Hockney also had plans for another large painting inspired by a trip he had made in September to the French spa of Vichy. This pretty town in the Auvergne had been known since the sixteenth century for its mineral baths and drinking waters, whose restorative powers were later made famous through the letters of the Marquise de Sévigné, who claimed that they had cured her of a paralysis in her hands. Its blossoming fortunes made it a centre of fashion, with a casino, new streets and villas, and even an opera house; up till the outbreak of the First World War, it had been the summertime music capital of France.
Hockney took Schlesinger and Clark with him to stay at the chic old Pavillon Sévigné hotel, in order to take the waters, and they drove down in a Triumph Vitesse, bought on the advice of Keith Vaughan with whom he had dined a few days before leaving. “The more I see of D.H. the more he impresses me,” Vaughan wrote of the occasion. “He has all the best qualities of his generation. Modest and self-confident, honest in speech, unconcerned with impressing yet considerate and well-mannered, impatient with all fraudulent or compromised behaviour, ardent, curious, warm hearted, uncorrupted (and probably uncorruptable) by success … he does what he says he will. Months ago … talking about special issues of stamps which I did not know about he said, ‘Oh, but they’re marvellous, haven’t you seen them, I’ll send you some.’ And two days later I get a postcard covered with about 8s 6d worth of special issue stamps. And the last time I saw him … just before he was motoring to the S. of France in his convertible Morris … I said, ‘You ought to get a Triumph Vitesse—they’re better than a Morris for long journeys.’ ‘Maybe I will. It’s an idea. I’ll go and buy one tomorrow morning. There’ll just be time.’ And he did.”54
Vichy was the first spa that Hockney visited to take the waters, the drinking of which took place in a lovely art nouveau building and involved a degree of ritual which was amusingly described by Wayne Sleep, on one of his visits there during a stay at Carennac. “When you arrive at the spa itself,” he wrote, “you are given your own glass cup in a string bag. Ladies in nurses’ uniforms ladle the water from the spring into your cup—and you then drink it. The sulphur content made a loo immediately necessary. It is very good for the system but the stink of rotten eggs can be hard to take. At dinner that evening I noticed that the majority of the guests looked half dead. So much for the water, I thought.”55
Le Parc des Sources, in the middle of the town, created in the time of Napoleon Bonaparte, had fascinated Hockney since he had first seen it the previous year, because of the way the trees had been planted in the form of a triangle in order to create a false perspective, making it look much longer than it really was. It reminded him of a sculpture, and gave him the idea to create a new painting based on one of his favourite themes, that of the picture within a picture. Taking three plastic chairs, he placed them at the edge of the park, and got Clark and Schlesinger to occupy the two right-hand ones as if they were watching a film or a play, leaving the left-hand one empty to signify where the artist had been sitting. He then took photographs of the scene from behind, which he would later use to create the painting. “I wanted to set the three chairs up for the three of us,” he wrote, “… then I’d get up to paint the scene. That’s why the empty chair is there—the artist has had to get up to do the painting. It’s like a picture within a picture; I was going to call it Painting within Painting, like Play within a Play. That gives it the strong surrealist overtones.”56
While Hockney had been engaged on the Grimm project, Kasmin had had to be patient. “It was always tricky with David,” he recalls, “because there weren’t that many paintings a year. There were plenty of drawings, but people always wanted paintings.”57 He was not idle, however, always thinking of new ways to further his artists’ reputations. When Charles Alan had to close his New York gallery for reasons of ill health, Kasmin pulled off a coup by persuading André Emmerich, one of Manhattan’s leading dealers in contemporary art, to take Hockney on. Emmerich was a soft-spoken, very straight businessman, who had a great interest in pre-Columbian art and a strong feeling for American abstract painting. He represented many of the artists Kasmin liked, and had shown Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler and the estate of Morris Louis in London, as well as Anthony Caro in New York. “He was a believer in order,” says Kasmin. “He had well-run galleries with well-spoken staff and was used to dealing with rich people. He was without any peculiarities of character at all, except that he was addicted to sweets … and his idea of generosity was to share a shoeshine with you in the office. Instead of saying, ‘Let me take you to lunch,’ he would say, ‘Let me buy you a shoeshine.’ He had a lovely big gallery and he always had at least one young gay man there, someone that David could talk and joke with. It was already the most important place to have a show in New York, and David benefited from being with a gallery that was primarily non-figurative.”58
Emmerich’s first show of Hockney paintings, in November 1969, included the three great double portraits, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott and American Collectors. Kasmin had pointed out to him that he should not sell to European dealers, who would simply take the work back to Europe to sell at twice the price, but try and find buyers in New York. One painting was already sold, however. Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy had been bought by an English lawyer, Sir John Foster, for $6,000 as a gift for his close friend, Marguerite Littman. Mrs. Littman, a Southern belle who lived in a grand house in Chester Square, had established herself as one of London’s leading society hostesses. Said to have been Truman Capote’s model for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, she was a confidante of Tennessee Williams, and had been Elizabeth Taylor’s voice coach on the film of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She was once with the great playwright beside the swimming pool of the Cipriani Hotel in Venice when, looking at a particularly thin girl in a bikini, she turned to him and said, “Look, anorexia nervosa,” to which he replied, “Oh, Marguerite, you know everyone!”59
Isherwood was among her circle of friends, and, after seeing the picture in Hockney’s studio, she had made it known to Sheridan Dufferin at one of her numerous lunches that she would love to own it. Its subsequent history is of interest, because it was a painting that meant a great deal to the artist, and it shows how easy it is for a picture simply to slip out of circulation. “David loved the picture because Chris and Don were friends of his,” Kasmin remembers, “and I was keen for it to go to the National Portrait Gallery as David is an English painter and Isherwood an English writer. Sheridan, however, put pressure on me to sell it to Marguerite. So it was bought by John Foster and on his death in 1982 the picture was sold to an English dealer, who sold it to a Texan billionaire for a great deal of money, a flash Harry who flew around the world in pastel-coloured aeroplanes. Hockney was broken-hearted about this. He literally wept. I couldn’t believe it had happened.” From the Texan it went to the Manhattan art dealer Andrew Crispo, who was later jailed for tax evasion, and from there it ended up belonging to the financier Gilbert de Botton who gave it to his wife Jacqueline as part of divorce proceedings, and with whom it still resides, its value having leapt from $6,000 in 1969 to several million today.
When Hockney returned to London after the Emmerich show, he began work on Le Parc des Sources, Vichy, the first picture he had painted for ten months, which was the longest period he had gone without painting in ten years. “I’d gotten to the point,” he wrote, “where I didn’t seem to care about the painted mark that much … Somehow a kind of painting block took over. Probably in the end acrylic paint did it, the burdens of it.”60 Getting back into painting proved difficult, since the new picture was large, as big as the double portraits, and he struggled with it. “I began working on it in January,” he wrote, “and it took me much longer than I expected … I think the difficulties stemmed from the acrylic paint and the naturalism, the fight to achieve naturalistic effect, the difficulty of blending colour, things like that.”61 The result is
a masterful picture, surreal and strange, that fills the viewer with unease, posing the question as to what is going on psychologically with these two figures, lost in their own thoughts, Clark’s perhaps of his descent into chaos, Schlesinger’s of whether he might be becoming a prisoner in one of Hockney’s canvases. Hockney eventually completed it just in time for it to be included in the biggest exhibition of his work so far, a retrospective at one of the most influential galleries in London, the Whitechapel.
Always at the forefront of showing contemporary art, in 1938 the Whitechapel had been the first London gallery to show Picasso’s Guernica in an exhibition protesting the Spanish Civil War. Its landmark show, however, and a milestone in the history of British post-war art, was This is Tomorrow in 1956, which consisted of a series of installations assembled by various artists to represent their vision of the future. The director at that time was Bryan Robertson, who transformed the place into London’s most exciting exhibition space, opening British eyes to the work of American abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg and Mark Rothko. In spite of this, it was starved of funds and by the time Robertson retired, his successor, Mark Glazebrook, one of the founders of Alecto Editions, found the gallery’s finances in a parlous state.
One of Glazebrook’s first decisions was to invite Hockney to mount a retrospective of the past ten years. Glazebrook had, after all, been in the vanguard of Hockney admirers, having spotted him as a serious talent while he was still at the Royal College, and been the purchaser of what Hockney considered to be the best picture in his first exhibition, Play Within a Play. The Whitechapel exhibition, curated by Kasmin and Hockney, occupied the entire gallery, even overflowing into the foyer and back into previously unrevealed side chambers. It included forty-five paintings, from Doll Boy to Le Parc des Sources, Vichy; his complete graphic work, comprising 116 items; and forty-seven drawings. The enormous cost of mounting the show was partly defrayed by David, who, to raise money, made a special lithograph, Pretty Tulips, in an edition of two hundred, which was a sell-out.
Hockney left the hanging, which he always claimed he was no good at, to Glazebrook and Kasmin, and went away with Schlesinger and Christopher Isherwood to stay at Le Nid de Duc, only returning the day before the private view on 1 April. “We … went to the opening like everybody else; so it was a surprise to me,” he wrote. “… just a few days before we came back, I began to think Oh my God, all those early pictures which I haven’t seen in ten years are going to look terrible. When I saw them, though, I thought, they do stand up; they’re not that bad … I could see the way things progressed, how I’d taken one aspect of a painting and developed it in other pictures so that it changed quite visibly … It dawned on me how protean the art is; it’s varied, with many aspects, many sided.”62
His parents visited the show on 17 April, along with his brother Paul and family. They left Bradford at 5.30 a.m. on a very hot train and Paul’s children, Lisa and Nicky, were both sick. “Went from King’s Cross by tube to Whitechapel,” wrote Laura, “where David met us at the Gallery. There for an hour pre-opening time we viewed at leisure his wonderful exhibits of ten years work.”63 The critics were impressed. Guy Brett, writing in The Times, singled out the California pictures. “Many of Hockney’s recent paintings have been about California. So much so that one easily identifies his qualities, his whole painting style, with the vision he has given us of that place. Describing ‘California’ one describes a Hockney.”64 The Spectator critic Paul Grinke loved the portraits, “an area in which Hockney works with great feeling largely because he almost invariably paints personal friends or lovers, which is a good way of putting his sitters at ease and also gives us a more than usually intimate glimpse of their personalities. Of the recent portraits, the 1968 painting of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy … is a most accomplished work.”65 In Apollo, James Burr wrote: “His ability to parody the good manners of picture-making is brilliant,” ending his review: “This decade of Hockney’s achievement is erratic, but nevertheless recalls his humorous satirical gifts at their sharpest and most alert … It seems to have reached a point of development that looks ominously like a cul-de-sac, but no doubt by some unusual act of visual agility he will extract himself and continue his distinctively eccentric painting progress without which English painting would be markedly the poorer.”66
For Hockney, it was a remarkable end to the decade.
CHAPTER TEN
MR. AND MRS. CLARK AND PERCY
There was one significant painting missing from the Whitechapel show, listed in the catalogue as number 70.2, Untitled, “A Portrait of Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell, Unfinished.” The proposed wedding portrait as yet only existed in the form of countless photographs and a few drawings. Writing long after the wedding in August 1969, Clark remembered, “Married Celia … DH gave picture for wedding present—Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, later sold to pay deposit on house,”1 which was a case of his memory playing tricks on him. Not only did Hockney never give this work to the Clarks, but he did not even begin work on it till April or May 1970, and he was not to complete it till May 1971.
Though Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy fits well in the canon of traditional English wedding portraits, such as Arthur Devis’s Mr. and Mrs. Atherton and Gainsborough’s Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, it also defies convention by having the man seated and the woman standing, swapping the customary position of the figures, which immediately makes it stand out. “Because it is the reverse of normal,” says Hockney, “people read things into it, but I just thought it looked better that way, and Ossie must have done it naturally as I don’t tell my sitters to do too much. I just watch them.”2 The picture does tell a story, however, of two people together but apart; she stands, serene and beautiful, looking directly at the artist, a slight look of sadness in her eyes, while he slouches rather sullenly in a chair, a cigarette in one hand, his right foot buried in the shagpile carpet, his thoughts perhaps drifting in the same direction as those of the cat sitting on his lap, staring out of the window. To model Percy, “they borrowed a stuffed white cat from a taxidermist, which was brilliantly funny,” recalls Birtwell. “People read all sorts of things about us from looking at the painting. They said they could see that the writing was on the wall, but it wasn’t. How could they know? David didn’t even know us that well.”3
Mr. and Mrs. Ossie Clark, Linden Gardens, London, 1970 (illustration credit 10.1)
“It turns out now,” Hockney says, “that it is quite a memorable painting, but when you’re doing it you don’t know that. I have no idea what makes a memorable picture. If I did there would be more of them.”4 Part of what makes it so striking is its size, ten foot by seven foot. Hockney made the picture so big because he wanted viewers to feel that they were in the room with the couple, but making this seem natural presented enormous problems, and he put blood, sweat and tears into the work in order to overcome them. The setting of the painting is the Clarks’ flat in Linden Gardens, which was painted first; Clark and Birtwell then came to Powis Terrace on numerous occasions during which Hockney attempted to paint them directly onto the painting of the room, an exercise made even more tricky by the fact that it was contre-jour. “The figures are nearly life-size; it’s difficult painting figures like that, and it was quite a struggle,” he wrote. “They posed for a long time, both Ossie and Celia. Ossie was painted many, many times; I took it out and put it in, out and in. I probably painted the head alone twelve times; drawn and painted and then completely removed, and then out in again and again. You can see that the paint gets thicker and thicker there.”5
Living with Schlesinger and working on a painting of this size made Hockney only too aware of the limitations of the Powis Terrace flat. He had lived there since 1962, and it had proved a perfect set of rooms for a single artist, but since the arrival of Schlesinger in his life, space had been at a premium, and when the lease of the adjoining flat came up, Hockney bought it and employed a young, very handsome architect, Tc
haik Chassay, to create a lateral conversion. Fresh out of the Architectural Association, Chassay was living with Melissa North, Tony Richardson’s former girlfriend. He had ambitious plans for the new annexe, including a large dining room, a library and a beautiful new bathroom. In order to keep disruption to a minimum, it was agreed that the conversion work would go on quite separately, and only when it was complete would the builders break through to join the two flats together.
Schlesinger was excited about the new plan; he was beginning to find life in London a little claustrophobic in more senses than one. He worked hard at his painting and wanted to be thought of as an artist in his own right, but wherever he went he was always known as “David Hockney’s boyfriend.” He longed for his own identity, and the more Hockney painted and drew him, the more he felt that to most people he existed only as a sex object in his lover’s pictures. He yearned to be cherished emotionally as well as physically, but was unable to grasp that living with a great artist it was inevitable he would always come second. “At some point,” he says, “I began to feel a bit smothered. David is an overwhelming person, and with his painting there was not much room for me in that world.”6
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