David Hockney

by Christopher Simon Sykes

  Clark saw things differently. On a whim, with the idea that it might save his marriage, he sold Kasmin the picture Hockney had given them for £7,000, and put a deposit on a large house in Cambridge Gardens, which he intended to do up as a family home. “I was quite hurt …” Hockney wrote to Henry Geldzahler. “I know he needed money very quickly for his house, but somehow it made me a little sick that my sentimental gesture had been turned so quickly into something else. Celia does not talk about the house. I think she has no plans to live in it. She says she would like to be alone for a while in Linden Gardens if only Ossie would leave. I don’t think he will, but I think the crunch is coming shortly.”28

  Hockney did have a good reason to return home. Paul Hockney was now sitting as a Liberal councillor in Bradford and he was there-fore able to invite his parents to the city hall when, on 8 September, J. B. Priestley was made a freeman of the city. “All parties—Conservative, Labour & Liberal gave speeches of welcome,” wrote Laura in her diary. “Paul represented his party (alone) & was very funny & very good—we are very proud of him.” There was more, she recorded: “J.B.P is to have a portrait done by David commissioned by the Corporation.”29

  When originally approached with this commission by John Thompson, the director of Bradford City Art Gallery, Hockney had once again been extremely reluctant to agree. Thompson had then asked Paul to act as intermediary, making it difficult for him to say no. The result was a compromise. Hockney would agree to a drawing, but not a painting. “We thought it would be good,” Thompson told the Times correspondent, “if Bradford’s most famous artist could draw the city’s most famous author … It will go into our collection and we shall probably make it the centrepiece of a special exhibition. It will be our first Hockney original.”30

  The sitting took place in London on 14 September at Priestley’s flat in the Albany, off Piccadilly, and the result was a series of three pen-and-ink drawings, in two of which Priestley is sucking on his pipe, while in the third, the one ultimately chosen by the gallery, he holds the pipe in his hand while looking intently at the artist. According to Hockney, there was little conversation between them. “He just sat there, looking big.”31

  Hockney found himself dreaming of his idyllic holiday, writing to Henry Geldzahler, “… the Summer was fabulous, without a doubt it was the nicest summer I have spent since 1966. Thank you. At the time I loved it, in retrospect it seems to get better every day … London seems very gloomy.” He cited Birtwell’s absence as one reason for this, and also Mo McDermott’s very low spirits. “I notice he stays up here more and more,” he wrote, “and at times he even looks as though he is about to Panic.”32 What Hockney did not realise, and was to remain unaware of for another year, was that McDermott was using heroin. “This started in the early seventies,” Celia Birtwell remembers, “but he lied to everybody and he just got thinner and thinner.”33

  For myriad reasons McDermott had become an integral part of Hockney’s life. To begin with he was stylish and had an eye for what was good. “I once took Mo to visit Freddie Ashton,” Hockney recalls. “He saw two marble obelisks on Freddie’s mantelpiece. The next day I was at his flat in Ladbroke Grove and I saw these two obelisks, and when I got close to them I noticed they were made of cardboard … He’d just copied them. Mo could make anything and I quickly saw that.”34 He was extremely practical, if occasionally a little undisciplined, and a talented artist himself, which made him a valuable studio assistant. He had also created his own business making and selling decorative trees and flowers cut out of wood and hand-painted, a number of which would, at any one time, be dotted about Powis Terrace. “Mo could even clean up quickly, even if he was a totally ‘sweep it under the carpet’ person. I remember once when my mother came,” Hockney recalls, “and he had put my pornographic magazines under the sofa and I saw my mother sitting on the sofa and the pornographic magazines sticking out from under it, and I thought, ‘Good old Mo!’ ”35

  He could make Hockney laugh to boot, a trait required of anyone who might wish to join his circle, and Hockney also admired his self-confidence when it came to his sexuality, which McDermott had no inhibitions about. “He could be a little whore,” Hockney says, “with one fantastic talent, which was that he could fuck anything and it didn’t seem to matter to him. I said to him that it was a talent I didn’t have. Sometimes he used to say to me, ‘What will happen to me in my old age?’ and I used to tell him, ‘There’ll always be someone looking for the comforts that you can bring them, Mo.’ ”36 For some time he enjoyed an arrangement with Peter Coats, the erudite and gentlemanly gardening editor of House & Garden. “We called him ‘Mr. House & Garden,’ ” Hockney recalls. “He would say to Mo, ‘Tell me about the Beatles,’ and Mo would say, ‘I don’t know the Beatles,’ and he would say, ‘Well, pretend you do.’ Mo knew what to do for the gentlemen. He was very sharp like that.”37

  David Hockney and Mo McDermott (illustration credit 12.3)

  In the mood Hockney was in, it is not surprising that he even began to consider giving up Powis Terrace and moving elsewhere. He had heard that the painter Rodrigo Moynihan was selling his house in Argyll Road, Kensington, and expressed an interest in buying it. He particularly loved the garden. “I do think that eleven years in the same place is about enough,” he wrote to Geldzahler, “and somehow Powis Terrace isn’t the same as it used to be with Mrs. Evans gone and Joan the dry cleaners.”38 Not even Birtwell’s eventual return could lift his spirits. “Things haven’t been so good since the Clarks returned,” he wrote a few days later. “Ossie seems terrified as if his world is about to collapse tomorrow, and while it frightens Celia a little she does have sympathy for him now … I think that’s very sweet and natural.”39

  He tried to get back into work, starting a new version of George Lawson and Wayne Sleep, but he got nowhere with it, and realising that there was nothing to keep him in London any longer, made the decision to return to Paris for at least a year. He told Clark, who had finally been kicked out by Birtwell, that he could move into Powis Terrace. “I am leaving London Thursday evening,” he wrote to Geldzahler. “Maurice is driving me and a lot of equipment … I’m looking foreward [sic] to it, I think, more than my first trip to California. The relief of getting out of London and being able to work all day long will ease my life so much … It’s all very well having excitement or turbulence in one’s life, but then one needs a period of reflection to sort it out. That’s why I look foreward to Paris so much. I hope to work it all out on canvases.”40 Working on the oil painting of his mother had made him fall in love with oils again, and he decided to abandon acrylic for the time being. “Oil painting is such a delight again. One doesn’t have to hurry, or keep bits of colour with labels on etc etc.”41

  Hockney was to spend the better part of the next two years in Paris, living in a beautiful apartment in the sixth arrondissement rented from Tony Richardson. 3 Cour de Rohan was a romantic place, hidden away behind the Rue Saint-André des Arts and accessed through iron gates, behind which lay a series of three connecting courtyards, parts of which dated back to the fourteenth century. The French painter Balthus had once had a studio in the same building, and Hockney too soon fell under the spell of its ivy-clad walls, ancient trees and cobbled surfaces. It was close to L’Odéon Métro station; he used to tell would-be visitors, “Just pass the statue of Danton and you will find me.”42 He arrived on 4 October, and was soon settled in, writing to Geldzahler, “Paris is very pleasant. For the first time in years I can have eight hours a day painting alone with no disturbances. The telephone only seems to ring two or three times and it’s usually only friends arranging dinner. I’ve started a few french lessons but my progress is slow, and after a hard day painting it’s a little hard to concentrate, but I intend to slog at it.”43

  He soon established a routine. “I used to have my breakfast out at the Café de Flore and read the papers,” he recalls, “and then after that I’d come back to the flat and paint. I might go out to lunch
at one of the little places on the corner—there were loads of places—and then I’d work in the afternoon, and about five or six o’clock I’d walk down to the Café de Flore or Les Deux Magots. At first I thought that old bohemian Paris had gone and then I realised that in fact I was living in the last bit of it. The Left Bank was still cheap. There were a lot of hotels which you could live in for not that much money, so I was always meeting all kinds of people. I lived on cash and I used to walk everywhere. I could walk to the Louvre. I could walk to the Pompidou, to the Opéra, to the Coupole. I hardly ever took a taxi. I really liked my routine. If I didn’t want to go to the cafe I didn’t, I just worked.”44 The apartment consisted of one large room with a high ceiling, which he used as a studio, a kitchen and two or three bedrooms. “I’ve got settled in and started a painting of the mirror in my room at Lucca,” he wrote to Geldzahler. “As it seems a time for reflextion [sic] in painting, I thought it a good subject. I only brought oil paints here, and it’s very exciting using them again. I’m quickly adapting my techniques to it.”45

  Hockney was at a crossroads in his life. “I was thinking about many things and about certain attitudes to painting I felt were dead,” he wrote. “I was trying to break out of something … of what I called obsessive naturalism … Usually when I get into that state I have to do something, so I just sit and draw in some way or other. At that time I felt almost as though I should go back to drawing skeletons, as I did when I was a student at the Royal College of Art, thinking, what shall I do?: I’ll make a study of the skeleton; what should I do?: I’ll make some drawings of my friends; I’ll make them slowly, accurately, have them sit down and pose for hours.”46

  One of the first to be drawn was Celia Birtwell, who came over to Paris on a number of occasions in November. “The whole point of going was to be drawn by him,” she recalls, “so I always took a pile of things with me … One day I had met this woman in Earls Court who had a trunkload of the most marvellous pieces of silk lingerie, and I took them with me to Paris. That’s when he drew me in all those pretty clothes, and in the dirndl skirt with the flowers on it. If I was there for a week he would do several drawings. They were done in pencil, and each took about four or five hours to draw. The best drawings he ever did of me were done in those three months.”47 These, notably Celia in a Black Dress with Red Stockings, Celia in a Black Dress with White Flowers, Celia Wearing Checked Sleeves and Celia in a Black Slip, Reclining, are more than just beautiful drawings, for they also reveal the artist’s feelings. Indeed, they might be the work of an ardent lover, in that they imbue the model with a sensual warmth and femininity. They are sexy. “In the French drawings, when we were very close,” she told the art historian Paul Melia, “there was something going on between us which I think he portrayed through those drawings. He said to me that this was his way of expressing how he felt about me.”48

  Just as he had cultivated an entourage of friends in London, so in Paris Hockney moved among an eclectic mix of Europeans and Americans, many of whom appear in his drawings from this period. Chief among his French friends was Jean Léger, a young designer for Helena Rubinstein, who Hockney liked to say “works in a lipstick factory.”49 A good-looking, highly cultivated Parisian, always impeccably dressed, with a quiet sense of humour and a twinkle in his eye, he had met Hockney in London in 1967. An etching of 1971, Rue de Seine, shows the view from the Paris apartment Léger shared with his lover Alexis Vidal, an interior designer, where Hockney often used to stay; it was published in an edition of 150 by Petersburg Press to raise money for the National Council for Civil Liberties. Léger, the subject of a large and affectionate drawing, Portrait of Jean Léger, spoke fluent English and, according to Celia Birtwell, acted as a kind of chaperone to Hockney, whom he was thrilled to have living in his home city.

  Gregory Evans was also living close by, in the Rue de Dragon off the Boulevard Saint-Germain, having split up with Nick Wilder and come to Paris with the intention of studying fashion. He had turned up after a period of floating around Europe and getting into a number of scrapes, including being refused entry to the UK by Customs and Immigration at Gatwick airport after arriving on a flight stoned out of his head. “In Los Angeles,” Evans recalls, “I had been to the George Trippon School of Fashion Design to learn technical aspects of pattern-making and cutting, and I had this fantasy while I was there of going to fashion school in Paris, and I did none of it.”50 Instead, supported by a private income, he set about having a good time. It was a great moment to be in Paris, a time of change, as the last breath of the post-war society of poets, actors, artists and musicians combined with an influx of a young international set of models and designers connected with the fashion industry. “I didn’t even speak French and wasn’t fluent enough to go to any kind of serious school, but I have to say it was probably the best time of my life. I loved Paris. It was a fantastic time. It was so new and exciting and thrilling. The first year I lived there I probably never went out before four o’clock in the afternoon and I never went to bed before seven or eight in the morning.”51

  Since his apartment was only two minutes’ walk from the Café de Flore, Evans would amble down there in the early evening and seek out the familiar figure of Hockney, who stood out from the crowd with his colourful rugby shirts, red braces and odd-coloured socks, and often wearing a panama hat or even a beret. They would drink white wine, and talk about life, and a true friendship slowly developed. “I went to the opera with David,” he says. “We travelled. I used to love spending time with him watching him paint. Occasionally David and I would lunch and then we would go to the Louvre in the afternoon. We’d go in the side door and there would be nobody there.”52

  Among the other regulars at the Flore was another of Hockney’s friends, an American painter called Shirley Goldfarb, whose curious appearance also singled her out. “She was a most extraordinary woman,” Jack Hazan remembers. “She always dressed as a beatnik with long black dyed hair. She had massive bulging eyes all mascaraed up and she always wore the same clothes—a roll-neck black sweater and jeans with high-heel clog boots.”53 Goldfarb had come to Paris to fulfil her romantic dream of being an artist living against the backdrop of the city of artists. She had taken a tiny studio in the Rue Liancourt in Montparnasse, where she lived with her husband, Gregory Masurovsky, a graphic artist, and a wiry little Yorkshire terrier which accompanied her everywhere. Here she would work on large abstract-expressionist paintings executed using a brush/palette-knife technique. “I paint a square every day,”54 she used to say, speaking French with a strong American accent, by which she meant a one-inch square of paint on the canvas. For twenty-five years she sat every day at the Café de Flore, in her latter years writing a journal, posthumously published as Carnets Montparnasse, 1971–1980. Though her intensity and her social ambition made most people run a mile, Hockney adored her.

  “I thought she was funny,” he recalls. “She liked mocking things, and we became quite good friends. I used to dine at the Coupole a lot and Shirley would come looking for me, and when she found me she’d sit down at the table and if she ordered lobster I knew I would have to pay for it. People used to think she was taking advantage of me, but I said, ‘Well, if I was in her position I would do the same.’ She had no money and in those days you could live in Paris like that. She told me sometimes she would sit down with no money at all and somebody would come along and pay for her. She and Gregory lived very modestly, but she thought they were privileged living in the most beautiful city in the world.”55

  Fascinated by their relationship, Hockney naturally saw them as a subject for a new double portrait. They had lived in two tiny little rooms for over twenty years, Gregory, who was very quiet and reserved, having the windowless back room, out of which he could not go without passing through Shirley’s room at the front. “Their relationship is a weird subject,” Hockney wrote. “He can’t go out of the building without her seeing, but she can. They are married but they are apart.”56

&nb
sp; Shirley Goldfarb and Gregory Masurovsky, painted in acrylic after a drawing, showed their curious living conditions, with Shirley seated on a chair in her studio, while Gregory perches on the edge of a single bed in his cubicle.

  Another eccentric woman who fascinated Hockney was the stage and costume designer Lila de Nobili, an Italian from a grand family, whose designs had included the celebrated Visconti production of La Traviata with Maria Callas. “The set … was of such refinement and elegance,” wrote the television producer Peter Adam, “that it made reality look shoddy.”57 Her appearance was less refined than her creations, however, dressed as she always was in rather shabby shawls and stockings. Hockney met her through Tony Richardson, with whom she had collaborated on The Charge of the Light Brigade, and she had also designed both Ondine and Sleeping Beauty for Frederick Ashton at the Royal Ballet, where she was known to the company as “Knobbly Lil.”58 When she first came to tea at the Cour de Rohan, she had just come out of retirement to design Manon Lescaut for Visconti at the international festival in Spoleto in Italy.

  De Nobili lived in just the kind of Paris garret that Hockney used to joke about owning. “One afternoon we went to her tiny little apartment,” Celia Birtwell recalls, “which was right at the top of this staircase that went up for ever … And there was this little flat, with a minute kitchen—I remember it had a Belfast sink and there was this great big box of Persil sitting there. She had cats and it was just the perfect scenario—this highly regarded, rather marvellous-looking woman living in this tiny flat.”59 A shy and quite reclusive woman, she had no telephone, and only one teacup, which particularly amused Hockney. He perfectly captured these elements in his beautiful and touching drawing, Lila de Nobili. “She had an almost masochistic humility,” wrote Peter Adam, “and a closed nature at odds with all those inflated egos in the world of theatre and opera, like a strange bird who had fallen out of a nest.”60