In 1968, Hockney had had one-man shows not only with Kasmin in London, but also at the Galerie Mikro in Berlin and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, not to mention appearing in group shows such as the Venice Biennale and Young Generation: Great Britain at Akademie der Kunst in Berlin; and in February 1969 the prestigious Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester gave him a mini retrospective, showing twenty-eight paintings together with a selection of prints. His ever growing international reputation now meant that his pictures were selling as fast as he could produce them, and his earnings were commensurate with this.
Much of his money came from the lucrative sale of his prints, and in March 1969, he began work on his next major set of etchings, a project that was to take up the rest of the year, to the exclusion of any painting. In December 1962, he had made his limited edition etching of Rumpelstiltskin, the strange gnomish character from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which he had loved as a child, giving them away as Christmas presents to his family and friends. Ever since then, he had wanted to illustrate a selection from the fairy tales, and eventually he suggested the idea to Paul Cornwall-Jones, who had by now split from his partners in Alecto to start a new imprint, Petersburg Press. Cornwall-Jones was only too happy to work with Hockney again and immediately started setting up the structure for the publication, bringing in Gordon House, who had designed the catalogues for the Kasmin shows, and the typographer Eric Ayers as the design team. “David wanted new original translations from the German,” Cornwall-Jones recalls. “He first suggested Isherwood should do it, so I went to see him but he didn’t want to do it. He then suggested asking Wystan Auden, but he wasn’t interested either. So I commissioned Heiner Bastian, a German who had been working at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, and he worked on it with me and my wife Tammy.”37
Hockney found the tales entrancing. After reading all 239, and researching various illustrated editions, notably those by Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, he initially chose twenty stories, of which fifteen were translated and twelve made the final list. He picked the stories, a number of them quite obscure, entirely for the vividness of the images they conjured up for him. “Old Rinkrank,” for example, begins: “A King built a glass mountain and announced he would give his daughter to the first man who could climb it without falling.” Just as Hockney was fascinated by painting water, so he was with the equally difficult technical problems of representing glass. He had always loved the verse from “The Elixir” by the mystical poet George Herbert, which runs:
A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye,
Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heav’n espy.
“That’s why … I chose the story of Old Rink Rank, about the glass mountain,” he told Mark Glazebrook in an interview. “I liked the problem of how to draw and represent a glass mountain. That was a nice little problem to give myself.”38 While trying to solve it, he made six or seven versions of the mountain, breaking up a large sheet of glass in the process and piling it up in the studio to draw it jagged. His eventual solution was to use the technique of reflection, revealing the king’s palace through the mountain, which also magnifies what it reveals.
It is clear from the work that Hockney derived enormous enjoy-ment from this project, drawing not just from the depths of his own vivid imagination, but on his great knowledge of the history of art, enabling him to reference the work of artists ranging from Leonardo to Magritte. This starts with the frontispiece depicting Katarina Dorothea Viehmann, the elderly German widow who gave the Brothers Grimm many of their stories, who is drawn in the style of Dürer. In “Rapunzel,” the story of a couple who give away their baby to an enchantress in exchange for some rapunzel flowers, he imagined that the reason the enchantress, whom he drew with a beard, had no children of her own was that she was so ugly no one would sleep with her. Because she was a virgin, he based the drawing of her with the baby on her knee on the Madonna in Hieronymous Bosch’s The Virgin and Child and the Three Magi. The prince who eventually comes to rescue the child, by then a beautiful maiden with long golden locks, was lifted from Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest. In “The Boy Who Left Home to Learn Fear,” the ghost which “stood still as stone” is reminiscent of one of Magritte’s “stone age” paintings, a series of 1950s works depicting organic objects turned to stone. It amused Hockney when distinguished art historians would write to him as if his references were their discovery, when to him it seemed obvious that he was quoting from a particular artist.
Not all the drawings are referenced from the past. Mo McDermott posed for some of the images in “The Little Sea Hare,” for example, while “The Boy Who Left Home to Learn Fear” opens with a picture of a comfortable armchair, a perfect representation of the security of home, which is lifted directly from a drawing he had once made of an armchair in the library at Clandeboye House in Northern Ireland, the home of Sheridan and Lindy Dufferin. In addition, photographs he had taken of castles on his Rhine trip the previous October proved valuable.
Though to begin with Hockney made preliminary drawings, particularly where the subject had some technical problem, as work progressed, more and more of the etchings were drawn straight onto the copperplates on special tables set up in Powis Terrace, before being placed in acid baths on the balcony, under Maurice Payne’s supervision. Since leaving Alecto, Cornwall-Jones no longer had a printing studio, so when the plates were ready, Payne took them down to the print department at the Royal College, where his friend Mike Rand let him proof them in the studio. Again a number of stories had to be culled. “I got carried away,” Hockney told Glazebrook, “and I did so many for some stories that if I had done twelve stories the book would have been so thick and so expensive that we couldn’t go on.”39 He had still completed eighty etchings before he knew he had to stop.
It was decided that the initial book would contain six stories, with a possible second volume if the first was a commercial success. When the time came for the paste-up, Cornwall-Jones thought Hockney might be interested in getting involved. “When I first showed him a paste-up,” he recalls, “he said, ‘Why are you bothering me? I’m painting and drawing.’ Anyway, with great reluctance he came round the next day to St. Petersburg Place, and he was grumpy because he felt he didn’t want to get involved in organising a book. In fact he started getting involved straight away, saying, ‘Oh, we don’t want to do this, we should do that,’ and he spent about a week reorganising the whole thing.”40 Hockney was determined that this should not be an “art” book with loose pages, but a real picture book in which on every page the image would be seen before reading the text it was illustrating. This would mean printing an etching on the back of an etching, a problem that was solved by simply doubling over the paper, an idea taken from Japanese books. Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm took over a year to produce and was published at the end of 1970. As a flyer for the book, a miniature version was published by the Oxford University Press, in a planned edition of 2,000: it ended up selling 150,000 copies.
In the canon of Hockney’s work, there is no doubt that Six Fairy Tales is right up there with the Cavafy poems, not just because of the superb quality of the etchings, but equally because of the sheer inventiveness and wit of his imagery. Hockney certainly considers it to have been a major work, not just for the time he spent on it but also for what he learned while doing it. “They’re more complex than my previous etchings,” he wrote. “First of all, instead of using aquatints to get tone I decided on a method of cross-hatching, which I used throughout. I just stumbled across it, and thought it was quite a good way to do it. And then I found that you can get very rich black by cross-hatching, then etching, then putting wax on again, and then drawing another cross-hatching on top on another, on another; the ink gets very thick … it was a step forward
for me in etching techniques.”41
Though Hockney’s concentration on the Grimm project meant that no further paintings were completed in 1969, it was not to the exclusion of any drawing, and in May he took Schlesinger off to stay with Cecil Beaton at Reddish, near Salisbury in Wiltshire, whose portrait he was doing for an article in Vogue. Beaton had been one of Hockney’s earliest patrons, and he adored David. “We could not be further apart as human beings,” he wrote in his diary, “and yet I find myself completely at ease with him and stimulated by his enthusiasm. For he has the golden quality of being able to enjoy life. He is never blasé, never takes anything for granted. Life is a delightful wonderland for him; much of the time he is wreathed in smiles. He laughs aloud at television and radio. He is the best possible audience, though he is by no means simple. He is sophisticated in that he has complete purity. There is nothing pretentious about him; he never says anything he does not mean. In a world of art intrigue, he is completely natural.”42
The only other guest that Whitsun weekend was another bright young man, the flamboyant 34-year-old director of the National Portrait Gallery, Dr. Roy Strong. The year before, he had shaken up this previously stuffy institution by mounting a massive exhibition of Beaton portraits, a turning point in the gallery’s history and so successful its run had to be extended twice. His invitation to a quiet weekend turned out to be exactly that as Beaton, preoccupied with the portrait sessions, paid Strong little attention, abandoning him to paint watercolours in the conservatory and garden, as well as to waspishly observe his host. “Cecil is nothing if not vain,” Strong wrote in his diary, “so there was much coming and going with piles of hats from which Hockney could make a choice for Cecil to wear. David’s early attempts didn’t go down at all well, hardly surprising for his graphic style highlighted every wrinkle on Cecil’s face.”43
Beaton studied Hockney meticulously while he was being drawn and perfectly described how, like a monkey, Hockney squinted and grimaced up at him and then down again to his drawing pad. Beaton was impressed by how tireless Hockney was and by the infinite care and precision he took over his work, marvelling as he sharpened his pencils for the hundredth time. About the results, however, Beaton was not so happy, particularly the early attempts. “To begin with,” he wrote, “I was utterly appalled, having remained in some romantic but extremely uncomfortable pose for a great deal too long, when I saw an outline in Indian ink of a bloated, squat, beefy businessman. He laughed. No, it wasn’t very good, and he embarked upon another which turned out to be just as bad. About eight horrors were perpetrated while the days advanced until, finally, something rather good emerged. He was encouraged. He was enthusiastic. Would I sit again tomorrow all morning and then again after lunch. He eventually decided to draw me in pencil rather than ink and the result was different and better.”44
While Hockney was working on the portrait, Schlesinger was either doing his own sketches of Beaton, or taking photographs, demonstrating a great skill in capturing those fleeting moments that define an era, much in the same way as did his hero, the great French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue. One such image, taken in the conservatory, shows Beaton and Hockney seated in basketwork chairs. The former, dressed like an Edwardian dandy in a green velvet suit, yellow socks and a large velvet floppy hat, is leaning back, eyes skyward, his legs wide apart, with his camera placed strategically between his legs. David, sitting cross-legged and gazing affectionately at the photographer, brings the dandy right up to date in all his sixties glory, wearing a pink plaid suit, the ubiquitous odd socks in bright green and red, deemed a “retina irritant” by Beaton, and his trademark black spectacles “as large as bicycle wheels.”45
On their last night at Reddish, Beaton took them to dinner with Richard “Dickie” Buckle, the ballet critic of the Sunday Times, who had designed his exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery and whose Wiltshire cottage was the setting for Hockney’s painting Domestic Scene, Broadchalke, Wilts. After dinner Hockney regaled the company with his philosophy, showing that the idealism of the sixties had not quite passed him by. “David talked of the coming of the Golden Age,” Beaton wrote in his diary. “He had read many philosophers, and has thought a great deal. In the next forty years all will change. The computer will do away with work; everyone will be an artist. No need to worry, all the leisure in the world, everything will be beautiful. There will be no private property, or need to own anything. Everyone will be ecstatically happy. It was marvellous to see this white-skinned, champagne-topped, dark-glassed young man in pale pistachio green with bronze boots, orange and yellow alternate socks, holding forth with such vehemence.”46
Though the weekend was a success, the drawings he did were not among Hockney’s best, as was often the case with his commissions: Beaton was not someone he knew well, whose changing moods and emotions he had observed on a daily basis. He told Henry Geldzahler, for example, that the reason his portrayal of Christopher Scott in the double portrait is slightly wooden is that he hadn’t really known him or been sure how long he was going to be around. His drawings of Schlesinger on the other hand—sleeping, reading, swimming, clothed, naked—breathe flesh and blood into him so that the viewer feels he knows him. Somehow Hockney manages to convey his strong attraction to his lover. Nowhere is this more true than in a striking three-foot-high etching of Schlesinger naked in 1969, which employs two sets of perspective: one for the lower half of the body, in which he is viewing it from above, thus foreshortening the legs; and another for the torso and the head, seen on the level. The result gives the impression that we, like the artist, are admiring Schlesinger’s body from the feet upwards.
Hockney’s drawings of Schlesinger occupy a special place in his art, and are a record of his most precious relationship during one of the happiest times of his life. They also represent a travelogue of all the places they visited together—California, Paris, Marrakesh, Rome, Carennac, Vichy, to name a few—as well as Le Nid de Duc, Tony Richardson’s house, which was the setting for the iconic painting Portrait of an Artist. In the summer of 1969, he and Schlesinger made up a party there with Geldzahler, Kasmin, Clark and Birtwell. Richardson, who was in Australia filming Ned Kelly with Mick Jagger, had lent his house to Hockney for a month, leaving his girlfriend Melissa North to make sure things ran smoothly.
North was in her early twenties, a girl about town from London who, along with her friend Celia Brooke, used to be invited by Richardson to spice up dinner parties at his house in Egerton Crescent, South Kensington, where they would encounter the likes of John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, John Mortimer and other theatrical and literary giants. On one such occasion she found herself sitting next to David Hockney, who invited her to tea. They subsequently struck up a friendship, and when Hockney came to Le Nid de Duc in 1969, she fell completely under his spell. “I’d always had a weakness for him,” she recalls, “and that summer I fell madly in love with him so that if he spoke to me I would just sweat and blush and crumple. It sounds pathetic, I know. I found him very, very attractive, and I loved his work and I loved the way he was drawing all the time and the way he organised expeditions. He was always going to look at something, either the Miró Foundation or a show, and we’d all follow. He never stopped drawing, and then he started drawing me. It was absolute agony because I was having to sit there with him looking at me, and me thinking, ‘My nose is too big. I’m so plain. How embarrassing that he’s drawing me to be kind,’ and as I had this mad obsession with him, this attention was almost too much to bear. I was up there sweating and all my clothes would start sticking to me and I would get more and more humiliated. I think he must have sensed this sort of passion and he was very, very sweet to me.”47
*
Soon after their return to England, Clark and Birtwell asked Hockney to be best man at their wedding. The marriage took place in August and was doomed to failure; it might never have taken place had it not been that Birtwell was pregnant and had received a letter from her father as good as orderi
ng her to get married. “So we just went out and got married,” says Birtwell, “and we dragged David along as best man. He turned up looking like an old wreck, so I said, ‘You could have just dressed up a little bit!’ so I think he put a carnation in his lapel, and we went off to the registry office.”48 The only other person present was Clark’s sister Kay, a nightclub chanteuse whom David had loved ever since she had told him, “What I love in the morning is a cup of coffee, a good cough and a cigarette.”49
The wedding took place at Kensington Registry Office with Birtwell dressed in a beautiful chiffon dress by Clark decorated with Birtwell’s trademark “Mystic Daisy” print. As they tumbled out after the ceremony, they stopped a vicar who was passing by and asked him if he would take their wedding photograph. He refused, no doubt because Birtwell was seven months pregnant and showing it. “Then we all went back to Powis Terrace, and had tea, and then the next day Ossie just buggered off with Chelita Secunda.”50 In his diary Clark noted nonchalantly, “Married Celia. Tears. ‘Tell me what you want, I’ll get you whatever you want’—Hockney, Kay a witness. DH promised Kay an etching she never got … honeymoon with another woman.”51 Hockney remembers that “we laughed at the time. We thought it was an odd way to start, but Ossie was an odd person.”52
Over the next few months Hockney completed a large number of drawings of the newly-weds in preparation for a proposed wedding portrait, trying both figures in different positions and with different looks on their faces. He also took many photographs recording the details he might use, of the vase, the book, the telephone, the lamp and the table. Peter Webb, author of Portrait of David Hockney, recounts Clark’s version of the moment Hockney found the perfect composition. “Ossie remembers … he had only just got up and so had no shoes on. He slumped into a chair with a cigarette, and Blanche, one of their white cats, jumped onto his lap. Celia was standing on the other side of the window with her hand on her hip, and Hockney said, ‘That’s perfect.’ He later added their Art Deco vase and lamp, and called the cat Percy, the name of Blanche’s son, because it sounded better.”53 The actual painting would have to wait for the time being, there being no room to work in the studio as every available inch of space was taken up with etching equipment.
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