Staying at a hotel in Kobe two days later, Schlesinger telephoned at midnight, and there was a row when he reiterated that he had no intention of ever moving back into Powis Terrace. “He said he enjoyed living in his studio alone,” Hockney confided to Geldzahler, continuing, “I’m not sure what to do now … I must have some physical affection from him on my return or I must seek it elsewhere, and while I can’t abandon him, if I actually find someone to share things with, my loyalties I have for Peter for what he gave me will be transferred.” Seeking advice, he broached the subject of his difficulty in meeting Peter’s sexual needs. “The way I look at our problem is one of Peter’s lack of confidence and his apparent envy of mine. Yet he knows the truth about mine. I only have confidence about one thing—my work. Therefore I make it important to me. I really don’t have sexual confidence any more and I’m sure Peter knows that. That’s what makes me sad as I think he is using that knowledge in a cruel way … I am perfectly prepared to accept the differences between us as individuals, it seems to me he has the difficulty doing that. I am a gregarious Yorkshireman and he is a rather quiet Californian. Surely the two can be compatible if they like each other? Or should I have another gregarious Yorkshireman as a friend?”20
For Hockney, the highlight of this trip was Macau, the Portuguese colony south-west of Hong Kong. “Macau is divine,” he told Geldzahler. “You must go there … you’d love it. It’s a combination of the Orient and old crumbling faded Europe. Very very beautiful … We had lunch at the Bela Vista Hotel on the Verandah looking over the South China Sea. It was very romantic … and it made the food terrific. The set lunch was believe it or not written in English and was ‘Green Pea Soup with Croutons,’ a ‘Fish Cutlet,’ braised ox tongue with white sauce and for a moment I thought I was on British Railways going to Bradford, so we washed it down with Mateus Rose, to help the starving Portuguese.”21 They also attended an opera in the Macau casino, during which, he reported happily, “you can sit and have a Chinese lunch, walk about and smoke while it’s on—you can’t do that at the Met.”22
Their next stop was Bangkok, the highlight of which was a visit to a male brothel, even though “afterwards I did have terrible guilt about it—you know decadent westerners exploiting the natural beauty of a lovely country etc.”23 His guilt was not strong enough, however, to stop him returning on their last night in Bangkok. “We put on our new Hong Kong made white suits, went to the brothel, asked for two skilful boys and just sat and watched them do all their tricks. It was like a Francis Bacon painting—I must admit though I think it was genuinely decadent, as when we got up to rush to the airport the boys immediately stopped. Silly romantic me thinking they would ignore us and go on having fun.”24
The last port of call in the Far East was Burma, where they stayed in the Strand Hotel in Rangoon, a city that appealed to him because “unlike most cities of South East Asia it’s completely untouched by America, therefore full of crumbling colonial British buildings, most of them with the signs still on—Barclays Bank etc. Like most Communist countries all there was for sale in the shops was toilet rolls and crude soap. Nevertheless the Strand Hotel … seemed to ignore all this and everyone acted as though it was 1925. There was a fat lady pianist in the Palm Court with a rather seedy violinist alternating with a small swing orchestra. I loved it all.”25 Hockney depicted this scene in a drawing of Lancaster sitting in a chair in the very grand Palm Court, titled Mark, Strand Hotel, Rangoon 1971.
The original itinerary had been to fly from Burma to India, and from there to travel to Afghanistan, but this was cut short with the outbreak of war between India and Pakistan on 3 December so the intrepid travellers found themselves instead in Istanbul, which was bitterly cold, and finally in Rome. From here Hockney wrote to Geldzahler expressing his continuing indecision as to what he should do about Schlesinger. Celia Birtwell, in whom he was increasingly confiding, had advised him to forget Schlesinger, on the grounds that he was behaving in too cruel a fashion. “It saddens me,” he admitted, “but I think I’ll have to. I’ll just leave him completely alone and see what he does, although the moment he appears lost, I’ll possibly cave in as usual. He did write me a rather naive letter about how he’s not left me, although if he hasn’t I don’t know what it is he has done.”26
With hindsight it is easy to understand Peter’s apparent indecision. “I was being a little equivocal,” he recalls, “because I was trying to spare his feelings. I was twenty-three and muddled and all his friends were putting pressure on me, saying things like ‘How can you be so mean to him?’ and ‘You’re ruining his life’ and ‘You’re so cruel.’ ”27 For this reason he made the mistake of agreeing to meet Hockney on the day he returned, a reunion that did not go well. “I suppose it’s all over,” Hockney wrote to Geldzahler. “It is painful and I am unhappy as I’ve really had to tell him that I can’t really see him for a while, as it’s too difficult for me. You see I think it’s a bit unfair of him to welcome Eric with open arms and sex, and me with a rather nervous coldness. He then refuses to stay saying I was too stoned—having not smoked for five weeks, Ossie’s joint handed me at the airport had really made me high. Anyway Henry it’s too difficult if he won’t let me express my love in any way now, and so all I can do is try and forget and see how he feels in two or three months …”28
Hockney returned to London bearing two sketchbooks filled with drawings and a tight schedule ahead of him, as he had an upcoming show with André Emmerich in New York. “I must really get down to painting now,” he wrote, “as the show is in April and although I have Mo as an assistant I actually have to do the paintings myself, which do take some time, and I must begin my Japanese pictures.”29 Curiously the first of these, Mount Fuji and Flowers, a painting that uses the same stain technique as Pool and Steps, Le Nid de Duc, is a very romantic view of Japan, as far removed as one could imagine from a country in which, as he put it to Kitaj, there was “hardly a patch of land that could hold a factory that has not got one.”30 Considering he saw little of Mount Fuji and did no drawings of it, it is a fantasy, inspired by the traditional woodcuts of nineteenth-century Japanese artists such as Hokusai, its images sourced from a postcard and a Japanese flower-arrangement manual. Henry Geldzahler considered it “a very beautiful and perfect picture”31 and later bought it for the Metropolitan Museum.
A mark of Hockney’s ever increasing fame was his being asked to appear on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, whose deviser and presenter, Roy Plomley, interviewed well-known people and asked them to choose the eight records, plus one book and one luxury, they would take with them if forcibly stranded on a desert island. For Hockney, who had been brought up in a house in which the radio had played such an important part, and who was still an avid listener, painting and relaxing to the sound of the radio, it was incredibly exciting, and he made his appearance on 5 February 1972.
His choices, mainly classical, were spur of the moment, and would, he said, have been completely different had he made his choice on another day. He began with Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, not the orchestral version, but the Liszt transcription for the piano, played by Glenn Gould, because when he had first heard it at George Lawson’s house, it had made him laugh. This was followed by another piano piece, Erik Satie’s “La Belle Excentrique,” played by Aldo Ciccolini, which romps along in the manner of a piano rag. Then his favourite composer, Richard Wagner, made his first appearance, with the great German bass-baritone Theo Adam singing “Verachtet mir die Meister nicht,” an aria all about art from Die Meistersinger. Following this came a section from Les Biches by Francis Poulenc; then “San Francisco,” from the film of the same name, and sung by its star, Jeanette MacDonald. He chose it because “it’s about California and a very pretty song, and really I like it because it used to be sung by a marvellous drag queen in a bar … and he actually looked like her in the film and swung out into the bar on a swing—it was really terrific.”32
Record number six was the Monte Carlo Opera Orc
hestra playing the overture to Fedora, “a marvellous corny opera” by Umberto Giordano, which Hockney told Plomley he liked to play once a month while working. Then came Marilyn Monroe singing the “very affecting” “I’m Through with Love” from Some Like It Hot, while his final choice was back to Wagner with the “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde, which he described as being “almost the same thing … it’s just high art form,” and which he picked as the record he would take with him if allowed only one out of his eight choices. Not surprisingly, his luxury turned out to be “some paper and some pencils and a battery-operated pencil sharpener,” while his book, to accompany the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, was a pornographic novel, Route 69 by Floyd Carter, author of such titles as Battle of the Bulges, Big Joe, Camp Butch and Forbidden Fruit. He chose it to stop himself fantasising too much. “I think it was written in a back room on 42nd Street,” he said, “and it’s full of bad grammar and spelling mistakes, but quite touching in its way, and it covers a great number of interesting things.”33 Not surprisingly, his mother was slightly perplexed by this choice. “Listened again today at the usual time,” she wrote, “—his choice of book to take was most unusual—was he joking—just one of his ‘cheerfully disrespectful’ idioms … I love him very much. I know he loves the life he lives and is very lucky to be able to do as he pleases & thereby earn a living.”34
After this brief distraction, he was back in the studio with Portrait of an Artist, with which he was still struggling. ‘The longer you work on a painting,” he wrote, “the more you’re loath to abandon it, because you think throwing away six months is terrible. So I struggled on and on and fiddled on with it, realizing it didn’t work, couldn’t work … it was the angle of the pool which was causing me all the problems. I couldn’t alter the water section and it was impossible to adjust it, so I decided to repaint the picture completely.”35 He also took the decision to destroy the first version of the picture, so it would be out of his mind, but, because parts of it were well painted, he cut the canvas up very carefully, removing one portion depicting a plant growing from the edge of the pool, which he later framed and gave to the Clarks as a late wedding present.
By the time he had made up his mind to start the picture again, it was late March and the Emmerich exhibition was due to open in May. Even though Kasmin told him he was mad, Hockney was confident he could repaint it in two weeks, since he knew what he had done wrong and how to make it right second time around. In need of more references to work from, he decided to make a trip down to Le Nid de Duc. He was, however, unable to ask Schlesinger to accompany him because, unbeknown to him, he had flown out to California with Jack Hazan, who had persuaded him to film some swimming pool sequences for his movie. Instead he took Mo McDermott as his stand-in, along with the pink jacket Schlesinger was wearing in the picture, and a young photographer, John St. Clair, to be the underwater swimmer.
They spent several days at Le Nid de Duc, where Hockney posed McDermott by the edge of the pool and St. Clair swam back and forth beneath the surface for hours on end. “To get different kinds of distortion in the water,” he wrote, “I had John swim underwater in different light conditions … and with different water surfaces … and I had Mo gazing at him with the shadows in differing positions.”36 While this was going on he took hundreds of photographs using a brand-new Pentax Spotmatic II, a fully automatic camera that allowed him to shoot much more quickly and get much better exposures. On their return to London they took the film straight from the airport to a processing lab in north London so that it would be developed within twenty-four hours. With the exhibition due to open in New York in a few weeks, time was running out.
Somewhat ironically, Jack Hazan, whom Hockney had been trying to avoid for so long, contributed to helping him finish on time. At the beginning of 1972, feeling a little guilty about France the previous summer, Hockney had tentatively allowed him to do some more filming, capturing him painting in his studio, as well as in conversation with Henry Geldzahler, Patrick Procktor, Celia Birtwell and Joe MacDonald, a young male model from New York. When Hazan, who had witnessed the destruction of the original, heard that he was going to repaint the portrait, he asked if he could film it. “I said Oh my God, no,” Hockney recalled, “I’m really going to work eighteen hours a day on this with Mo. Mo’s going to do all the spraying to keep the paint wet. The last thing I want is somebody interfering.”37 Hazan’s solution to this was, in return for occasional access to film, to offer to lend him a set of daylight lights for a fortnight, which would enable him to work in the right lighting conditions at night as well as during the day. “And I agreed,” said Hockney, “just so that I could have the lights and work night and day … painting it only took about two weeks, but every single day I think we worked eighteen hours on it.”38
Schlesinger returned from LA just in time to agree to pose for some photographs for Hockney, who was having difficulty because all the shots he had were of Mo, while any drawings of Schlesinger were done for the previous version of the painting. “I had to do it in the same light as the south of France,” Hockney wrote. “Of course London, which is farther north, does not have the same light. Capturing the shadows the right way, trying to recreate the same light, meant going out early in the day. I photographed Peter in Hyde Park on an early Sunday morning.”39 The image he actually used to paint the figure was one of his earliest composite photographs, in which a number of the images were glued together in order to provide more detailed information than could be obtained from the enlargement of one negative. The first one, taken in Paris in 1969, had been a jokey image of Hockney and Schlesinger seated on a park bench, in which they had each taken a shot of the other and pieced the two prints together. These composite photographs, which were later to gain in complexity and become a major part of Hockney’s work, were initially fairly simple and were often used to deal with architectural subjects on his travels, where he was having a problem with perspective. “I did try using a wide-angle lens,” he told Marco Livingstone, “but I didn’t like it much. Its distortions were extremely unnatural … I thought, ‘Why don’t you just take many and glue them together?’ It would be more like the real thing than a wide-angle lens which makes the verticals go this way and that way … I don’t like distortion in photography.”40 But they were also used for portrait subjects, such as in a sitting he did with Rudolf Nureyev in November 1970, at his house in Richmond.
Portrait of an Artist was completed just in time to be sent to New York for the exhibition. “I varnished it,” wrote Hockney, “… and the next morning we got up at six o’clock to begin rolling it. At eight-thirty the men came to collect it to send it off on a plane to New York, and it got there just in time … I must admit I loved working on that picture, working with such intensity; it was marvellous doing it, really thrilling.”41 Though the finished work is an impressive painting by any standard, it was also of great importance both to Hockney as an expression of his loss and to Schlesinger as a measure of self-esteem. “In titling the painting Portrait of an Artist,” Henry Geldzahler commented, “David is giving Peter his birthright, his mess of pottage—he’s calling him an artist. It’s very difficult to have your progeny learn to fly. And I think for David this is a very important painting psychologically because it gives Peter dignity, allowing him to be the artist that he is …”42
In gratitude for all his hard work, Hockney took Mo McDermott to New York with him for the opening at André Emmerich. They stayed with Geldzahler on 7th Avenue, where Hockney did a coloured crayon drawing of his host sitting in an armchair, wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt and smoking one of his trademark cigars. Geldzahler told him afterwards that it was the best drawing ever done of him. At the time he was involved in raising money for the Phoenix House Project, a non-profit organisation that aimed to provide help for the victims of drug and alcohol abuse, and had asked various artists such as Joseph Cornell, Jim Rosenquist, Adolph Gottlieb and Alex Katz to provide an original work of art for h
im to sell on behalf of the charity. When Hockney offered another portrait, Geldzahler recalled telling him, “ ‘You really can’t because I am fund-raising for them. It would look a little funny.’ So he said, ‘Well,’ and just sat down with an etching plate and in about an hour, he did my jacket, my hat, my pipe and my iced coffee. I like that print because it’s a portrait of a subject with the subject missing.”43 It was this etching, Panama Hat, which Hockney gave to him to sell.
The exhibition, David Hockney: Paintings and Drawings, opened on 13 May with French Shop, painted in September 1971, on the cover of the catalogue. It was taken from a photograph of a grocer’s shop in the French spa town of Miers, “one of those little French towns,” wrote Hockney, “where, occasionally, when they build a shop, they try and blend it in with the old ones. Its architecture seemed so simple that it could almost have been erected by a builder, not an architect … this little building had a purity that I found very attractive.”44 The show also included Pool and Steps, Le Nid de Duc, Chair and Shirt, Still Life on a Glass Table, The Island and Sur la Terrasse, but its star was undoubtedly Portrait of an Artist. The circumstances of its sale, however, caused Hockney some grief.
Kasmin did his utmost to try and prevent Hockney’s work falling into the hands of speculators, and had already warned André Emmerich about this. Hockney was happy that the Philadelphia Museum had shown an interest in Portrait of an Artist. Unfortunately, while they were biding their time coming to a decision, a man walked in off the street, an American, apparently with money to spend, who gave the impression that he was a friend of Hockney’s and who seemed to know the painting well. Assuming him to be bona fide, Emmerich agreed to sell him the picture, the most expensive in the show, for $18,000. Within a few months the painting was with a London dealer, who took it to an art fair in Germany, and it ended up being sold to a London collector for nearly three times its New York price. When Hockney found out he was very upset. “The guy had been sent by some dealers in London to buy the picture tricking both André and myself,” he recalled. “Within a year people had made far more on that picture than either Kasmin, André or I had. Considering the effort and trouble and everything that had gone into it, it seemed such a cheap thing to do …”45
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