerator but macrobiotic food. Hockney sold some etchings to the Museum of Modern Art and used the money to buy another car, a plum-and-cream Oldsmobile Starfire convertible with polychrome metallic plum upholstery, the Falcon having been ditched the previous autumn. “It was about six or seven years old,” Hockney remembers, “an enormous car with a seven-litre engine. It did about twelve miles to the gallon, but since gas was only thirty cents a gallon then, that didn’t matter, and it had an electric roof and electric windows, which in 1965 was very rare.”47 “It was rather an outrageous car,” wrote Procktor, “and got some stares by the time we reached rural Iowa where we were asked, ‘Why are you driving that flash nigra car?’ ”48

  Patrick Procktor (illustration credit 6.2)

  After dropping Procktor off in Iowa City, Hockney made his way to Boulder, which turned out to be a much bigger and livelier place than Iowa. The university, founded at the same time as the state of Colorado in 1876, had a spectacular setting against the background of the Flatirons, a range of impressive rock formations which run along the eastern slope of Green Mountain, with the Rockies rearing up behind. Though the faculty had given him a large studio in which to work, to Hockney’s amusement it had no windows, something that immediately reminded him of his trip to Italy with Michael Kullman, trapped in the back of a van. “Here I am surrounded by these beautiful Rocky Mountains,” he recalled, “I go into the studio—no window! And all I need is a couple of little windows.”49 His typically witty response was to paint Rocky Mountains and Tired Indians, a picture entirely invented from geological magazines and his own romantic ideas, there being no Indians within three hundred miles of Boulder. The plastic and metal chair in the painting was put in for compositional reasons, and, to explain its presence, he dubbed the Indians “tired.”

  Hockney enjoyed his time in Colorado. He found himself a lover, a nineteen-year-old American student called Dale Chisman, who, after a car accident, was lucky enough to have been exempted from the Vietnam draft. This dark cloud hung over all male students of eligible age in 1965, a year in which the number of ground troops deployed to Vietnam rose dramatically from 3,500 to 200,000. “Dale became a friend because he was lively,” Hockney remembers, “and anyone who was lively was someone you hooked up with. Students like Dale made the place, so I would be hanging out with them outside the college.”50 His friend Norman Stevens came to stay, and there was also a visit from another of Kasmin’s artists, Colin Self, who was in the U.S. on a painting trip. When Procktor’s residency in Iowa was over, he too drove over to Boulder, with his own student lover, Dick Mountain, whose ambition was to go to San Francisco and become a drag queen. They spent a few days in Boulder, exploring the Rockies, where Hockney gave Dick the nickname “Pike’s Peak” after one of the higher mountains, and driving up to Central City, an old gold-mining town near Aspen. At the end of the trip, all five, together with Dale Chisman, piled into the Oldsmobile, which had bench seats, making for plenty of room, and drove to San Francisco, a thrilling journey taking in mountainous twisting roads, broad highways and numerous motels. When they reached San Francisco they stayed at the Embarcadero YMCA, which was cheap, if not to the taste of Stevens and Self, who found it much too gay.

  After a few days enjoying the sights of San Francisco and its gay bars, Hockney and Procktor left the others and drove down to LA, where Procktor had to fulfil a commission from Joan Cohn, the wealthy widow of Harry Cohn, former head of Columbia Pictures, to paint a mural for the cinema in her home in Beverly Hills. This had come about through his friendship with her lover and soon-to-be husband, the actor Laurence Harvey, star of such films as Room at the Top, Walk on the Wild Side and The Manchurian Candidate. Harvey was a bisexual who strung along his long-term lover and manager, James Woolf, through three career marriages, and once confessed to Jack Larson that he considered women to be “extortionate creatures.” He had befriended Procktor the previous year while he was appearing onstage in London in Camelot at the Drury Lane Theatre, and had bought some of his paintings from the Redfern Gallery. Patrick was suitably impressed. “Laurence Harvey was at the height of his fame,” he wrote, “and a darling.”51

  To begin with they stayed at the Tumble Inn, where they were eventually joined by Stevens and Self, who stayed for a few days, dining with Isherwood and Bachardy, going to see Bob Dylan at the Hollywood Bowl and hanging out at the beach. “We didn’t have that much money but it was all very exciting,” Hockney recalls. “I remember we were on this beach in Santa Monica, just up by Santa Monica Canyon. It was a high school beach, and there was this very pretty California girl lying on the sand. Colin was looking at her and he told me that she had inspired him for a work he was going to do called ‘Nuclear Victim.’ I couldn’t see the connection. Anyway, he did her as a shrivelled-up corpse.”52 Eventually Stevens and Self took the Greyhound bus back to New York, leaving Hockney and Procktor to move into a guest house which Joan Cohn had lent them in the grounds of her home. Hockney immediately nicknamed it the “Little Grey Home in the West.” Soon after their arrival there, they were invited up to dinner in the main house, where they enjoyed a real Hollywood evening. “The dining room looked wonderful: the waiter wore white gloves, the knives and forks and even the dishes were gold,” Procktor recalled. “The food was hamburgers. Joan smiled and said she hoped we thought that this was typically American, and she added that the steak had been flown in from Maine. After dinner they played a gramophone record of Larry’s, where he read love poetry over a romantic orchestral accompaniment, for an ho
ur. They were so very much in love.”53

  While Procktor was working on his painting, Hockney was approached by Ken Tyler, a printmaker, who had his own atelier, Gemini Ltd., on Melrose Avenue. Tyler had attended the Art Institute of Chicago, and studied lithography at the John Herron School of Art in Indiana, graduating with a master’s degree in 1963 and then studying with the French master printer Marcel Durassier, who had worked with both Picasso and Miró. He opened Gemini in 1965 and his strong emphasis on the importance of technique soon began to attract many of the greats of the American art scene, such as Josef Albers, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. His approach to Hockney was for a series of lithographs with a Los Angeles theme. The only problem was a lack of finance, as his backer had just pulled out leaving him high and dry. Hockney, who had immediately liked Tyler and been greatly impressed by the quality of his work, called Paul Cornwall-Jones in London and had little difficulty in persuading him to agree to pay for and publish the edition.

  What Hockney came up with was a typical example of his subversive wit, a set of six prints that poked fun at the kind of Beverly Hills collectors who bought art either for social prestige or financial investment. He called it A Hollywood Collection and it was his idea of an instant art collection, pre-packaged for a Hollywood starlet, and because Gemini was situated behind a framer’s shop, he drew appropriate frames as part of the prints. Each lithograph is an imitation of a framed picture representing a particular genre. The titles speak for themselves: Picture of a Still Life that has an Elaborate Silver Frame, Picture of a Landscape in an Elaborate Gold Frame, Picture of a Portrait in a Silver Frame, Picture of Melrose Avenue in an Ornate Gold Frame, Picture of a Simply Framed Traditional Nude Drawing and Picture of a Pointless Abstraction Framed under Glass. Once again his versatility and his fertile imagination triumphed.