To tie in with the Royal Court opening, Kasmin put on a show of the original drawings for the sets and costumes, described by Paul Overy in the Listener as being “gay, witty and lightweight.”38 He combined it with the first exhibition of the Cavafy etchings, which certain people found perplexing. Hockney was in the gallery one day when two old ladies came in, and they asked him to explain to them why two men were sitting on the bed in the same room. “The thing is,” Hockney replied mischievously, “they are very hard up and they have to share a room.” The Cavafys were generally admired, although, given the subject matter, they were slow to sell, but, as Overy pointed out, “Hockney concentrates on presenting homosexual liaisons as something completely normal and acceptable. To do this requires a courage one must admire …”39 It was to be Hockney’s last show with Kasmin for a while, because when he flew back to California at the end of the month he was not to return to England for a whole year.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A BIGGER SPLASH
Peter in Carennac, 1967 (illustration credit 8.1)
Hockney’s first move on his return to LA was to find himself an apartment of his own, where eventually he might also live with Peter Schlesinger. The place he found, in a very seedy part of the city near to the junction of Pico and Crenshaw Boulevards, was a run-down little house that had been converted from a garage. Dirt cheap, it had concrete floors, a bedroom, a tiny kitchen and bathroom, and a room at the front to use as a studio. When the gas stove was lit, cockroaches dived for cover. There was no phone. Instead Hockney took a leaf out of his father’s book. “It had a telephone booth right outside,” he remembers, “and I just kept all my quarters and dimes so I could make phone calls. I didn’t have that many phone calls anyway. People didn’t in those days. I just went to see people in person.”1 It was in this scruffy little studio/apartment, in one of his most prolific periods, between the summers of 1966 and ’67, that Hockney painted some of his most iconic paintings.
The first of these was Beverly Hills Housewife, an enormous twelve-foot-long picture which, the studio being so tiny, had to be painted on two canvases and which, as Hockney remembered, “I could never get more than about five feet away from …”2 It is the modern-day equivalent, as Henry Geldzahler later described it, of those “grandes machines” from the heyday of the Paris Salon in the nineteenth century, “impressively large paintings grandly conceived to show the artist’s strength.”3 The subject was Betty Freeman, the daughter of a chemical engineer, Robert I. Wishnick, who had made a fortune in Chicago. Inspired by the example of her father, who gave away large amounts of his money to hospitals and educational establishments, she dedicated her life to supporting people in the sphere of the arts which she loved most, contemporary music, and over the years commissioned works from many of the world’s most famous modern composers, such as John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Harrison Birtwistle and Steve Reich.
She and Hockney had been introduced by Jack Larson during his first visit to LA. “She used to have these kind of concerts on Sunday afternoons,” Hockney recalls, “and sometimes they were almost like a joke. I remember one afternoon when there was this event which consisted of just one note going on and on and on for hours and hours and people just sat there and didn’t really know what to do. I think it was by Harry Partch, a composer she had rescued off the streets. Then Betty would come in and say, ‘You can talk if you want to.’ If you did, it then just sounded like there was a washing machine going on in the other room. I was very amused by this of course, but I loved Betty because she was interested in painting and music.”4 Still in the throes of his love affair with the very newness of Los Angeles, he first asked Mrs. Freeman if he might paint her very glamorous swimming pool. When he arrived at her house to do some preliminary sketches, however, he found himself seduced by her entire surroundings—the open-plan inside-outside house, the lush plants, the perfect lawn and the belongings (already hinted at in his entirely invented California Art Collector), which included a William Turnbull sculpture, the head of an antelope bagged by her husband and a Le Corbusier chaise longue. Since Hockney was carrying an early Polaroid Land camera, he persuaded Betty to pose for him in front of the house.
This was one of the first instances of Hockney using the camera as a tool to help compose a picture. Though he had previously taken many photographs, using a tiny Kodak Instamatic, they were mostly holiday snaps. From this out-of-focus, rather badly lit black-and-white print, he composed an extraordinary painting which, though it does not name the sitter, was his first naturalistic portrait for many years, and the first of a series of paintings which, to millions of people, were to be the evocation of California. Betty Freeman loved the finished work and liked to joke that she was “just one of the artistic objects on display.”5
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Hockney’s image of California as a carefree land of sunshine, affluence and leisure is indicated in the series of paintings featuring swimming pools on which he now embarked. He saw the swimming pool as the embodiment of the foreigner’s view that he had of the country, and he began meticulous observations of the water in the pools he saw. “Water in a swimming pool is different from, say, water in the river, which is mostly a reflection because the water isn’t clear. A swimming pool has clarity. The water is transparent and drawing transparency is an interesting graphic problem. I noticed that with the sun on the pool you got these dancing lines, so I would sit watching the surface of the pool and draw what I saw and then I would go and paint it. I drew with coloured pencils, or I would just work with an ordinary pencil. The problem is, how do you represent water in the pool graphically?”6
Though there was no photography used in the swimming-pool paintings, because the camera “freezes” water, which was not the effect he was after, he did continue to use it as an aide-memoire, typically in one of his first paintings featuring Schlesinger, Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool. “I didn’t ever pose in the pool,” Schlesinger remembers, “which is why the painting looks a little weird, especially the legs underwater, because I was actually posed against the hood of my car. Then he put two paintings together.”7
Photography was used in a similar fashion in another important painting of this period, Portrait of Nick Wilder. Hockney’s friend Mark Lancaster, an English artist who had worked for Andy Warhol, took photographs of Wilder standing in his pool as studies for what was to be Hockney’s first explicit portrait since that of his father, painted in 1955. The picture, which shows the upper torso of Wilder emerging from the pool like a Roman bust, perfectly captures the Californian light, with the overwhelming brightness of the sun creating extremely dark shadows. For Hockney it was something of a breakthrough. “To me, moving into more naturalism was freedom,” he wrote. “I thought, if I want to, I could paint a portrait; this is what I mean by freedom … I could even paint a strange little abstract picture. It would all fit into my concept of painting as an art. A lot of painters can’t do that … To me a lot of painters were trapping themselves; they were picking such a narrow aspect of painting and specializing in it. And it’s a trap. Now there’s nothing wrong with the trap if you have the courage to leave it.”8
The more closely Hockney observed water, the more fascinated he became; but it was a photograph that inspired his next depiction of the subject. While leafing through a book about the construction of swimming pools which he found on a Hollywood news-stand, he came across a photograph of a splash, and immediately thought what a good subject it would be for a painting. “What amused me was the fact that the splash only lasts a very, very short time,” Hockney recalls, “and a photograph can freeze it, and that’s not what it’s like. When you paint it, you can make it flow. That is the difference, and that is what I was doing.”9 The first painting of this series, The Little Splash, was a tiny picture, two foot by one foot, and was painted quite quickly, in a couple of days. It was closely followed by The Splash, which was a bit bigger and more fully realised, giving more emphasis to the background. With hindsight, Hockney d
ecided that this version was too fussy, with the background, in which you can see the landscape, detracting from the subject, so he now chose to paint an even bigger, eight-foot-square version, using a simpler building and very strong light.
A Bigger Splash turned out to be one of Hockney’s most enduring images, a painting securely established as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century art. It is a mesmerising depiction of order and chaos. On a hot, still, cloudless day, with the sun at its highest in the sky, the heat at its most intense and the surface of the water in the swimming pool mill-pond calm, a diver has leapt from the diving board and disappeared into the depths of the pool, gone for ever, his existence marked only by a violent eruption of water that is in complete contrast to the ongoing stillness of the scene. To emphasise this contrast, Hockney put the paint on using rollers, except for the splash. “… the splash itself is painted with small brushes and little lines,” he wrote. “It took me about two weeks to paint. I loved the idea, first of all, of painting like Leonardo, all his studies of water, swirling things. And I loved the idea of painting this thing that lasts for two seconds … the effect of it as it got bigger was more stunning.”10
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In the summer of 1966, Schlesinger had returned to Santa Cruz to continue his studies, and Hockney would visit him there at weekends, trips which were immortalised in a series of beautiful drawings, such as Peter in Santa Cruz, which demonstrate his ever-increasing skill with a line. Among these, perhaps the most sublime is Dream Inn, Santa Cruz, a touching portrait of Schlesinger asleep on a bed, the tranquillity and gentleness of which says everything about the happiness of the relationship. It is a remarkably accomplished drawing, in which he breathes life into his lover’s body with an astonishing economy of line. Hockney didn’t have to wait long for them to be permanently reunited, since Schlesinger was becoming increasingly disenchanted with the lack of any art teaching at Santa Cruz, and was missing Hockney. At the end of the term he made the decision to transfer down to UCLA, which he was able to do quickly thanks to the help of Hockney’s friend Bill Brice, an influential teacher there who pulled a few strings.
So at the beginning of 1967, Schlesinger moved into the Pico Boulevard apartment and began his art course. He had to explain his new living arrangements to his parents, to whom he was close. “I was living with David,” Schlesinger recalls, “but I pretended to my parents that I wasn’t. Then they found out what was going on, and there were fights and arguments and they eventually said I had to go and see a psychiatrist. They sent me to see someone I knew, and I went for a while, but I hated doing it because I didn’t feel I had a problem that needed changing.”11 These sessions kept his parents off his back, but amounted to little more than hours of gossiping about mutual friends. The person who helped Schlesinger most was Nick Wilder. “My father once went to see Nick to say he was worried about me, and Nick said to him, ‘Your son is with a very wonderful person and would you rather have him hustling on Santa Monica Boulevard?’ and that was one thing that helped my father see my relationship in context, because Nick, being naturally drawn to the underworld of LA, knew all of that scene of hustling.”12
Although Hockney had shared apartments before, this was the first time that he had ever lived with a lover and it was quite a steep learning curve, since Hockney was a self-confessed slob, and Schlesinger was naturally neat and tidy. For Hockney, it was a blissful period. With Schlesinger out at school, he would paint all day, then go out in the evenings to eat, returning home to a bed which was as much a place to read as to sleep or make love. Unable to go to bars since Schlesinger was underage, they kept the fridge stocked with Californian white wine. Sometimes they would go to Nick Wilder’s for a swim, and hang out with the young and beautiful boys who were invariably to be found there. They went to the cinema a lot, and visited friends, in particular Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, and Jack Larson and Jim Bridges, Hockney regarding both of these couples as role models when it came to successful gay relationships. “The six of us spent many hilarious evenings together,” wrote Schlesinger, “often at a little Japanese restaurant where they would sneak me sake, illicitly.”13 “Looking back on it,” Hockney wrote, “it was certainly the happiest year I spent in California, and it was the worst place we lived in.”14
In the first few months of 1967, Hockney worked on A Bigger Splash and Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool, as well as new paintings such as A Lawn Sprinkler and Four Different Kinds of Water. Then he went off to teach three days a week of the summer term at Berkeley, the oldest part of the University of California, on the east shore of San Francisco Bay. Here they gave him a studio and put him up in a hotel on Telegraph Avenue. It was quite a different experience from his previous posts, because he was teaching graduates, who proved to be an interesting group, and included Joel Perlman, who went on to become a successful sculptor, and the painters Alan Turner and Mary Heilman. In addition, it was an extraordinary time to be in the San Francisco area, then at the centre of the phenomenon that has come to be known as the “Summer of Love.” This had its origins in the Golden Gate Park, where on 14 January 1967, tens of thousands of young people came together on a glorious sunny day to celebrate a Gathering of the Tribes, a Human Be-In, at which Timothy Leary addressed the crowd and encouraged them to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” By the summer, the message had reached 100,000 people, who had variously made their way to San Francisco in a haze of marijuana, LSD and flower petals.
Although he was aware of it, the counter-culture affected Hockney very little, though he did occasionally attend anti-Vietnam War meetings. He was too busy teaching, painting in his studio and flying back at the weekends to see Schlesinger. Occasionally he would stray from the path of true love. “Sometimes I can remember I would have gone to bed in my hotel and then woke up thinking, ‘I’m feeling a bit horny,’ and I’d get up, get in the car and drive over to San Francisco and check into the Embarcadero YMCA, which is cheap, and it was an amazing place. All you had to do was check in and you got this tiny little room for about three dollars, and if you went for a shower and it was three in the morning, as soon as they heard the shower going, there would be two or three other guys who’d come and join you and you got what you wanted pretty quickly. I just thought this was amazing. This is America.”15
Hockney completed A Bigger Splash in Berkeley, before beginning a new work, another painting featuring Schlesinger. Leafing through the San Francisco Chronicle one day, he had come across an advertisement for Macy’s department store, which used a colour shot of a room to advertise furniture. “The photograph caught my eye,” he wrote, “because it was so simple and such a direct view, although it’s got angles in it … I thought it’s marvellous, it’s like a piece of sculpture, I must use it.”16 Directly transcribed to the canvas, it showed a room furnished with a single bed, a side table and a rug, with the light coming from an open window in the top right-hand corner. Hockney’s next thought was that there should be someone on the bed, so he summoned Schlesinger to fly up to Berkeley for the weekend and photographed him lying on a table at the correct angle, naked from the waist down. The two images were then put together.
The finished work was named after the town where Edgar Rice Burroughs lived and wrote the Tarzan books. “He called the painting The Room, Tarzana,” Schlesinger recalls, “because I was from Encino and Tarzana was the next-door community. I didn’t want him to call it The Room, Encino as I thought my parents might see it and recognise it as being me. David was of course quite oblivious to any of these fears and couldn’t care less what my parents thought or anything.”17 Since the painting is undeniably erotic, presenting him as a sex-object lying face down on the bed, passive, his eyes open and buttocks bare, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and a pair of white sports socks, Schlesinger’s caution is understandable. Though many people have cited Reclining Girl, Boucher’s 1751 portrait of the child-courtesan Marie-Louise O’Murphy, as an obvious reference for this painting, Hockney denies this, sayin
g, “I knew the painting, of course, but it wasn’t in my mind at the time.”18
The Room, Tarzana is important because of the way Hockney used light and shade to create perspective. There are no shadows in A Bigger Splash, nor in Portrait of Nick Wilder, though there are hints of shadow in Beverly Hills Housewife. “… because of this light dancing around,” he wrote of this painting, “I realised the light in the room was a subject and for the first time it became an interesting thing for me, light. Consequently I had to arrange Peter so the light was coming from the direction of the window … I remember being struck by it as I was painting it; real light; this is the first time I’m taking any notice of shadows and light. After that it begins to get stronger in the pictures.”19
In the early summer, with his teaching contract at an end, Hockney ended his tenancy in Pico Boulevard and decided to give Schlesinger the treat that he wanted more than anything else, which was to make his first trip to Europe, and to travel by sea. They sailed cabin class on the RMS Queen Elizabeth, then the largest passenger ship in the world. Schlesinger was entranced by the decor, with its wood panelling and curved surfaces, which he labelled “Dowdy Deco,” and was thrilled when they passed the Queen Elizabeth’s sister ship the Queen Mary mid-ocean, with much sounding of horns. In the dining room they shared a table for the whole journey with a Mr. and Mrs. Wally Warwick from Allentown, Pennsylvania. “They didn’t say much,” Hockney recalls, “but I remember that he collected wooden decoy ducks. They said they were coming to Europe and going to go to Switzerland. I said I’d assumed that they would go to Italy as I thought all Americans went to Italy, and Mrs. Warwick said no, she didn’t like Italy because of what the Italians did in the war. She said they were no respecters of authority. Well, I told her that as far as I was concerned, that was one of their more charming characteristics.”20
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