Darling,
Man are my eyeballs stinging and boy am I seeing everything yellow well maybe I ought to try slashing something off my flesh it weighs heavily – fingers like stalks soaked with mighty tempests – after a weekend drought …… Christ could I get really sloshed right now and be laid by you a dozen and a half times with Sandra somewhere over the edge … reminds me I wouldn’t mind a trip to down under wearing my ‘Bizarre’ dress and SOFT (clinging) black-black leather coms and outerwear etcetera etcetera – though Dorse would do?
IN SUCH a crowded room, the paintings aren’t really visible at a distance. Instead, you have to shunt your way forward, politely but assertively, shoulders wide enough to establish contemplative space, because this is Hockney’s 2017 blockbuster retrospective and Tate always lets too many people in for its big exhibitions. It’s also a bottleneck, one of the earliest rooms – the one filled with the paintings that made Hockney’s name in 1961 and 1962: works that established him as one of the most significant painters to emerge in Britain since Francis Bacon. In 1962 Bacon was the existential Establishment, and Hockney was the hot, young, Poppy thing. Fifty-five years later, Hockney is as Establishment as Establishment comes: arguably the most popular ‘serious’ British artist of the past half-century, if not of all time, even if he has spent much of his life on the other side of the Atlantic.
That popularity is down to his work, of course. But it is also down to the man himself: the Yorkshire-inflected affability and straight-talking; the legacy of that peroxided blonde hair; and, as he ages, the cloth caps and cardigans and canes and signature specs. Hockney isn’t just a great artist but an embodiment of what much of the British public imagines an artist nearing the end of his career should be: like someone’s kooky granddad, losing his hearing but maintaining his humour and charm, painting dog portraits and Yorkshire landscapes and doodling on an iPad.
It’s a far cry from Bacon’s tortured-genius persona, which stuck with him until his death in 1992. But perhaps the way each man aged in the public’s mind’s eye isn’t so surprising, because the twenty years between them were more like a century. Towards the end of World War II, Bacon began to make what became some of his best work, and masterpiece after masterpiece came in the brutal decade of austerity that followed the war. By the time Hockney got to the RCA in 1959, the British economic gloom had started to lift. Two years later, everything was pure potential: both in British society, which was going through a series of cultural and sexual changes that would find their full expression later in the decade, and in Hockney’s own work.
The transformation in Hockney’s work, when viewed chronologically at the Tate exhibition and in the accompanying catalogue, is swift and profound. The slightly humdrum semi-abstractions of Love Painting and Shame, both 1960, quickly give way to the altogether more promising The Third Love Painting, 1960, in which a lumpy torso with wisps of paint like hair springing from it is surrounded by phrases resembling bathroom graffiti, both ominous and erotic: ‘my brother is only 17’; ‘ring me anytime at home’; ‘I am he that aches with amorous love’. Love and shame have matured quickly into a deeper articulation of the space between physical desire, danger – both legal and violent – and care. That lumpy torso is then doubled, articulated and joined with limbs the following year in We Two Boys Together Clinging, 1961: Hockney’s tribute to Walt Whitman, Cliff Richard and his outed self.
The paintings tumble out of him: The Cha Cha That Was Danced in the Early Hours of 24th March 1961, 1961, in which he paints his crush, Peter Crutch, holding a handbag; Cleaning Teeth, Early Evening (10PM) W11, 1962, in which two giant heads with legs and Colgate tubes for cocks, one of them chained down, squirt toothpaste into each other’s mouths; and the ‘Demonstrations of Versatility’: A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style, 1961; Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style, 1961, Figure in a Flat Style, 1961; and Flight into Italy – Swiss Landscape, 1962, in which a Mini van with three figures races through the Alps, the words ‘thats [sic] Switzerland that was’ trailing in its wake. Works that made not just Hockney but a generation, changing the terms of conversation for British painting.
‘Ten or eleven years ago,’ the RCA’s principal Robin Darwin wrote in the college’s 1959 Annual Report,
students were older than they are now, the sequence of their education had been interrupted by war or national service; they had known experiences and discharged responsibilities far outside the orbit of their interests, and returning to them they were primarily concerned in the rediscovery of themselves as individuals. As artists they were less self-confident, but in all other ways they were more mature. By these same tokens perhaps they were less experimental in their ideas. The student of today is less easy to teach because the chips on his shoulder, which in some instances are virtually professional epaulettes, make him less ready to learn; yet this refusal to take ideas on trust, though it may not be congenial to the tutor, may in the long run prove to be a valuable characteristic.
It’s unclear whether Darwin knew exactly what he and his faculty had recruited for the 1959 student intake when he wrote this. But the likes of Bates and Hockney were unquestionably part of a new pattern in the RCA’s most gifted recruits. The college had recently produced the Pop pioneers Peter Blake and Joe Tilson, and the abstractionists Robyn Denny and Richard ‘Dick’ Smith. All four were key figures in a new and progressive London art scene that took its inspiration from America. Smith was the first visual artist to receive a Harkness Fellowship, in 1959, which gave him two years in the States, where he made connections with the New York art scene that would help his own career as well as the eventual trajectories of some of the 1959 RCA intake.
Marco Livingstone has argued that this group – and Smith in particular – represented a significant change in British painting. ‘In severing the links with landscape still so prevalent in British art,’ he wrote in 1992, ‘replacing such references with allusions to the built environment and the man-made world of the mass media, Smith and his colleagues laid the basis for an essentially urban avant-garde art that constituted a real break with native tradition. The one thing Smith was not prepared to sacrifice, however, was the intimacy of the personal mark.’
That so much new thinking emerged around this time at the RCA initially seems surprising, given some of the faculty teaching there. The Painting School, for example, was run by Carel Weight, a gifted painter of suburban scenes and portraits who had also served as an official war artist. Despite the seemingly conservative subject matter, Derek Boshier (one of the 1959 painting intake) remembered Weight and his work fondly: ‘I was a great fan of Carel Weight’s paintings,’ he said in a 2013 interview, ‘we all were, all the faculty and all the students admired his work I think …’ Weight’s teaching team, though, was dominated by a figurative, post-war stuffiness: landscape enthusiasts Roger de Grey and Robert Buhler, and Ruskin Spear, a painter of portraits and London pub scenes. In technical terms, they were all immensely talented. In terms of subject matter and execution, though, their work already belonged to a bygone era.
The much younger Sandra Blow, who joined the faculty in 1961, was a welcome relief: she was an important figure in contemporary British abstraction, as well as a seriously fashionable figure within the London art world. At the start of the sixties Blow’s work still showed the influence of the year she’d spent in Rome in 1947–48 with her lover Alberto Burri. As Michael McNay wrote in a 2006 obituary for Blow, ‘Burri remade Blow in his image.’ Paintings like Blow’s Composition II, 1960, clearly illustrate this, its black, white and muddy colour scheme, with just a hint of red, owing much to Burri’s similarly hued works from the 1950s. She was, though, developing her own voice and reputation: she’d been exhibiting in London since 1951 and New York since 1957, and in 1958 she was included in the Central Pavilion exhibition at the Venice Biennale. It appears she’d made an impression on Ann Quin, too: ‘Christ could I get really sloshed right now and be laid by you a dozen and a half times,’ she wrote to Bates in early 1962, ‘with Sandra somewhere over the edge …’ It seems likely that the glamorous Blow, then working in the department where Quin was secretary, is the ‘Sandra’ she was referring to.
Hockney claimed in 1976 that ‘[t]he staff said that the students in that year were the worst they’d had for many, many years. They didn’t like us; they thought we were a little bolshy, or something …’ Events towards the end of their first year seemed to bear out this animosity. That collective bolshiness was apparently too much for Darwin, and, demanding the Painting School make an example, Allen Jones – who would become such an important figure in British Pop – was booted out of the RCA. ‘They stuck a pin in the list,’ Jones recalled in 2013, ‘and it was my name that came out of that.’ Jones says that it was a dreadful moment for him – because he’d done nothing to deserve such treatment, but also because it could have had a major impact on his future livelihood. Artists who graduated from the Slade, the Royal Academy or the RCA were instantly placed on a graduate pay scale for teaching jobs, which is what many had to do to make a living. Jones says it was like having his ‘legs cut off’. He went and did a teaching diploma instead, but stayed closely connected to the RCA painters he’d briefly studied alongside, and to the emerging London scene they were starting to shape.
But neither Jones’s expulsion nor Hockney’s recollections of the faculty’s antipathy towards his cohort capture the dramatic way the Darwin-era RCA had transformed post-war art education in Britain. Darwin had become the RCA’s principal in 1948, and immediately set about modernising it by hiring professional artists and designers. The idea was to create a postgraduate college with strong links to industry (particularly in design), where students could specialise in narrow fields – typography, say, or silversmithing and jewellery – that prepared them for a life of work in their chosen disciplines. While this doesn’t seem particularly radical now, it was a major shift from the comparatively fusty pre-war years during which the RCA had a reputation as a training ground for art teachers and not much else. Implicitly, it was an acknowledgement of a new British creative economy, in a world of mass communication and new technologies that had been supercharged by wartime innovations.
Arguably the clearest and most successful example was the school Bates entered in 1959: Graphic Design, run by Richard Guyatt. Under Guyatt’s guidance, the school had leapt to the forefront of transatlantic design, and was notable for its industry-leading publication, ARK. Guyatt was also sufficiently attuned to his students to recognise the New Zealander Bates’s singular, unusual gifts – and would become a central figure in Bates’s early development.
As Hockney biographer Christopher Simon Sykes points out, Hockney and his British classmates were also among the first to benefit from the 1944 Education Act. Towards the end of the war, this new legislation transformed primary and secondary education in the UK, making higher levels of education more accessible to the working classes and requiring the provision of school meals. It raised the school leaving age to fifteen and put in place the 11-plus exam, which determined the secondary pathways children would follow. Crucially, this was a meritocratic system: in principle, smart kids who did well, no matter their economic background, ended up going to grammar schools. Hockney was one of those smart kids, earning a scholarship to Bradford Grammar – one of the oldest and best schools of its type in England – in 1948.
Bradford is an essential part of the Hockney mythology. While it’s easy to emphasise the wartime grimness he grew up in (the Hockney household had narrowly missed being bombed by the Germans), it’s also significant that the Hockneys valued education. Hockney grew up in a house with books, and went to the theatre (including to see the opera) and to museums – albeit the ones in and around Bradford and Leeds (he didn’t visit London until he was sixteen). His parents Laura and Kenneth were bright, and both knew that schooling was the key to their children’s future success. Hockney’s older brother Paul had also won a scholarship to Bradford Grammar.
Even at this early stage in his biography writers run into an issue, which Chris Stephens, the curator of Hockney’s 2017 Tate retrospective, describes diplomatically: ‘The Hockney literature,’ he writes, ‘has … been dominated by [Hockney’s] own view of his art and its development, and this has naturally served to isolate it from broader accounts.’ Hockney, in other words, has cast his own shadow over how we might understand his early evolution. And this stretches all the way back to the boy entering grammar school for the first time. It unfurls to its full length in Hockney’s 1976 ‘autobiography’ – in reality, a story of his early years edited from conversations with Nikos Stangos – published when he was just thirty-nine, a book that cements the view of him as the avuncular Yorkshireman, and creates a kind of Beano-esque English aura around his adolescence.
The Hockney-as-cheeky-teen narrative goes something like this: David enters Bradford Grammar with a scholarship, which means he’s placed in one of the top forms. To his dismay, he discovers that he’s able to study art for only about ninety minutes a week. The bottom class, by contrast, gets far more time in the art rooms. So he comes up with a cunning plan to fail his way down the forms. This is much to the alarm of the school, and his parents, but it works, and he turns himself into a decidedly average academic achiever. We do, though, get flashes of the future great artist: the posters he makes for school events, some early paintings. And, most of all, caricatures: exercise books filled with daydreamy doodles and comical portraits which, combined with his status as class clown, hatred of sports days and love of slapstick-style self-deprecation, keep his classmates endlessly entertained.
There’s no reason to doubt this is based in truth. But in its distillation, and its repetition by his later biographers, it’s become a winking shorthand, hindsight perfectly revealing the obscenely gifted, precocious, gay (there are comical accounts of his time in the Boy Scouts) superstar he’ll become in the early sixties. More complex is what happens after he leaves Bradford Grammar for Bradford School of Art in September 1953. Hockney had actually sought permission to leave grammar school much earlier to join the junior arm of the art school. But the Director of Schools in Bradford turned him down, insisting, much to Hockney’s distress, that he finish his secondary education first.
At Bradford School of Art he begins his serious training as an artist, particularly in conventional drawing techniques. This would become foundational to his place as one of the great draughtsmen of twentieth-century British art. He also became part of a close group of talented painters, including John Loker, Peter Kaye, Dave Oxtoby and, most of all, Norman Stevens, who would go to the RCA ahead of Hockney, warning his own classmate, Adrian Berg, about the talented kid who was on his way in 1959.
Hockney was taught at Bradford by Derek Stafford, a recent graduate of the RCA and still in his twenties. Stafford encouraged Hockney and his classmates to travel outside of Bradford to see as much art as they could: to Wakefield and to Leeds, and particularly to London. The group would either hitchhike or get cheap day-return tickets and stretch that day as far as they could, leaving just after midnight and coming back on the last train before the clock ticked over twenty-four hours later. It was on these trips that Hockney first encountered London’s gallery scene, and the Tate Gallery, and, perhaps most importantly in terms of his future development, the National Gallery.
Hockney’s performative self-awareness found an early manifestation in Bradford. For a time, he modelled himself on Stanley Spencer, at that moment the archetypally eccentric English artist. According to biographer Peter Webb, Hockney ‘imitated the painter by walking about wearing a bowler hat and long woolly scarf, in a heavy black overcoat with drooping shoulders, carrying an old umbrella and pushing a pram containing his painting materials’. It was a look topped off by Hockney’s signature National Health Service spectacles. Though it may have been a passing phase, it’s evidence of a very young artist already thinking not just about his work but about how to manifest his presence as an artist in public.
Hockney took his exams for the National Diploma in Design in the summer of 1957 and, unsurprisingly, smashed them, receiving a first-class diploma with honours. At the encouragement of Stafford, he had applied to the RCA and Slade postgraduate programmes. He travelled to London to take the entrance exams, and met Derek Boshier there. Both young men were accepted to the RCA. The Slade had given Hockney the nod, too. Stafford encouraged him to choose the RCA.
But before he could take up his place, he had the small matter of his National Service to complete. Like his father, Hockney registered as a conscientious objector, and completed most of his service working in hospitals, delaying his entry to the RCA until the 1959/60 academic year.
There are strong parallels between Hockney’s backstory and that of the young man who would, at the end of 1962, disappear forever and be replaced by Billy Apple: Barrie Bates.
Bates was a year and a half older than Hockney, born in Auckland on 31 December 1935. Bates’s parents also had middle-class ambitions for their kids. In fact, his mother Marija, who had aspired to be a ballerina, was already middle class, but married Bates’s more working-class father Albert, a telephone mechanician who worked for the post and telegraph service. Like Hockney’s father Kenneth, Albert was also a hobbyist artist: a part-time watercolourist who recognised his boy had some talent and encouraged him to attend Saturday morning art classes. There are parallels between their mothers, too: where Laura Hockney was a religious, teetotalling vegetarian, Marija was meticulous to the point of neurosis, insisting on the utmost cleanliness in herself and her children. Both families were large: Bates was one of four siblings, Hockney was one of five.
For Hockney, grammar school offered a way up and out of his blue-collar surrounds. In Auckland, Mount Albert Grammar, which Bates attended, was more egalitarian but offered similar opportunities. The two boys’ experiences at secondary school were, however, very different. Hockney was clearly an over-achiever who, as he tells it, began to wilfully under-achieve so he could spend more time in the art room. He was also popular with his schoolmates. Bates, by contrast, hated school, and as Apple tells it, was bullied so much that he convinced the school’s principal he should be allowed to arrive late and leave early. Even with this accommodation, he didn’t see things through, leaving the school after three years, at age fifteen, without a qualification.
For many young New Zealand men of his era, leaving school young wasn’t the end of the world. In the early fifties, New Zealand was a wealthy country that had modelled itself as a kind of classless utopia: still unmistakably tied to Britain, but without all the pesky societal stratification. Bates lived with his grandparents for a while, helping them around their property, then got a job in 1953 as a lab assistant in a paint factory. Soon after, he got his first break in Auckland’s advertising industry, as a messenger. And in 1956 he was taken on as a trainee graphic designer for the department store chain, the Farmers Trading Company. While there he redesigned the company’s logo, which Farmers kept for three decades – a strange ghost of Bates himself, well and truly outlasting the man who disappeared in 1962.
Bates took evening art classes at Auckland City Art Gallery and Elam School of Fine Arts. This gave him a dual life, bouncing between the advertising and art worlds, which he would carry with him to the RCA, and which would continue, after he became Apple, until 1990 when he finally returned to New Zealand. This is also where the parallels with Hockney pick up again, because, as with Derek Stafford, it was an RCA graduate who first gave Bates the desire to study at the London institution. The RCA-trained artist Robert Ellis joined the teaching staff at Elam in 1957. Prior to that, he’d taught at Yeovil School of Art, where one of his students had been a young painter called Derek Boshier.
In 1958, Ellis encouraged Bates to put together a portfolio for submission to the RCA, despite the fact he had no formal qualifications. This wasn’t a particularly unusual pathway for talented New Zealand artists: William ‘Bill’ Culbert was nearing the end of his own time at the RCA just as Bates was applying. The New Zealand government supported these students with travelling scholarships of £500 per year – a pretty generous sum compared to what the likes of Hockney and Boshier, as domestic students, received. Bates applied for the scholarship but was turned down. It wasn’t until the RCA – and in particular Richard Guyatt – saw the portfolio and was so impressed by it that Bates got the money, albeit a lesser amount of £400.
This augured well for the twenty-three-year-old Aucklander: he had the recommendation of a gifted RCA graduate in Robert Ellis; he had a direct contact with Boshier and his family; and, perhaps most significantly, his work had already made an impact on Guyatt, who would become so important to his early trajectory as an artist and designer, both as a defender and mentor.
Although there’s no question Auckland was almost as far away from London as one could get, it wasn’t, in the 1950s, a complete backwater. In terms of modern art, the city had experienced a major overhaul through both the influx of British staff to Elam – not just Ellis, but others like Michael Nicholson – and the Auckland City Art Gallery’s engagement with, and collection of, European and British modernism under the leadership of Peter Tomory, who took up the directorship in 1956. Local painters were also beginning to make their presence felt as genuine modernists – most notably Colin McCahon, who would become the giant of New Zealand art over the next three decades until his death in 1987.
There were coffee bars, a growing sexual freedom, jazz records and fashion, and international influence in art and design. As Christina Barton notes, Bates himself had already started to receive recognition, having had some of his design work published internationally, in the 1958–59 edition of Modern Publicity, while the Dutch émigré Kees Hos wrote a favourable article about him in the influential New Zealand magazine Home and Building in July 1959. Bates, then, was no hick. He was, though, an extremely complicated young man: gifted, but with no qualifications to his name and a history of being bullied at school. He set off for London with a well-established chip on his shoulder, massive ambitions and serious points to prove. The colonial wasn’t going to let his colonial baggage hold him, or drag him, back.
Bates travelled to Australia in July 1959, and took an ocean liner from there to England, arriving in early September. The Boshiers picked him up and took him back to the pub they ran in Basingstoke. He and Boshier then headed up to London, and moved into a flat at 83 Warwick Road, ready for the start of their first term at the RCA – where Boshier would once again encounter the young man from Bradford he’d first met when they were both interviewed back in 1957, and whom Bates would meet for the first time.
An important cast of characters was beginning to assemble at the RCA that autumn: Bates, Hockney, Boshier, Allen Jones, Peter Phillips, R. B. Kitaj, Frank Bowling and Peter Crutch. At the college already were Hockney’s Bradford colleague Norman Stevens, Adrian Berg, Pauline Boty and Ridley Scott (Scott was a year ahead of Bates in Graphic Design, and the pair struck up a friendship). And among the support staff there was Ann Quin, who started that October as Carel Weight’s secretary.
Quin was until recently a relatively obscure figure in 1960s British culture. But the 2018 publication of The Unmapped Country: Stories & Fragments, edited by Jennifer Hodgson, has led to a resurgence of British interest in Quin, and via her estate new details have emerged about her.
Much of what is known about Quin’s early life comes from a brief autobiography published in London Magazine in July 1966. ‘Bound by perverse securities in a Convent, RC Brighton for eight years,’ she wrote:
Taking that long to get over. The Holy Ghost. The Trinity. The Reverend Mother. I was not a Catholic. I was sent to a convent to be brought up ‘a lady’. To say gate and not giate – the Sussex accent I had picked up from the village school in my belly-rubbing days had to be eliminated by How Now Brown Cow, if I wanted to make my way in the world. According to Mother.
Her mother, Anne Reid, was wrong. Quin, from the time she moved to London from Brighton as a young woman in the 1950s to her death in 1973, would make her way in the world as one of the most talented writers of her generation. That way, though, was ferociously difficult: only a small group of readers, writers, critics and editors truly understood her significance in her own lifetime, and her battles with mental illness were debilitating. Still, her mother was right about one thing: a recording of Quin from the late sixties illustrates that the How Now Brown Cow worked – her deeper-than-average voice has none of the Sussex inflection the nuns were so keen to drill out of her.
As is the case with other talented women of her generation who died young (Pauline Boty, for instance, who died aged twenty-eight in 1966), Quin has, for a long time, largely been known as a footnote in other people’s stories – including those of two writers with whom she had brief affairs, the American poet Robert Creeley and the British novelist Henry Williamson – or as a kind of curiosity in the history of experimental British fiction. Quin published four novels and wrote a cluster of short stories and fragments, and some of her letters have ended up in other people’s archives: among them, those of her publisher Marion Boyars; the Carmelite friar Brocard Sewell, who was part of the 1960s British literary scene; and Apple, a natural hoarder who still has pieces of writing Quin sent to Bates, and wrote as Bates, while they were together in 1961/62. Her employment records at the RCA largely square with her London Magazine account, as well as providing specific details about her life and livelihood around the time she wrote Berg.
Born 17 March 1936, Quin was raised by her mother Anne, whose married name was Ward (which is how she’s listed on Quin’s birth certificate) but who for all of Quin’s life was known by her maiden name, Anne Reid. Reid had married young to a much older man, Philip Henry Ward. Ward was a captain in the merchant navy, working on boats between Mumbai and Port Said on the Suez Canal. The couple had a son, John Edward, in 1928. Around 1934, Ward retired and moved his young family back to the UK, to Brighton. Soon after their arrival, Reid left Ward and their son John. A year or so later, her daughter Ann Quin was born – the father listed on her birth certificate as Montague Nicholas Quin, an optician. There is no record of Reid ever divorcing Ward.
Quin and her mother lived in Ovingdean, a small village near Brighton (Ward and his son John had moved to Paington, Devon). As she wrote in London Magazine, Quin received a Catholic education at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament, but had little time for her regular homework, preferring to immerse herself in books from the public library: Greek and Elizabethan dramatists, Dostoevsky, Woolf, Chekhov, Hardy and Lawrence (Lawrence’s legacy would eventually come to play a particularly important role in her own work and trajectory).
Quin described herself as a teenager preoccupied with sex and physicality: wondering whether the nuns stripped completely to bathe, and being ‘excited in getting into the Sixth Form, not only because the classroom windows overlooked the boys’ college, but on the whole sinful world lay before me at the end of the year’. She also wrote that ‘[a]t fourteen I met my half-brother for the first time and fell desperately in love with him; he died five years later and I saw myself as Antigone. At eighteen I went up to London to spend Saturdays with my father … and pretended he was my lover.’ The half-brother was John Ward. By the time the siblings first met around 1950, Ward was in his early twenties. He married in 1952, and had his own son, Jeremy, in 1953. John then died of polio in 1955. But with the two branches of the family reconnected, Jeremy maintained relationships with his aunt, Quin, and his grandmother, Reid, until both women died within months of each other in 1973. Jeremy describes Quin as having a complex, love-hate relationship with her mother, whom she referred to as ‘Mother Courage’. He also says that his grandmother was fiery and could be a ‘terrific snob’, and would be ‘spinning in her grave’ at the suggestion, which has been made by several commentators, that Quin was working class.
The young Quin became fixated with the theatre, in which she was able ‘to witness a fantasy world that relieved my many desires, frustrations’. She set her sights on becoming an actor. She got her first job as an assistant stage manager with a repertoire company, but left after a row with her boss – over a hem she’d sewn crooked. Soon after, she auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) – and this is where we get the first inkling of the crippling anxiety that formed part of her illness. ‘I expected a stage,’ she wrote, ‘even a platform, instead a smallish room, brightly lit; ten or twelve people faced me. I began, froze, asked to start again, but was struck dumb, and rushed out, silently screaming, down Gower Street.’
In Brighton, Quin enrolled at Box’s Commercial College, where she gained a certificate in shorthand and typing. This was pure expedience, a way to pay the bills and maintain her independence while she set her attention on the serious business of becoming a published writer. During a brief stint in a newspaper office in London, she got appendicitis, went home to Brighton and fell in love with a painter, whom she doesn’t name. She took a job in a solicitor’s office, which was incredibly dreary, ‘[b]ut the world of love awaited me every evening, I lived for that, would have gladly died for it. The job, the love, lasted two years.’
After both ended, she moved back to London, first working for a solicitor’s office in 1956 and the first part of 1957, then in the foreign rights department of the publisher Hutchinson & Co. She found a flat in Soho and began to write a novel called A Slice of the Moon, ‘about a homosexual, though at the time I had never met one, knew very little about queers (maybe I had read something in Proust?)’. She was barely able to cover food and rent. Still, she wrote, this was ‘[a] time when I worked the hardest at writing, more disciplined than I have ever done since.’
Quin worked on the novel for eighteen months, moved home to her mother’s in Brighton to finish it, then sent it off to publishers, who duly rejected it. It was around this time that she first met Paddy Kitchen, another aspiring writer, who was working in an administrative role at the RCA. In her recollections of Quin published in 1979 (also in London Magazine), Kitchen says that they met through Joy Rendle, who was ‘the mother of a friend’ and was working with Quin at St Dunstan’s in Ovingdean – a convalescent centre for blind or visually impaired veterans. Rendle had thought it would be interesting to introduce the two young writers. The ‘friend’ was Timothy Rendle, an architect working for the firm Casson Conder in London. Kitchen’s first role at the RCA had been as a secretary to Hugh Casson, who, as well as running his private practice, was at the helm of the college’s Interior Design School. (She later moved to Robin Darwin’s office and became the college’s assistant registrar.) Kitchen read the manuscript of A Slice of the Moon. ‘The four characters intertwined in complex relationships which I did not understand, and therefore barely believed in,’ she wrote. ‘I was not used to the stamping ground of the psyche, where Ann was intuitively at home.’ After A Slice of the Moon was rejected, Quin began another book called Oscar, which she described as ‘a novel that developed into telephone directory length of very weird content, without dialogue’. Kitchen described it as ‘an extraordinary gothic edifice, in which the weird and macabre were given an uncanny reality in an almost-London landscape’.
In September 1958, Quin wrote to Kitchen about getting work in London because she was leaving her job at St Dunstan’s. She also described her frustrations as a young woman writer. ‘Honestly don’t the other sex have the best of both worlds’, she wrote:
They can quite happily go on with their creating yet have a wife, mistress, children etc. without it upsetting them too much, besides doesn’t he get all the attention and comforts from the woman, ah it was a sad day when the seed entered the wrong ovum and I was conceived a girl, sure now I would have made a wonderful man besides people take more notice of a male writer no matter what blarney he gushes forth …
By the end of October, Quin had arranged a childcare job in Paris, with the hope that she would eventually get a job at NATO, where the money was good. This didn’t work out, and she returned to the UK. She moved back to London and got a three-day-a-week job, and was living on a pittance. (‘I fell in love with poverty-stricken painters who needed feeding as much as I did,’ she wrote of this time, ‘so that never lasted long.’) But by May 1959 she couldn’t face a summer working in a law firm’s basement, and took a hotel job as a resident waitress in Mevagissey, Cornwall, instead.
There, Quin had a more severe episode than the RADA panic attack. She escaped the hotel in the early morning and,
reached home speechless, dizzy, unable to bear the slightest noise. I lay in bed for days, weeks, unable to face the sun. If I went out into the garden I dug holes and lay in them weeping. I woke up in the middle of the night screaming, convinced my tears were rivers of blood, that my insides were being eaten away by an earwig that had crawled into my ear. I went to see a psychiatrist, going more from curiosity, and spent a few hours entertaining the horrified lady. I decided to climb back out of madness, the loneliness of going over the edge was worse than the absurdity of coping with day to day living.
Afterwards, Quin went to Paris for a month, then returned to London and ‘found a part-time job as secretary in the painting department of an art college’. This was, of course, at the RCA, where her great friend Paddy Kitchen already worked. Quin began her employment as Carel Weight’s secretary in the Painting School on 9 October 1959 – the start of the 1959/60 academic year in which Hockney, Boshier, Phillips, Bowling, Kitaj and Jones were among the intake. Just ahead of them was a thirty-year-old painter, whose surname would eventually become essential to Quin: Adrian Berg. She worked part-time, from 9.30 a.m. until 1 p.m. daily, leaving the afternoons and evenings free to write.
Quin’s initial address in her RCA file was 62 Redcliffe Road, not far from the art school, from where she ‘was turned out because my typing late at night disturbed the landlady’. She was still working on Oscar, which she eventually sent out to publishers. Again, it was rejected. But an encouraging letter was enough for her to start a third. That book would become Berg, which Quin finished before she left the art school in December 1962, having written three or four versions of it. Calder, which in 1963 would become Calder & Boyars – publishers of experimental and highly risky fiction, including the works of Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, William Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr and Nathalie Sarraute – accepted it. The first person to read it there was a young editor called Dulan Barber (Barber was also a writer, who later published under his own name, as well as under the pseudonym Owen Brookes for his horror fiction; he married Kitchen later in the 1960s). Barber loved Quin’s manuscript, and Berg was scheduled for publication in 1964.
The RCA was a three-year graduate diploma, and many of the staff, like Quin and Kitchen, were the same age as most of the students: young people in their twenties. So they were bound to become entangled. Bates, when he got involved with Quin in 1961, was twenty-five – only a few months older than her. And in 1960 one of Bates’s classmates, the painter Frank Bowling, began a relationship with Kitchen.
Like Quin, Bowling has had a recent and much-deserved rediscovery. In 2017, Munich’s Haus der Kunst staged a major exhibition of his work, and in the summer of 2019 Tate gave him the full survey treatment in London. This late-arriving recognition has also begun the work of re-inserting him into the histories of the Hockney-era RCA, where he was clearly one of the college’s most gifted painters. In fact, he won the silver medal for Painting in 1962 as Hockney won the RCA’s overall gold.
Bowling was born in February 1934 in Bartica, British Guiana. He grew up in New Amsterdam and arrived in London, aged nineteen, in 1953, first living with an uncle and intending to study English literature, before being told at the Labour Exchange that he’d have to perform his military service if he wanted to work in Britain. Bowling enlisted in the RAF that autumn, hoping he’d get an education alongside his service. He didn’t, and, clashing with his superiors regularly, was eventually given a dishonourable discharge in 1956. In the meantime he’d met Keith Critchlow, an artist who left the air force to study painting at the RCA. Bowling became close with the Critchlow family – Keith’s mother Rosalind was a journalist, his father Jerry a painter – and this, as well as hanging out in fashionable pubs like Finch’s on Fulham Road, would have helped him become a presence in London’s literary and art scenes.
To pay the bills, Bowling began life-modelling, including for Jerry Critchlow and, eventually, at the RCA. This was when the prospect of being an artist finally trumped his desire to be a writer. He took a place at the Chelsea School of Art in 1958, then applied to the RCA. His portfolio got through a first round of assessment but failed a second, so Carel Weight stepped in, helping his former life model get a place at the City & Guilds of London Art School, where Bowling quickly developed his technical knowledge of drawing and painting. It was enough to earn him the place he’d wanted from the start, at the RCA, which is how he entered as part of the same intake as Hockney and Bates.
Bowling got on well with both men, perhaps because he was also an outsider: a migrant to London who’d had to work doubly hard to earn his spot. With Bates, there was also a strong Commonwealth connection. Apple remembers that Bowling was rarely at the art school itself, preferring to work in his own studio in Cedars Road, Clapham, but that he was a striking physical presence – not because he was black, but because he was a big, solid guy, who seemed to translate that physicality into the surface of his figurative paintings which, at that time, often dealt with explicitly sexual, inter-racial themes. Apple also recalls that Bowling would often have pieces of animal carcass in his studio which made their way as subject matter into his paintings. In an interview from around 2007, Derek Boshier remembered the same thing – a tin bath, under Bowling’s work table, with blood in it, and animal heads.
This interest in viscera was undoubtedly connected to the influence of Bowling’s friend and mentor, Francis Bacon (though the two men later fell out). Many of Bowling’s works from this period have been lost or destroyed, but surviving paintings and documentation show just how significant Bacon’s impact on the young painter was. Bowling, at the time, did something quite rare: translating the existential and painterly tortures of Bacon’s best work into social comment, as well as a complex exploration of his own subjectivity and sexuality as a black man in Britain. The first strand is exemplified by Beggar In the Window, 1962, in which a Bacon-esque screaming figure is seen through a window frame (akin to the box-like structures Bacon often placed his screaming figures within). The theme of poverty had roots in Bowling’s Guyanese background: as a child, his mother would regularly feed and bathe beggars, and make Bowling help. Bacon’s influence is even more obvious in Bowling’s triptych A Mirror, Three Windows, a Door, 1962, with its twisting figures, darkly sexual themes and visceral portrayal of childbirth.
Bowling was one of the ‘Windrush’ generation – those West Indians who began a mass migration to Britain from the Caribbean in 1948. Initially, numbers were small; in the year Bowling arrived, 1953, he was one of only about two thousand. But by the mid-1950s, around forty thousand non-white Commonwealth migrants were arriving in Britain each year. And that began to have a substantial effect on attitudes about race, class and ‘Britishness’, raising tensions between whites and blacks in the UK’s cities.
For many white ‘Teddy Boys’, the central issue was black men dating white women: a classic miscegenation fear that had also plagued the American South since the days of slavery. Riots eventually came in late summer 1958: first with clashes between whites and blacks in Nottingham; second, and more seriously, with the Notting Hill riots in West London (not far from the RCA), in which armed white gangs roamed through the suburb, smashing windows, throwing petrol bombs into houses, and randomly attacking black men and the white women thought to be dating them. This was a test of Britain’s openness, of its commitment to reciprocity towards the citizens of its former Empire. The political parallels with the present Brexit moment are eerie: an unjustified fear of the other, a sense that they ‘were coming here and stealing our jobs’, taking and sexually corrupting white British women, putting pressure on housing, and bringing with them thoroughly un-British attitudes from their home countries.
Bowling and Kitchen fell in love and decided to marry. This, in the opinion of the RCA’s administration, was unacceptable, and so Bowling was expelled in 1960. The reason given was that staff–student relationships were inappropriate, though it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suggest there was an underlying racial charge too, especially given the close memories of Nottingham and Notting Hill. According to Martin Gayford, Bowling had befriended Francis Bacon by this time, and the senior artist consoled the younger man by telling him that Darwin was the worst painter who had ever lived.
It’s also interesting that it was Bowling, the student, who took the initial fall for their relationship, rather than Kitchen the staff member. Once again, Weight intervened on Bowling’s behalf, securing a place for him at the Slade School instead. The issue was eventually resolved by Kitchen’s own resignation. She headed to Chelsea College of Art, which gave the RCA an elegant excuse to re-admit Bowling – clearly one of the most talented young painters in London – in January 1961.
The bold sexuality of Bowling’s work from this period seems to draw on many of these personal experiences, portrayed in a Bacon-esque register, with plenty of Goya thrown in the mix. From 1960 to 1962, Bowling worked on a series called ‘Birthday’, inspired by seeing a neighbour giving birth. In one of these paintings, Birthday, 1962, a prone woman, viewed through an open window frame, lies on a bed, reclining with her arms behind her head like Goya’s Nude Maja. Afternoon Nap I and II, also 1962, continue the Goya reference: another reclining woman, this time on one half of a sofa, the other half taken up by her lover – a twisted figure lifted straight from Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son. The same woman appears to be the model for Bowling’s much grimmer painting The Abortion, 1962, in which a couple – the white woman, with her black lover – are in bed together. Above them floats another woman and, next to her, a baby – and the painting’s titular subject – still bleeding from its umbilical cord.
It seems fair to assume that the black man in the work is essentially a self-portrait, particularly given that Bowling, in 1962, also made a life-size portrait of himself as Othello: Shakespeare’s ‘Moor’, driven mad by suspicions about his white wife’s fidelity. Chris Stephens has written of the Afternoon Nap paintings that: ‘Bowling was waiting for the birth of his first child and had been terrified by the scandal that erupted around the drug thalidomide that caused babies to be born with severely malformed limbs. Also resonating through this horrific reference might have been thoughts of the widespread hostility to mixed-race marriages … and the belief that such relationships could produce monstrous children.’
Bowling and Kitchen’s son Dan was born on 20 January 1962. That same year, Bowling’s second son Benjamin was born to another woman, Claire Spencer. Kitchen’s second novel, published in 1970 after she and Bowling had divorced, and pointedly titled A Fleshly School, draws on the romantic complexities of that time. One of its storylines is a relationship between a student, Elinor, and David, the art school’s assistant registrar. The novel is dedicated to two people. One of them is Ann Quin.
Implicit in Robin Darwin’s statement about ‘the student of today’ is that they were part of Harold Macmillan’s ‘Never Had It So Good’ generation. The age of austerity in Britain after World War II had been long and brutal. Rationing of many goods continued into the early 1950s. But the idea of making individual sacrifices for the greater collective good also resulted in some of the great economic and cultural reforms of the country’s modern history. The 1944 Education Act was one. The National Health Service and National Insurance were two more. So too was the massive reconstruction of a Blitzed Britain, particularly in and around London. The New Towns Act 1946 led to the creation of places like Stevenage, Basildon and Harlow, built and connected with good rail to the city so middle-class workers could get in and out easily. In the cities, meanwhile, whole neighbourhoods were rebuilt as social housing, resulting in the kinds of tower blocks and housing estates that have come to define so much of Britain’s local authority architecture.
By the late 1950s, these changes were beginning to thoroughly embed themselves in the British psyche. Unemployment was at historic lows, Britain was embracing the consumerist tidal wave, and the economy was bumping along nicely but for the threat of rising inflation. Macmillan’s Conservatives won re-election comfortably on 8 October 1959 – the day before Quin officially started work at the RCA. For the group entering the college that year, all of them too young to have served in the war, this was the new reality: an optimism that created a framework for a new individualism rather than a culture of collective sacrifice. Hockney, for instance, had found it much easier to be a conscientious objector than his father Kenneth had during the war itself; Bowling’s dishonourable discharge hadn’t scuppered his artistic aspirations; Quin was able to live as a single, working woman in London.
This individualism was based on the granting and protection of adult freedoms. And one of the most important of these freedoms was the right to one’s sexuality.
In August 1954, the British government set up a committee, with the oversight of Sir John Wolfenden, to look at the question of whether the country’s archaic laws against gay sex should be reformed. Until Wolfenden, any sexual act between men, even if consensual and in private, was illegal. The resulting report, published almost exactly three years later, represented a significant moment for the gay rights movement – even if it would take another decade for the British Parliament to finally change the law.
In the 1950s, one of the main arguments for keeping the existing law was that gay sex, even in private, posed a threat to the overall moral health of society. Another was the commonly held misbelief that homosexuality and paedophilia went hand in hand, as twin urges. And a third was that homosexuality was a ‘disease’ or ‘illness’ that should be dealt with through medical intervention. Perhaps the most notorious example of this, and one of a handful of high-profile cases that led to the establishment of Wolfenden’s committee, was the conviction of the mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing, and his subsequent chemical castration in 1952.
The Wolfenden Report rebutted all of these arguments. It found that rather than being an ‘all or none’ condition, homosexuality existed on a spectrum, from people who were exclusively gay to those who had latent tendencies even they weren’t aware of. The report also stated that going through a homosexual phase was a perfectly normal part of adolescent development, rather than an aberration that should be suppressed or treated. Its authors drew on Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male to support both points. The report declared that there was absolutely no evidence that homosexuality was a disease, mental or physical (refuting, too, the myth it was caused by abscesses on the brain). It also debunked the destructive belief that being gay stemmed from the trauma of being ‘seduced’ in youth, a key aspect of the idea that homosexuality and paedophilia were synonymous.
Wolfenden’s final recommendations hinged on two factors: consent and the right to privacy. Having thrown out the idea that all homosexuals were paedophiles, the report argued that sexual contact between adults and youths, whether homosexual or heterosexual, should be dealt with the same way: as a crime. Public sex – again, one of the pervading popular characterisations of homosexuals, lurking in public bathrooms, waiting for prey – should similarly be dealt with as a crime. But the precise nature of the sexual contact, whether gay or straight, was irrelevant.
With these caveats in place, the report recommended that ‘homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence’. This was based on a central principle, which would also become essential to the artistic censorship debates and trials that followed: that individual morality and criminality were different things. ‘There remains one additional counter-argument which we believe to be decisive,’ the committee wrote,
namely, the importance which society and the law ought to give to individual freedom of choice and action in matters of private morality. Unless a deliberate attempt is to be made by society, acting through the agency of the law, to equate the sphere of crime with that of sin, there must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business.
On 29 June 1960, the Labour MP Kenneth Robinson brought a motion in the House of Commons to accept Wolfenden’s recommendations and decriminalise private homosexual acts between consenting adults. ‘It is a subject which touches deep and perhaps primitive instincts and which rouses strong emotions,’ Robinson said in Parliament, ‘but it is also a topic of some importance not only to the minority who are directly affected by the law but also to the rest of the community.’ He also made an impassioned case for the fact that homosexuality is a normal part of any society:
The majority of homosexuals are useful citizens who go about quite unrecognised and unsuspected by most of us.
Homosexuality has existed in all societies from the primitive to the sophisticated and at all periods of history regardless of laws and of the rules of society. It has been condemned, condoned and even encouraged at different times and in different cultures.
Despite his argument, Robinson’s motion was resoundingly thumped, 213 to 99. It wouldn’t be until 1967 that the law would finally change.
By the autumn of 1959, then, it was clear that the ‘Never Had It So Good’ generation were beginning to live through, and accelerate, a series of profound and lasting changes in British life. The contradiction at the heart of these changes is that the collective sacrifices of the austerity years had laid the groundwork for the radical, and rapid, emergence of individual rights and a new sense of individualism: the right to a quality education no matter your background; the right to practise your sexuality freely; the right to love whomever you choose, no matter their skin colour; the right to a private morality, even when it ran counter to the dominant culture’s agreed codes.
At a community level, these shifts can be seen as liberations: as progressive moves that improved the lives of entire groups of people. But they were also forms of ‘libertarianism’. This was particularly the case with Kinsey’s ideas about the role of sex in shaping society – that individuals being free to pursue their sexuality would lead to a healthier collective community. This emphasis on individual happiness wasn’t dissimilar to a growing capitalist logic in the post-austerity era that placed the individual at the heart of a new economic system. Provided the individual was doing no harm to anyone else, the argument went, they should be left free from government interventions in their decisions. The separation of morality from criminality, as proposed in the Wolfenden Report, was another revolutionary expression of this new spirit of personal liberty.
Between 1959 and 1961, this new libertarianism, both creative and sexual, would be put to the test in the courts, and in the studios of the RCA. And, for Bates and Hockney in particular, it would become transformational: not just a way to finally be who they were, but to be who they wanted to be.
‘Made a lamentable start + very much a “mixed up kid”. However eventually settled down and produced some excellent work – v. contemporary + chic. Incoherent but his eye right on the ball.’
This was Richard Guyatt’s assessment of Bates at the end of his first year at the RCA. Bates’s personal discombobulation had extended to his initial living arrangements: he didn’t live at the Warwick Road flat with Derek Boshier for long. Apple says the comings and goings were more than he could cope with; Hockney biographer Peter Webb writes that the flat was a popular late-night hangout for RCA students once the local pubs and cafés had closed. Bates moved to a small flat by himself, around the corner in Warwick Gardens. While there, he reconnected with the Australian Phillip Russell, who he had first befriended on the ship that had brought them both to the UK. Russell had a job as a London pharmaceuticals rep, and the pair decided to get a flat together.
This was at 35A Cornwall Gardens, in South Kensington. They were eventually joined there by an Australian journalist called Peter Bell-Smith. One of the perks of Russell’s job that Bates and his art school pals were happy to exploit was that he had a company car (Apple remembers a party at the flat during which two guests tumbled out of the house fighting, and left a dent in the car’s hood). It was also at this flat that, Apple recalls, Bates had a relationship with the improbably named Joy Knightley, who lived a few doors down. A few doors up from Bates was an Egyptian journalist whom Knightley was also involved with. Apple says the arrangement suited everybody just fine, and ended only when he headed to New York with Hockney in July 1961.
Bates quickly built a reputation at the RCA, largely because he’d become heavily involved in creating the visual language of the college’s daily student life, including making posters for the RCA’s jazz and film societies. Bates was a nut for both art forms, and the posters gave him the chance to develop singular responses to their visual potentials.
In this regard, Bates had as much to live up to as Hockney and the other painters did in the department that had produced Robyn Denny, Richard Smith, Joe Tilson and Peter Blake in recent years. Guyatt had built one of the most sophisticated graphic design programmes in the world, and this was underpinned by ARK: notionally a student magazine but one, as art historian Thomas Crow points out, that broke down barriers between fine art, commercial design and critical writing as early as the mid-fifties, and seemed to presage many of the kinds of printing techniques and tricks later ascribed to Andy Warhol and American Pop. This was particularly the case in a spread by David Collins and Richard Smith to accompany Smith’s essay ‘Man and He-Man’ from 1957, in which the actor Glenn Ford is shown reaching for a gun in his holster, printed so that three identical images of him overlap in a kind of triple-vision, which beats Warhol’s iconic Elvis to the draw by five years.
In 1995, Alex Seago published an in-depth analysis of ARK’s impact on mid-century British culture, from its inception in 1950 through to its peak circulation of around three thousand copies in 1963. This, he argues, was a period of huge transformation, particularly in the way young artists thought about images and their social and cultural function in an emerging era of mass communication. ‘If the rise of image consciousness was one of the most obvious symptoms of the revolution in English culture during the 1950s and 1960s,’ Seago writes, ‘then the School of Graphic Design at the Royal College of Art bore a good deal of responsibility for that cultural transformation.’
ARK was at the heart of this, almost always edited by an RCA painting student, but art-directed and laid out by students from Graphic Design. This collaborative spirit was partly a consequence of proximity: the Graphic Design and Painting schools shared their location, in the Victoria & Albert Museum. But, from the mid-fifties on, it was also a consequence of sympathy, at least when it came to some of the RCA’s most ambitious students. Strong connections began to emerge between students in the two schools, especially those with an interest in American visual culture. Seago points out that credit for this belonged not just with the students but with Darwin and Guyatt too. The new professionalism that they promoted, and their desire to elevate the perception of ‘commercial arts’ to a status similar to that of painting, created some of the most important cross-fertilisations of the period – including the connections between Hockney and Bates.
Bates, always a believer in his own abilities, was unintimidated, and threw himself into poster-making and advertising ideas in Guyatt’s school. It was doubtless this work that Guyatt referred to as contemporary and chic. But that same year Bates was also beginning to develop a conceptually driven approach to his art practice. The turning point may well have been a trip he took to Spain in the April break of 1960, just before the last term of the year. In Alicante, he used photography to make what was arguably his first conceptual art work (and an early one in the history of conceptual art as a whole). The two images that survive from that work are now known as Art Declared Found Activity (Lathering, Alicante Spain, April 1960) and Art Declared Found Activity (Shaving, Alicante Spain, April 1960), both 1960. In them we see a man being shaved. In the first, he leans back in the barber’s chair with eyes closed, a cloth protecting his front. A hand reaches in from the right edge of the frame, brushing shaving cream onto his chin. He’s almost completely lathered; the white of the cream is a void in the centre of the picture, his bottom lip the only surface breaking through. The second image is much darker: two hands this time enter the frame from the left; the man’s face is turned as one hand stretches the skin of his cheek taut while the other scrapes him with a cut-throat razor.
It’s a banal, daily act. But via careful lighting, staging and framing, it’s elevated into an artistic one. On one level, Bates’s work is a knowing wink to the processes of painting: applying paint, scraping back, starting again. But just as crucial – especially for the image/text trajectory that would come to define so much of Bates’s, then Apple’s work – is the way he titled the images with the simple facts of the action, the location and the date. In contrast to his classmates over in Painting, Bates was claiming a stake in an alternative history of modern art: not the story of Picasso and Pollock and Bacon, but the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, the readymade, and Dada. Bates wasn’t framing a found object as an art work as Duchamp had, but rather framing a found activity: what made it art was his declaration that it was so. The young artist couldn’t have known it, but with these seemingly straightforward photos he’d laid down two guiding ideas that would shape his practice for the next fifty years: on the one hand, that the daily and the banal had validity as art material; and, on the other, that his art work’s significance – or, perhaps, its art-ness – emerges in a complex interaction between word and image.
At the Cornwall Gardens flat, Bates took huge leaps forward as an artist. Early experiments extended the Spanish work, making full use of his flatmates and friends as subjects. In Drunk (Earls Court Road, London, Winter 1960), 1960, he presents images in a grid, of Bell-Smith and another friend, Ahmad Jarr, wasted in the street together; a black man in a white jacket and a white man in a dark jacket going through all the emotions of drunkenness – confusion, disagreement, laughter, embrace.
In Body Cleaning: Bathing and Shampooing (35A Cornwall Gardens, London, Winter 1960), 1960, there are twelve shots on a sheet, arranged in rows of four. In them Bell-Smith is doing exactly as the title suggests: soaping his hair with shampoo, looking at himself in a mirror as he brushes his teeth, lathering his face for a shave. In the penultimate image, the camera looks into the mirror at Bell-Smith’s lathered face, the bath’s taps doubled from two to four – the real ones and their reflections. In the final square, Bell-Smith hams up the fact that he’s got shampoo in his eyes, squinting and sticking out his tongue.
The sequences of both works are more like sets of movie stills than photographs for an exhibition. Body Cleaning is also accompanied by a script, of sorts – a collaborative text between Bell-Smith and Bates, in the form of a dialogue:
Hes a marvellous bloody writer … Trueman Capote
Why?
Jeez, you know he’s just great, no detail, no full stops no nothing he just writes what he feels.
Oh.
Doesn’t that impress you. Wouldn’t you like to be able to do that.
I can.
Huh?
I said I can.
How, when where. What?
Look around boy, look around.
I am looking man.
Look over there.
What, that sign post-STOP, LOOK and LISTEN.
Yeh! Look at it.
I am.
I could have written it.
Gee. Jeez.
Gents.
Yeh. Simple. Purpose and end. You have to have a purpose and you have to hand an end. When you have both you have finished.
Road Up, like for instance?
Yeh.
Jeez, Gee, God man, that’s just grate.
Cant you spell.
Great!
Yeh.
Jeez.
Gee.
God man.
Its great.
Crazu.
Crazy man, cant you speel.
Yeh, cant type.
Type what type are you?
Jeez.
God.
Gee, don’ know really. One of those (wave gand in suggestive tone=) you know.
Hih.
Huh.
Oh. Gtreat.
Jeez.
God.
Gee.
Despite its infuriating smartarsery and spelling mistakes, the text provides some clues about where Bates’s practice was headed. Perhaps the most important aspect was its outsourcing: he knew Bell-Smith was a far better writer than he was. The reference to Capote is also significant: America, and American culture, were increasingly becoming Bates’s fixation. The relationship between the Hip-sounding dialogue and the banal images also hints at the influences of the likes of Robert Frank and the Beats. But Bates’s own ego starts to shine through, too: it’s clear that he’s the character claiming the perfection of signs like ‘Gents’ and STOP, LOOK and LISTEN. He was, after all, the RCA’s graphic design star – the young man learning how to make image, text and typography work together to maximum effect.
During this time, Bates was torn about whether graphic design was the right path for him. In the summer break between his first and second years, he decided he wanted to change programmes and join Boshier, Phillips, Hockney, Kitaj and Bowling over in Painting. Carel Weight visited him at Cornwall Gardens, saw some paintings and gave him permission to make the switch.
Guyatt, though, made a counter-offer. If Bates stuck with graphic design, Guyatt would rig things so that he could roam free, making use of whatever technical expertise he saw fit from across the RCA’s departments. The choice, for Bates, was an easy one: head off with Weight and the restrictions of paint and canvas, or capitalise on the full and extraordinary resources of the college, including Furniture Design, Engineering, Ceramics and Sculpture. He became, in his second year, a free-range student. It would change everything for him, and laid the foundations for fifty years of practice as Billy Apple. As Apple told me in 2012, this was the moment he began to think of himself as an ‘art director’: borrowing the language of the advertising world, he developed a new kind of artistic identity, one reliant not on the qualities of individual technique or touch but on the quality of his ideas.
The effects of this opportunity began to be felt immediately. Between 1960 and 1961, a deepening sophistication began to emerge in Bates’s poster work, with subtle plays between text, image, visual pun and meaning, as well as recurring freehand forms that marked out a Bates poster like a signature. In early 1960, he had made a poster for a group exhibition called ‘The Ring’. The exhibition, at the Bilston Art Gallery in the West Midlands, included four painters, two graphic designers (of which he was one) and one sculptor. The freehand drawing to illustrate the poster consisted of a near-perfect circle created in a few graphite loops. The four painters were represented by fingers (or possibly penises, or rockets) growing from the circle. Two more fingers, representing the graphic designers, have launched off the circle, while the biggest finger, representing the sculptor, disappears out of the frame.
Bates included several of his Jazz Society posters in the exhibition. But most remarkable, given their prescience, was his inclusion of a series of photographs. In three of them, arranged vertically, a young man stands, like William Tell, with an apple on his head. In another set of three, Bates himself appears with the other man, the two of them mouthing the apple from either side, the fruit the only obstacle to their mouths locking together in a passionate kiss. A local reviewer singled out Bates for praise, while also using his images as the platform for a pun that, while cheesy, seemed to recognise the gay sex/original sin tension in Bates’s photographs: ‘Barrie Bates shows some eye-catching themes for posters,’ the reviewer writes. ‘Indeed, it is here that the extravagant modern treatment bears greatest fruit.’
A Jazz Society poster Bates made for a playing of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue was, like the album, the height of modal elegance: a pale-blue sheet with the text typed simply in lower-case Gill Sans. For a Film Society screening of the 1957 western The Tin Star in February 1961, Bates printed an image of a crushed tin can – which he’d had manufactured in the Engineering School – its top opened jaggedly, pierced by several holes (made to look like they were from bullets) to form a sheriff’s star. It was printed using offset lithography – a contemporary technology used in the magazine industry.
Bullet holes was a motif Bates liked; soon after, he made a work called B.E.A. Flight over East Berlin (1961), 1961, a painting of half a Union Jack which Bates then took to a rifle range and had shot through several times as a comment on Britain’s role in the Cold War. (The Union Jack would eventually come back full circle in his poster ‘A Union, Jack!’ of 1962.)
In the March/April 1961 issue of the influential American graphic design journal Print, Bates’s student society posters were included in its roundup of the state of European design. His poster for a playing of The Ahmad Jamal Trio at the Pershing – a large, painted blob with thick brushstrokes springing down from it, not too different from the finger-penis-rockets of the Bilston Gallery poster – featured prominently as an illustration, accompanied by a short explanatory text: ‘a desert scene’, it reads, ‘an oasis and palm trees. In red, a palm plantation, the blue, a fountain or water hole. Pink paper to suggest heat and haze and to have an impact on the eye.’ The Saharan feel seems to be based only on the fact that the American pianist Jamal had an Arabic name, given there are no obvious desert references in the music, or in the site of its recording: the Pershing in Chicago.
Bates developed the visual identity for the 1961 ‘Young Contemporaries’ exhibition. The poster for the exhibition and cover for its catalogue was a motif connected to ‘The Ring’ and Ahmad Jamal posters: another hand-drawn circle, though this time in the form of a target that doubled just as effectively as an eyeball – a blue iris at its top, a band of scrawly red, and just below that, wisps of red, bloodshot lines. To emphasise its status as free-rolling, three-dimensional and disembodied, there’s a blue shadow like a puddle at its base. There are shades of Tin Star and B.E.A. Flight too, with the catalogue’s cover punctured by three holes.
This was the catalogue in which the critic and curator Lawrence Alloway made his first proclamations about the 1959 RCA intake: ‘A group, seen here for the first time,’ he wrote in his short introduction,
is of artists (mainly at the Royal College) who connect their art with the city. They do so, not by painting factory chimneys or queues [surely a dig at the RCA’s Painting faculty, among them Weight and Ruskin Spear], but by using typical products and objects, including the techniques of grafiti [sic] and the imagery of mass communications. For these artists the creative act is nourished on the urban environment they have always lived in. The impact of popular art is present, but checked by puzzles and paradoxes about the play of signs at different levels of signification in their work, which combines real objects, same size representation, sketchy notation, printing, and writing.
Alloway was pointing to the rise of Hockney, Boshier and Phillips as the emerging stars of British painting. But his words were just as relevant to Bates’s graphic design. In fact, when it came to ‘the play of signs at different levels of signification’ and the combinations of real objects, same-size representation, printing and writing, Bates would eventually go much further than most of his contemporaries.
Much of Hockney’s first-year work at the RCA, Apple recalls, was done under the influence of Alan Davie, a Scottish abstractionist by whom Hockney had been deeply impressed when he saw a substantial survey of Davie’s work in Wakefield in 1958. More generally, though, Hockney and his contemporaries were grappling with the immense weight of American Abstract Expressionism, which had landed in London in the late fifties with a massive and influential thud.
The first major exhibition of Jackson Pollock’s work in the UK was at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1958. It was a touring show from the New York Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) International Program. Rather than simply stage the show following American instructions, the Whitechapel’s director Bryan Robertson commissioned the architect Trevor Dannatt to design the exhibition. In Dannatt’s hands, the show turned into a modernist installation, with some of Pollock’s monumental drip paintings installed on freestanding breezeblock walls. Dannatt also mounted paintings on black panels, and created a ceiling of suspended fabric.
Dannatt’s environment was an attempt to build on the idea that Pollock’s drip works had been made with the desire to completely immerse viewers in their surfaces. The artistry of both men – Pollock with his drips, Dannatt with his clever design – had a huge impact on the London art scene. Hockney saw the exhibition. So did Bowling. In 2013, Allen Jones also recalled its significance. As an undergraduate at the Hornsey School of Art, he visited the exhibition with fellow students. ‘I remember looking at this show,’ he said, ‘and saying “I think we could sue Hornsey”. We’d been five years at art school and had received absolutely no indication of the reality of the contemporary art world.’
The following year, in February 1959, the Tate Gallery presented ‘The New American Painting’, which included work by seventeen painters, among them Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still and Grace Hartigan. London was the exhibition’s last stop of eight cities across Western Europe. Like the Pollock exhibition, ‘The New American Painting’ had been organised by MoMA’s International Program, under the auspices of MoMA’s International Council. A crucial figure in both exhibitions was the American poet Frank O’Hara who, having got his first job at MoMA soon after his arrival in New York from Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1951 – on the membership desk, selling tickets and postcards – was given a permanent position as the International Program’s administrative assistant in April 1955.
O’Hara got his first curatorial break when he was assigned to curate an exhibition for the Fourth Sao Paulo Biennial in September 1957. One half of it was a group show including works by Hartigan, Kline, Philip Guston and Larry Rivers. The other half was a retrospective of Pollock – which later toured Europe, including to the Whitechapel. The Pollock show owed much to MoMA’s own retrospective of the painter’s work, curated by Sam Hunter, which had opened just months after Pollock’s death in 1956. O’Hara also acknowledged Hunter’s work in his important monograph on Pollock published in 1959. As O’Hara’s biographer Brad Gooch points out, the Pollock show and ‘The New American Painting’ often crossed paths on their respective European tours, and by early 1959, ‘Abstract Expressionism had triumphed and was rivalling jazz as America’s most influential cultural export.’
In his introduction to ‘The New American Painting’ exhibition catalogue, MoMA’s Alfred H. Barr chose to emphasise the painters’ shared intellectual concerns. ‘Indeed one often hears Existentialist echoes in their words,’ he wrote, ‘but their “anxiety”, their “commitment”, their “dreadful freedom” concern their work primarily. They defiantly reject the conventional values of the society which surrounds them, but they are not politically engagés even though their paintings have been praised and condemned as symbolic demonstrations of freedom in a world in which freedom connotes a political attitude.’
Frances Stonor Saunders argued in the mid-nineties that ‘The New American Painting’ had actually been part of the CIA’s wider programme to co-opt contemporary American art, and Abstract Expressionism in particular, as a weapon in the Cold War, even suggesting that its staging in London was the result of CIA money funnelled through a donor. The specific facts of the CIA’s cultural programme are debated, but it is nonetheless clear that the US saw contemporary American painting’s progressive values and aesthetics as fundamentally American and ‘free’. It was also a useful counterpoint to Soviet totalitarianism, as expressed through orthodox socialist realism and state-controlled art. The Cold War’s threat of nuclear annihilation was implicit in O’Hara’s own assessment of why Pollock’s ‘action painting’ was so significant. ‘[T]his new painting does have qualities of passion and lyrical desperation,’ he wrote, ‘unmasked and uninhibited, not found in other recorded eras; it is not surprising that faced with universal destruction, as we are told, our art should at last speak with unimpeded force and unveiled honesty to a future which may well be non-existent, in a last effort of recognition which is the justification of being.’
The quasi-political function of Abstract Expressionism is backed up anecdotally by Apple, who remembers that one of the prime spots to see contemporary American painting in London wasn’t at a museum but at the US Embassy. Its iconic Eero Saarinen-designed building opened on Grosvenor Square in 1960. That the embassy was such an important place to encounter contemporary art from the States was largely due to its cultural officer, Stefan Munsing. A graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan (an institution that had counted among its teaching staff Charles Eames and Saarinen), Munsing was given his London posting in 1955. There he became close with Lawrence Alloway, and helped both Alloway, then at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), and the Whitechapel Gallery’s director Bryan Robertson get grants from the embassy to travel to the USA. These trips would prove vital to the growing transatlantic art traffic in the late 1950s. Richard Smith, Joe Tilson and Allen Jones are among the artists who, like Apple, have acknowledged Munsing and the American Embassy as essential parts of the contemporary art scene at the time.
Apple also remembers another great place near the embassy to see contemporary American art: the apartment of the collector E. J. ‘Ted’ Power. Power had made his fortune as the co-founder and chairman of Murphy Radio and Television. Apple says that Power was extremely welcoming to young artists, often letting them up to his place to look at his collection. Apple recalls seeing Abstract Expressionism there, including works by Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. This seems very likely, given that Power owned at least three Rothkos and, as James Finch has written, bought his first Newman after seeing ‘The New American Painting’ in 1959. Power also became a collector of British Pop, acquiring art by Patrick Caulfield, Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, and Apple too. He eventually became a highly influential trustee at the Tate Gallery in the late 1960s, gifting the institution several works or selling to it at good prices.
Several successful British painters just ahead of the 1959 generation had embraced the promises of Abstract Expressionism, especially the RCA graduates Richard Smith and Robyn Denny with their colour-field works, and the more expressive Sandra Blow, the youngest and most definitely hippest member of the Painting School’s faculty. ‘In the 1960s,’ Hockney wrote in his autobiography,
the subject had been completely played down; abstraction had begun to dominate everything, and people firmly believed that this was the way painting had to go. There was no other way out, people thought. Even I felt that, and I still felt it even when I began to reject it in action; in theory I still couldn’t reject it at all. I felt, well, I’m sure they’re right, and I think I felt that even as late as 1966.
In retrospect, however, this battle between abstraction and representation, as it relates to Hockney at least, seems less important than larger questions at the time about morality and freedom. And for the young RCA painters, there was one London figure who posed these questions more than any other: Francis Bacon.
By 1959, Bacon had established himself as the giant of contemporary British painting. He’d represented the UK at the Venice Biennale in 1954 alongside Lucian Freud and Ben Nicholson. He’d already made iconic works like Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, c. 1944, and his screaming popes inspired by Diego Velázquez. He had also made explicitly homoerotic paintings such as Man Kneeling in Grass, 1952, and Two Figures in the Grass, 1954. Bacon’s existentialist angst was of a totally different order from the Americans’ in ‘The New American Painting’, and was expressed through the tortures and contortions and erotic potentials of the male figure, rather than through abstract splashes or zips of paint.
In late March 1960, Bacon had an exhibition of recent paintings at London’s Marlborough Fine Art. This was towards the end of Hockney’s first year at the RCA, and the young artist was impressed by what he saw. The exhibition included several of Bacon’s ‘Head’ paintings – relatively small canvases by Bacon’s standards, between 30 and 60 centimetres square, that still capture the deep physicality of his painting: whorls of brushstrokes that twist into bruised and swollen cheeks; eyes that seem closed over by some vicious punch or sting; noses that glow red with the rush of blood. There was also Study from Portrait of Pope Innocent X By Velásquez, 1959: different from his earlier popes, this one offering more side-eye than scream, a lurid green throne blending into the equally garish background, a purple skullcap popping above a bulging forehead.
It may also have been significant for Hockney, who was on the cusp of making his own erotic breakthroughs in his paintings, that Bacon showed several clearly homoerotic works, all from 1959: Sleeping Figure, in which a naked man curls up on a chaise; another nude in Seated Figure on a Couch, his penis clearly visible; and Two Figures in a Room, in which one man crouches, his fist driving into the red floor, as another figure – a semblance made from a few brushstrokes, surrounded by a green aura – lies on his back, his knees raised.
These works are striking in their comparative simplicity, the background expressive scratchiness and silhouetted cages of Bacon’s earlier popes and portraits replaced by solid areas of bright colour. The figures, too, are almost always made from paint in big strokes. This economy doesn’t hide the work’s heart, though: a deep, sexual charge that doesn’t rely on screaming mouths or hanging carcasses to make their messages about Bacon’s sexuality loud and clear.
There was one more major exhibition that year which would leave a significant mark on Hockney and the other young painters around him. In July 1960, the Tate Gallery opened what has been described as Britain’s first ‘blockbuster’ exhibition: a major survey of Pablo Picasso’s work. Picasso’s relationship with Britain had begun fifteen years earlier when, at the end of 1945, the Victoria & Albert Museum staged a substantial exhibition of his paintings alongside those of Henri Matisse. It had 170,000 visitors in just five weeks, including a seventeen-year-old Joe Tilson, who in 2013 described seeing it as life-changing. It also substantially helped the curator and art historian Roland Penrose – who would eventually write Picasso’s biography and curate the 1960 Tate exhibition – in his cause to establish a dedicated modern art gallery in London. This eventually became the ICA, which would play a vital role in establishing the credentials of the RCA painters.
Under Penrose’s leadership, the ICA in 1956 staged a Picasso exhibition, called ‘Picasso Himself’, to mark the artist’s seventy-fifth birthday. The Tate survey, though, was of a different magnitude, presenting two hundred and seventy works, of which Picasso had loaned about one hundred. Of huge importance to the show and its legacy was the fact that it included Picasso’s entire ‘Las Meninas’ series – the staggering culmination of his battle with arguably the most important and difficult painting of all time by his countryman Diego Velázquez. Hockney visited the Picasso show around eight times; this would have happened in the summer break between his first and second years at the RCA, and just a few months after his encounter with Bacon’s work at Marlborough.
The intensity of Hockney’s responses to Bacon and Picasso took place at a moment when he was building a new confidence to paint subject matter that really mattered to him. He was guided in this by an older student at the RCA, R. B. Kitaj.
An American who was studying in England, Kitaj was certainly regarded by many of the younger painting students as the star of the Painting School. Bates didn’t share their enthusiasm, with Apple recalling in 2013 that ‘Ron Kitaj and I were at loggerheads with each other: he thought that what I was doing was about Madison Avenue. He was right, it was subject matter. While he was reading Classics, I was looking ahead, not backwards.’
Following Kitaj’s counsel, Hockney began to make works about his own strong commitment to vegetarianism. The idea that his work could address a lived polemic rather than pure abstraction or the dour everyday realism of his teachers like Weight and Spear provided a crucial launching pad for the work that would later put Hockney on the British art map.
Two other older painters would also have a big impact on Hockney’s decisions about the content of his work. The first was Kitaj’s studio-mate who had been part of the 1958 intake, Adrian Berg. Like Hockney, Berg was gay. Both Christopher Simon Sykes and Peter Webb suggest that he gave the younger artist a new confidence to be free about his sexuality. Like Kitaj, Berg was also incredibly well read; he’d previously gained a place at Cambridge to study medicine, but switched to English literature instead. In a forewarning of what would happen to the 1959 cohort, Berg had at the end of his first year been placed on a list of students who faced probation. But, he wrote, ‘[t]he moment Ron Kitaj and David Hockney came I was no longer in the firing line.’ Berg was scathing of the faculty, and in particular their decision to expel Allen Jones: ‘I think they were jealous of anyone who was in competition with them,’ he wrote, ‘[t]here was a strong feeling of us and them. These things were life and death at the time, and we were in an insecure position.’
Then, in the 1960/61 year, another American showed up in the Painting School: Mark Berger, thirty and with a year off from his teaching duties at Tulane University in New Orleans. Berger was also extremely comfortable with his sexuality, and – crucially for Hockney – arrived with an armful of American male physique magazines. Hockney was now surrounded by older men who were by turns political, distinctly literary and, in Berg’s and Berger’s cases, openly gay. Consequently, a new licence emerged in Hockney’s work – and, perhaps most importantly, a sense of a project. What elevated that project wasn’t just its openness about his sexuality. His paintings were also celebrations of the joys of adult, physical love. It was Bacon’s confrontational sexuality freed from existential angst. Hockney’s focus wasn’t to torture the bodies he desired but rather to venerate them: early evidence of his later mantra that, ‘[t]he source of all art, the source of all creativity, is love. If anybody thinks there is something more important, I would like to know what it is.’
Over the course of 1960 and into 1961, Hockney’s sexuality and painting each seemed to feed the other; the more out he was, the better the painting got. In Love Painting, 1960, which owes so much to the influences of Jean Dubuffet and Alan Davie, Hockney offers up just the suggestion of a phallus entering the picture from the right, surrounded by splashy paint that keeps the work close to gestural abstraction. Shame, 1960, uses its title to hint at the otherwise abstract work’s real subject matter. But things move very quickly from there into the far bolder The Third Love Painting, 1960. A more directly phallic form springs up from the bottom of the picture, and Hockney begins to use graffiti to more explicit effect, elevating the kinds of gay messages and codes found in public bathrooms, many of them with a deeply personal resonance for Hockney himself: ‘ring me anytime at home’; ‘my brother is only 17’ (which later becomes a work in its own right); ‘come on David admit it’; and the more literary flourish, ‘I am he that aches with amorous love’. There’s also a knowing nod to Bacon, with the outline of the kind of cage the older artist used so often to ensnare his figures.
Adhesiveness, 1960, is an early example of Hockney making his literary and gay influences more explicit. In it, two crudely drawn figures (a sign that he was inching towards the fully fledged figuration he is most celebrated for) interlock. One, wearing a hat, appears to be biting the other’s nose while penetrating him. Really, the nose is as much a penis too, the figures locked in a 69 position that Hockney would return to in later paintings. The figure in the hat has the numbers ‘23.23’ written on it; the other, ‘4.8’. When transposed onto the alphabet, these are ‘W.W’ and ‘D.H’ – Walt Whitman and David Hockney – Hockney borrowing Whitman’s own simple code, in which the poet swapped letters for numbers.
This became an essential device in many of Hockney’s most important paintings of the period. In Doll Boy, 1960–61, a figure has his head bowed, the words ‘doll boy’ scrawled next to him and ‘Queen’ on the hem of his shirt. Just below that are the numbers ‘3.18’, or, ‘C.R.’ – Cliff Richard, who Hockney had a crush on, and whose song ‘Living Doll’ had been the most successful UK single of 1959. Doll Boy and The Third Love Painting were both included in ‘Young Contemporaries’ in February 1961. The young art dealer John Kasmin saw Hockney’s work there for the first time, bought Doll Boy, and subsequently resolved to launch him into the London art scene.
Hockney’s critical success at the time of ‘Young Contemporaries’, Kasmin’s support, and other sales (Cecil Beaton had bought Adhesiveness) seemed to give him a new clarity of direction. This found its expression in arguably his most important painting of the period, We Two Boys Together Clinging, 1961, a brilliant coming-together of all these disparate strands – love, sex, Cliff Richard, Walt Whitman. In it, two block figures with stick legs (strongly similar to Bates’s Ahmad Jamal poster from around the same time) clutch each other, with lines of paint connecting their bodies. Their faces press together, one marked ‘4.8’ – Hockney – with the word ‘never’ scrawled over his mouth. The work’s title comes directly from a Whitman poem, but it’s also a play on current events; Hockney was evidently most amused, given his fixation with Cliff Richard, by a headline about a mountaineering accident that read ‘TWO BOYS CLING TO CLIFF ALL NIGHT’. Richard is present, in the form of Hockney’s pet name for him, ‘Doll Boy’, with the numbers ‘4.2’ prominent in the lower left corner. Whitman is there too, in a small way, the hem of the Hockney figure a jagged white line that reads like a succession of Ws.
There’s a series of photos by Geoffrey Reeve – a textiles student who photographed the 1959 generation extensively – of Hockney and his studio-mate Derek Boshier in front of We Two Boys. Boshier’s initials are, of course, also D.B, or 4.2, though he is adamant that the Doll Boy reference was always to Richard and not to him. In one image, he and Hockney ham it up, holding hands, looking at each other as though about to kiss. In another, Boshier, bug-eyed and trying to slip away from Hockney’s grip, play-acts the sudden realisation that Hockney has designs on him.
In an interview with Sykes, Mark Berger suggested that the two figures in We Two Boys actually came out of an etching Hockney had made to illustrate Berger’s gay fairy tale, Gretchen and the Snurl (Apple still has a copy of these illustrations in his Auckland archive). Hockney had begun to work in the Printmaking department when he was running out of money for paint and canvas, and had discovered that materials were freely supplied there. There, the talented student Ron Fuller taught him etching – which would become absolutely essential to Hockney’s sky-rocketing status in the coming years.
The subject of many of Hockney’s most iconic works from this time is his unrequited crush Peter Crutch, a straight student studying furniture design, whose presence in Hockney’s paintings is usually marked with the numbers 16.3, standing in for his initials P.C. The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, 1961, offers up a naked figure in side profile, wearing the outline of a baby-doll nightie, ‘D.Boy’ crawling up his neck towards his chin. The painting’s title crawls down his back to his buttocks, and a heart with a protruding tongue (a stand-in for Hockney) makes out with him. Above him, vertically, is an Alka-Seltzer box, with the numbers ‘69’ just below it. Crutch is also the subject of The Cha Cha That Was Danced in the Early Hours of 24th March 1961, 1961, which is easily misread as Hockney’s representation of a drag act but was, according to Peter Webb, the recollection of a moment at a party when Crutch was holding a handbag for someone.
Crutch seemed unflustered by Hockney’s attentions, given that another sequence of photographs by Reeve shows him with The Cha Cha, and with Hockney’s other homage to him, Peter.C. This was one of the first works in which Hockney attached two canvases together. The effect warps Crutch’s body. He was a tall man, but Hockney used the smaller of the two canvases for his legs, tilting the balance. Hockney used block type to spell out PETER.C on the top canvas and PETER on the bottom. He also used printed letters in The Fourth Love Painting, 1961, to spell out ‘I will love you at 8pm next Wednesday’ (the ‘8’ hand-painted) – again, the numbers ‘69’ not far away.
Peter Crutch told Webb that Hockney was especially interested in mirrors and mirror images around this time. That fascination is at the core of one of Hockney’s early etchings, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, 1961, which includes quotes not from Whitman but from another gay poet Adrian Berg had introduced him to and whose work would hugely affect him, C. P. Cavafy.
That Hockney began to make openly gay work, filled with literary and personal references, in 1960 and 1961 was a brave act – especially in light of the House of Commons’ resistance to Wolfenden’s suggested reforms. But there were other important debates about artistic freedom and morality swirling in the culture at that moment. And these were brought to a head by the trials relating to D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover on both sides of the Atlantic.
The American public’s fascination in the 1950s with the Kinsey Reports illustrated how the battle for sex had begun to reshape the country’s cultural life. Another key fight came at the end of the decade when the owner of Grove Press, Barney Rosset, published an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the US. The book, written in 1928, had never been published in the States or the UK, because of its sexual content and language. On 30 April 1959, New York City’s postmaster Robert K. Christenberry ordered the interception of twenty-four cartons of the Grove edition of Chatterley on the grounds that, as an obscene publication, it had been banned from being mailed thirty years earlier. The Post Office then took Grove to trial for having mailed the book.
Grove’s defence lawyer was Charles Rembar, who was no stranger to obscenity accusations against books. He’d previously represented Norman Mailer after Mailer’s publisher Rinehart & Company had refused to publish The Deer Park, 1955, on the grounds that it was obscene. Rinehart also claimed that Mailer’s obscenity was an illegal act, which therefore voided their contract, which meant Mailer couldn’t keep his advances for the book. Rembar threatened to test that in court, and Rinehart settled with Mailer instead (Mailer later published The Deer Park with Putnam).
The Post Office’s case against Chatterley was a chance for Rembar not just to get Grove off the hook but to put a lasting dent in America’s anti-obscenity laws and achieve a big win for freedom of expression, both for authors and their publishers. This was all the more pressing because in 1957, in the case of Roth v. United States, the Supreme Court had ruled against Samuel Roth, a New York publisher of erotica, who had defended his right to publish porn on First Amendment grounds.
The majority ruling in Roth was that anti-obscenity laws weren’t inherently unconstitutional. Or, put another way, the First Amendment right to freedom of expression did not extend to the protection of smut. To assess whether a publication was dirty or not, the majority argued, the standard should be whether the work had been produced primarily for ‘prurient interest’, and that this should be judged by ‘contemporary community standards’ and what the ‘average person’ would make of it. The judgment by William J. Brennan Jr. used a statement from the American Law Institute to elaborate: ‘A thing is obscene if, considered as a whole, its predominant appeal is to prurient interest, i.e., a shameful or morbid interest in nudity, sex, or excretion, and if it goes substantially beyond customary limits of candor in description or representation of such matters.’ The trial of Chatterley, then, hinged on whether the novel fell foul of these criteria. In the wake of Roth, there was the possibility that the book’s alleged obscenities tipped into ‘shameful or morbid’ territory, or that it reached beyond those ‘customary limits of candor’.
The danger of Roth, as Rembar saw it, was that these descriptors – the average man, community standards, prurient, shameful, morbid – would eventually be widely used to suppress all sorts of risky artistic work: they were moral values which undermined constitutionally protected freedoms. Chattlerley was therefore a perfect book to test the law. The two major complaints against it were interlinked: first, Lawrence’s graphic descriptions of the sex acts between Connie (Lady Chatterley) and the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors; and second, the language Lawrence has Mellors use to describe that sex, especially ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’. Rembar’s defence was complex, and evolved over time, but eventually coalesced around specific themes, and these were to have a lasting effect on censorship debates.
The first was about Lawrence himself: on the one hand, his intent in Chatterley, and on the other, his literary status and the place of the novel within it. To answer these inter-related questions, Rembar called on literary experts Alfred Kazin and Malcolm Cowley, who both defended Lawrence as one of the most significant English writers to have ever lived. They also vigorously defended the literary merits of his descriptions of sex, on the grounds that Lawrence was a writer who believed sex between a man and a woman was a deeply spiritual act – not about prurience or promiscuity but about communion with another, and a reconnection of our bodies and minds in an increasingly mechanised age. And Lawrence’s language, they said, was no different from that of many other highly esteemed literary figures who hadn’t been subject to obscenity charges.
With Lawrence’s credentials established, Rembar turned to the question of prurience. This was where his defence was at its most substantial and mature, because he argued that a normal interest in sex was not prurient. In other words, sex is a normal part of adult life, and what Lawrence was describing wasn’t shameful, or morbid, or excessive of that normalcy. This, Rembar argued, also lanced the second part of the argument, around contemporary community standards. If sex is a normal part of adult life, it is also a normal part of communities.
Rembar also saw serious danger in the ‘average person’ hypothesis, arguing that one couldn’t park this standard of judgement at the door of the average joe in the street – the guy with little to no interest in literary values, or who doesn’t read books at all. Instead, he claimed, ‘if books are to be judged by community standards, they should be the standards of those who read them, rather than the standards of the population at large’. In his recounting of the trial, though, Rembar did acknowledge that Chatterley was a book with a difference. ‘An outstanding best-seller among books taken seriously as literature will have,’ he wrote, ‘in all editions, perhaps a million and a half buyers. The various editions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that came out in 1959 and ’60 sold over six million copies. The average man, it was pretty clear, was buying because it was a dirty book.’
Rembar’s defence, once the case got to the federal courts, hinged on his argument that the Postal Service had no special competence in literature, freedom of speech and constitutional law. In other words, it had no right to decide what Americans should, or shouldn’t, be reading. In the end, this was the most convenient argument for the judges to accept, rather than the harder path of having to overturn the Supreme Court decision in Roth. In their judgments, though, the judges highlighted the problems with Roth’s ‘community standards’ language, and emphasised the importance of a work’s literary merit: the seeds of a changing attitude that would prove vital when Rembar was called upon to defend Grove again – in the case against Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which Grove published in 1961.
It wasn’t until the US judgments in favour of Chatterley that Penguin published it in the UK for the first time, in 1960. This decision by Penguin’s founder Allen Lane also led to the first prosecution under new legislation: the Obscene Publications Act, which had become law in 1959. The Act was hugely significant, because it created a ‘public good’ defence: if a work of literature or art could prove its cultural merit, it couldn’t be removed from sale or censored. Chatterley became a test of the law. And ‘public good’ was exactly the defence Penguin relied on.
The trial opened at London’s Old Bailey on 20 October 1960. Mollie Panter-Downes, who wrote a ‘Letter from London’ for the New Yorker for decades, sat through the six-day proceedings, which came to be defined, largely, by the old-fashioned bombast of the Crown’s prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones. As Panter-Downes wrote:
The plot, Mr. Griffith-Jones said, was little more than padding between what he called the ‘bouts’ of sexual intercourse – thirteen bouts in all, he advised them, and added that the hero and heroine hardly existed except as bodies. Now he came to Lawrence’s deliberate experiment with the use of Anglo-Saxon four-letter words. Mr. Griffith-Jones had been counting them up, too, and his arithmetic rang through the court as baldly as a grocery list – this one thirty times, that one thirteen times, this and that six times each. If the jury registered any shock then, by the end of the case it was clearly regarding the items as neutrally as though they were indeed salt, pepper, or mustard.
Witness after expert witness streamed through the court. In the end, it took the jury only three hours to unanimously find Penguin not guilty: perhaps the best proof yet of how much contemporary ‘community standards’ had changed when it came to the artistic depiction of sex. But Charles Rembar made some interesting criticisms of the Old Bailey trial. Strongest among them was that the British case descended into a trial of Lady Chatterley herself, rather than the book: in other words, that the fact of her adultery was a sufficiently corruptible force to make the book fall on the wrong side of the ‘public good’ argument. Farcically, in Rembar’s view, the trial had ended up turning on whether a fictional character had made a bad life decision; the question of Connie’s virtue became a football to decide what met appropriate behavioural standards for the day. As Rembar put it, ‘the issue was morality, and the question of freedom was thoroughly obscured’.
For many of the young artists at the RCA, this simultaneous freeing up of sexual attitudes and censorship laws gave their work a new potential for contemporaneity and political urgency. It also highlighted the growing cultural synergy between London and New York – a recognition that if a book is deemed acceptable for publication in one place, it should be in the other. Ann Quin – a big fan of Lawrence’s work – would surely have been following Chatterley’s path through the courts, particularly given the role descriptions of sex would play in her first published book, Berg. For Hockney and his colleagues like Bowling, Kitaj, Berger and Berg too, there must have been something freeing about the trials’ confirmation that sex and politics in art would be protected from censorship and the more conservative leanings of mass opinion.
But fierce debates still raged at the RCA about the moral corruptibility of the individual – not through encounters with pornography or sex-heavy novels, but with advertising and the mechanisms of mass communication. Richard Guyatt’s successful design graduates were often viewed by their contemporaries in other schools as having been wooed by the pernicious temptations of mass culture. In the Summer 1960 issue of the RCA student newspaper Newsheet, for example, one student writing under the moniker ‘H.D.’ stated that:
‘If Graphic Design is even to be raised above a hack level, designers must avoid plunging into such sentimental slush as surrounds many products. No one would tolerate such rubbish in any other art-form, and no matter how well you design, it’s still hardly the height of personal integrity to tell lies for money.
Bates, as the rising star of Graphic Design, clearly had a commercial career path ahead of him, if he wanted it. He was unsure if he did: attracted to the potential of financial and professional success, but still wanting to be recognised as an artist first and foremost. This is why For Sale, 1961, is one of his most intriguing and subtle early works. The ‘painting’ is simply that – the words ‘FOR SALE’ printed in red lettering on a white canvas. Apple remembers Bates and Hockney making it together late one night, recalling that Hockney helped him print the canvas by pulling the lever on the printing press.
The fact Bates’s work essentially names its own condition as an exchangeable commodity points to a tongue-in-cheek attitude towards his peers’ critiques of the advertising industry. All artists crave sellout shows, but as individuals they never want to be seen as ‘sell-outs’. Bates’s seminal work declared that it was For Sale; far from being an advertising lie, it told the bald truth about its cultural status. It was also starkly different from the Poppy snatches of Americana in paintings by the likes of Peter Blake and Peter Phillips. The two words that make up the work’s content could just as easily have been applied to their maker, too: a young, gifted designer waiting for an offer for his services from the highest bidder.
The commercial pathway kept opening out in front of Bates. In early 1961, he entered the Layton Student Prize, a national design competition in which students were asked to respond to the thoroughly English theme: ‘drink more tea’. Bates’s response was his ‘we all love tea’ campaign. Using the ceramic, photographic and metal resources of the RCA, he designed a series of objects associated with tea drinking in the shapes of hearts: a tin tea-caddy with its heart-shaped lid open; spoons bent together to form a heart; a teacup with a heart-shaped handle; and, slightly cheesier, a kettle and teapot with their spouts nuzzling, the kettle’s heart-shaped lid slightly ajar as if it’s blown its heart-fluttered top. Under each image are the words, all in lower case, ‘we all love tea’. Bates won the first prize of £250 (the runner-up prizes were a laughably measly £10 each). It was an enormous sum of money, given that his annual bursary from the New Zealand government at the time was £400.
Though it was a response to a specific brief rather than a completely original project, ‘we all love tea’ showed Bates the potential of his new licence to roam from Guyatt. In June 1961, Advertiser’s Weekly ran a short interview with him about the campaign. Did the headline precede the visual treatment or vice-versa, the interviewer asked. What was the starting point? ‘From enmeshed thoughts,’ Bates answered, ‘I conceived, first, a purely visual solution, but the subsequent copy line was, to my mind, more important than the original idea of resulting heart-shaped tea utensils. The final result was a conceptual idea and not a design idea. There was no starting point except in thought.’
Later, he provided more detail about how the work came to be: again, this would become a blueprint for future Bates/Apple projects. ‘Did you art-direct the photography, or give the photographer the general idea and a free hand?’ he was asked. ‘In this case I closely directed the photography’, Bates replied, ‘using the photographer as an extension of myself. There was also close direction with other craftsmen who manufactured my photographic models to my specifications.’
The win was a massive boost for the young New Zealander: proof he was finding his feet as a designer, but also developing a working method that suited his belief that ideas were the most important aspects of art and, indeed, of being a good artist. But there was also the pragmatic fact of a windfall: he was suddenly flush. And it meant, when Hockney told him about cheap airfares to New York for the summer break, he was able to jump on them without a second thought.
The timing was serendipitous: Hockney had already begun making his Tea Paintings, the first of which had been shown at ‘Young Contemporaries’ alongside Doll Boy and Adhesiveness in February. The Second Tea Painting, 1961, had included a representation of a Typhoo Tea box – Hockney’s preferred brand, which he kept in his studio – in the background, behind brushmarks and a floating heart that look like an obliterated reversal of the figure in The Most Beautiful Boy in the World.
But Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style, 1961, was a major breakthrough: a painting made from several shaped two-dimensional canvases that, when assembled, look like an open three-dimensional box of Typhoo Tea. Making the composition even more complicated is the figure Hockney seated within this framework. The figure’s backside, back and right shoulder spill over into the side panel, and the top of his head pops ‘out’ of the box and onto the canvas that represents the container’s opening. The figure, then, represents the traditional ‘illusionistic style’ referenced in the title, but the canvas arrangement itself is a virtuosic piece of dimensional disorientation: an open, seemingly three-dimensional container sitting flat against the wall. Hockney described how difficult it was to make, writing that the Tea Paintings were ‘as close to pop art as I ever came’ and that:
To make a painting of a packet of tea more illusionistic, I hit on the idea of ‘drawing’ it with the shape of the canvas. The stretcher is made up from sections and I made the stretchers myself. It was quite difficult stretching them all up – the back is almost as complicated as the front; it took me five days. I don’t think anybody had done shapes before…. It’s interesting, I spelt the word ‘tea’ wrong on the left-hand section … I am a bad speller, but to spell a three-letter word wrong!! But it’s drawn in perspective and it was quite difficult to do. I took so long planning it that in my concern for flatness or abstraction I spelt it wrong.
That Hockney concedes this was as close as he came to Pop also highlights how resistant he was to the label being applied to his work at all. It’s true that many of his contemporaries – especially Pauline Boty, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips and the slightly older Peter Blake – were absolutely engaged in something that was easily labelled British Pop. But Hockney had a very different project. The seated figure in Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style clearly has allusions to Bacon, but it was also an implicit attempt to knock the older man off; to take what Bacon had passed down in a new and clever direction. Up until this painting, Hockney’s days at the RCA had been spent grappling with his forebears: with Alan Davie, with Picasso, with Jean Dubuffet and Bacon. But with Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style he stepped over a line, from the burden of influence into a genuine originality of his own.
America was about to become hugely important to both Bates and Hockney, but that most British of drinks – tea – had advanced them down their respective transformative paths.
As the summer break of 1961 approached, Hockney, like Bates, found himself with unexpected money in his pocket. Unbeknown to him, one of the printmaking tutors had entered one of his prints into a competition. He won £100. He’d also had money from the sales of the works in ‘Young Contemporaries’ and the support of the art dealer John Kasmin. In addition, P&O, the cruise-line operator, had just built the SS Canberra and commissioned the RCA’s faculty to decorate it. Hockney was in turn commissioned to paint murals in the ‘teenagers’ room’ – a sort of hangout space for young people. It netted him another £100.
In the spring of 1961, Flying Tiger Airlines introduced $99 round-trip fares from London to New York. Apple remembers that it was Hockney who found out about these cut-price flights. Thrilled at the prospect, because he’d thought travelling to the US would cost far more, Hockney told Bates about the opportunity, and the pair booked tickets for 9 July 1961: Hockney’s twenty-fourth birthday. Frank Bowling was on the same flight. Apple has always recalled that it was a student charter flight, connected to the London School of Economics. This is corroborated by one of ARK’s art editors and fellow RCA student Brian Haynes, who told Alex Seago in 1990 that ‘[a] whole gang of us went, including David Hockney’. It seems completely plausible that the LSE might have chartered entire cut-price Flying Tiger flights for students on their summer break.
For Hockney, the appeals of New York, professionally and personally, were obvious. Through Mark Berger, he’d learned of American gay culture, both through magazines and Berger’s own accounts of it. New York’s reputation as a gay scene would have been temptation enough. He planned to stay with Berger’s family in Long Island (Berger was back Stateside by then too) and to visit New Orleans. There were also the museums, and the fact he already had an introduction, via Robert Erskine, the dealer who had awarded him the printmaking prize, to William Lieberman, curator at MoMA.
For Bates, the temptations were different. His own obsessions with American culture were threefold. First, there was the fashion. Apple was inclined towards the hipster particularities of drip-dry suits, impeccable Levi’s, sneakers and Oxford shirts, rather than the grimier fashions of the Beats or the uptight Englishness of some of his peers. The second was his passion for, and knowledge of, the latest developments in Madison Avenue typography and design. His own advertising successes in his second year, in particular winning the Layton Prize, had confirmed, in his mind, not only that he was right to be fixated with Madison Avenue but also that he was good enough to foot it with the best creators there.
But the third draw for Bates was arguably the most important: New York was the world centre of contemporary jazz, the development of which he’d been following closely for years. The scene had been dramatically improving where he was, too: the first half of 1961 was a watershed period for contemporary jazz in London. The Soho clubs were thriving, with several American-influenced band leaders, including Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott, introducing the city to modernist jazz. Thelonious Monk played in the UK for the first time, at London’s Royal Festival Hall on 29 April, followed by separate gigs in Hammersmith and Kilburn on 30 April and 7 May. Bates saw one of these last two concerts, writing to his friend Leon Lesnie in Auckland that he’d seen ‘Monk, Delonius [sic], yesterday. Things are happening so fast, I can’t keep abreast.’
In that same letter, Bates wrote that he’d taken a date to see The Connection, Jack Gelber’s 1959 play, which was then having a West End run. The play had been a controversial smash back in New York, where it had been first staged by The Living Theatre – an avant-garde company that had also presented works by the likes of Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch. New York’s daily press had hammered Gelber’s play when it first opened. There were, though, glimpses of recognition for it. The Village Voice named it the best new off-Broadway play of the year. And Donald Malcolm wrote in the New Yorker that:
The jazz group, whose presence alone would justify an evening at the Living Theatre, consists of Freddie Redd (piano), Jackie McLean (alto saxophone), Larry Ritchie (drums), and Michael Mattos (bass). How they contrive to play so well, so spontaneously, and yet in such perfect coordination with the demands of dramatic timing is a matter I can never hope to fathom.
This intersection between jazz and dramatic performance was both The Connection’s greatest conceit and its greatest breakthrough. The play is ostensibly about a group of junkies waiting for their ‘connection’ to show up: the mysterious and serene ‘Cowboy,’ played by the equally serene African-American actor Carl Lee.
The play immediately breaks the fourth wall, with Jim Dunn, the narrator, desperate to portray himself as Hip, addressing the audience directly, as though they’re witness to a kind of Big Brother-like reality show rather than a conventional play: here are real junkies, he says, but of course, because narcotics are illegal, we won’t be using real ones here in front of you tonight. The whole thing is set up to leave the audience wondering if, in fact, the actors were using real drugs throughout the performance. The link is an uncomfortable one: in many well-known cases, jazz and heroin went hand in hand in turn-of-the-decade New York. Heroin was such a feature of the jazz lifestyle that Bates evidently felt the need to tell Lesnie in a letter, ‘I’m not taking junk.’ This was despite the fact that Naked Lunch was his favourite book around this time.
The Connection is, on the whole, a bleak work, with shades of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as the players, both musical and theatrical, lie around waiting for Cowboy. But out of this drudge, two features of the play offered a bracing analysis of the times in which it was being staged: first, the language of Hip and, second, its ambiguous morality. The critic Kenneth Tynan wrote in his preface to the Faber & Faber edition of The Connection that:
The play is not a defence of dope. Nor does it attack the wage-earning, clock-punching, home-making technique of survival; as one of the characters says, ‘… what’s wrong with day jobs? Or being square? Man, I haven’t anything against them. There are lousy hipsters and lousy squares.’ … The junkie seeks euphoria. The average citizen seeks happiness. How do these goals essentially differ? If the aim of life is pleasure, why is it more pleasurable to achieve it by injecting dollars into the bank account than by injecting dope into the blood-stream? If, on the other hand, the aim is spiritual enlightenment, how can we be sure that the insights provided by heroin (or mescalin, so eloquently hymned by Aldous Huxley) are less reliable than those supplied by religious mysticism? The Connection offers no answers; it simply states the problem, and implies the questions.
After its long run in New York, the play’s cast upped sticks, at the invitation of London theatre impresario Michael White, for a season across the Atlantic – White’s first independent West End production. For Bates, who evidently attended a performance in early May 1961, The Connection was a revelation with its singular combination of self-conscious performativity – the artifice of the set-up, the direct address to the audience somehow made compelling and believable – and pitch-perfect hipster language and world-class jazz performances. Its thrill for the young jazz obsessive was also about to be doubled, because that same month the film version of The Connection – the debut feature by director Shirley Clarke – premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
Despite its New York setting, the state itself hadn’t wanted to know about Clarke’s film adaptation, the film licensing board denying it a licence on the grounds that it used profanity and showed drug use. In Europe and the UK, though, the film had a very different life. It was received rapturously at Cannes. And in early June – still a month before Hockney and Bates flew to New York – London’s National Film Theatre screened it for three nights as part of a programme called ‘Square Pegs’. It’s likely that the UK’s Obscene Publications Act, and the failed prosecution of Chatterley a year earlier, meant that Clarke’s film had a much easier time in London than New York. The Connection would even get a general release later in the year, screening at The Academy Cinema on Oxford Street. The other films in the ‘Square Pegs’ programme were two made by Robert Frank: The Sin of Jesus, and, with Al Leslie, his 1959 Beat film Pull My Daisy, which was written and narrated by Jack Kerouac.
Clarke translated Gelber’s play using the same cast and musicians that Bates saw in London. Her solution to the fourth-wall issue was to reshape the play as a fly-on-the-wall documentary, transforming the narrator Jim Dunn into an aspiring hipster filmmaker: a young guy whose fashion is perfectly on-point for the time, and perfectly consistent with Bates’s own preferences—turned-up jeans, a drip-dry jacket, buttoned-up Oxford shirt and white sneakers.
As the film opens, Leach, the lead junkie, clutches a boil on the side of his neck. There’s music: a few bluesy bars of Redd’s piano. Leach grabs a tea towel before tucking it into his pants: a makeshift apron. He half-disappears behind a wall, and another man, Solly, bald with a moustache, emerges from the toilet, holding a newspaper. He looks self-consciously into the camera. Written all over his two-second glance are scepticism and invaded privacy – and being caught emerging from the toilet is the least of it. He walks to the piano and puts his hand on Redd’s shoulder. Redd turns and also gives the camera a dismissive look.
Leach, still nursing the boil on his neck, reaches into the apartment’s pot-belly stove and, inexplicably, pulls out a pineapple. He’s hungry. Then he addresses the camera directly:
Look here. I live comfortable. I’m no junkie bum. Just look at my pad, it’s clean! Yeah, it’s clean except for these creeps that come here and call themselves my friends. My friends, wow. Like, they come here with a little money, see. And then they expect me to use my hard-earned connections to furnish them with heroin, see. Then when I take just a little for myself, they cry and they scream, the bastards. [He shoves one of them, who’s sleeping at the table.] Come on, man! They just wait here, making me nervous, sleeping. That’s all they do is sleep.
Seconds after his monologue, we hear the director’s voice, and get the briefest glimpse of Dunn in front of camera, before the door opens and two more musicians – Jackie McLean and Larry Ritchie – come in, immediately asking if Cowboy has been yet.
What follows is a kind of lazy closed-room claustrophobia, with occasional bursts of agitation. Dunn starts to worry and gives directions: he wants the junkies to act naturally, but he’s concerned that junkies lying around, doing nothing except occasionally sniping at each other as their withdrawals get worse, isn’t the material he was hoping for. It’s clear to everyone including the junkies that this young wannabe who, despite his fashion sense, is the squarest man in the room, is using them to try to make a name for himself as a gritty urban filmmaker.
‘I gave Cowboy enough money to keep you high for a week, right?’ Dunn reveals, as his cameraman Burden keeps rolling. ‘Now, I’m giving you what you want, you give me what I want, huh?’ From then on, Dunn becomes more present in the film, manipulated and parodied by the junkies. Gradually, they conspire to ‘turn him on’: a peer-pressure situation which eventually leads to him shooting up with the group, while Burden captures it all on camera.
When Cowboy finally does show up, McLean is the first to be shuffled into the toilet for his fix. The musicians follow one after another, the remaining members maintaining the tune. Redd, once he’s high, plays with his eyes closed, sweat running down his face. With Cowboy is an old woman, dressed like a sister of the Salvation Army, who clutches her Bible close as Burden introduces her to the junkies; slowly, she tries to save their souls, oblivious to what’s unfolding around her. Cowboy, played by Carl Lee, is beautiful: a white shirt, white high-waisted pants, a kerchief knotted around his neck. He’s their dealer but he’s also the devil, silver-tongued, languid and utterly amoral, having invited his oblivious elderly angel – ‘Amen to that, Brother Cowboy!’, ‘Amen Sister Salvation. Now excuse me a moment …’ – for no obvious reason other than to bat her around like a cat with a half-dead bird.
It’s Cowboy who finally convinces Dunn to get high. Dunn justifies it to himself as research, that ‘there is something dirty about just peeking into people’s lives’. To really understand his subject, he rationalises, he needs to join them. Cowboy opens the bathroom door; Dunn strips down to a t-shirt and walks in: another innocent soul dragged down into hell, even as a soldier of the Lord is standing there observing. That is, until Sister Salvation reveals her true self. She’s a shakedown artist, and tries a sob-story on Cowboy about needing money for her own funeral. The film closes with Leach insisting he isn’t high enough and demanding another fix. Cowboy relents: ‘It’s your life,’ he says; and as Redd and his quartet play, Leach ties off and self-administers an overdose, while Cowboy clicks along to the music. The musicians pack up while Cowboy revives Leach. Just another day in New York City, 1961.
For Bates, the film version of The Connection was the quintessential expression of contemporary American avant-garde culture: not the expressionist drips of Jackson Pollock but the improvisations of McLean and Redd; not the griminess of Beat fashion but the hipster sharpness of Dunn and Cowboy; not the fevered stream-of-consciousness of Kerouac and Ginsberg but the ultra-cool language of swinging black musicians.
This black-white contrast between two of the defining artistic subcultures of contemporary New York at the time – Hip on the one hand, the Beats on the other – was highlighted by the National Film Theatre’s ‘Square Pegs’ programme. Alongside The Connection, Robert Frank and Al Leslie’s Pull My Daisy was also ostensibly a fly-on-the-wall film. But it took a completely different approach to New York’s cultural underbelly – by focusing on the Beats. And its unlikely leading man would have an impact on both Hockney and Bates just a few months later: the American painter and Bronx native, Larry Rivers.
In Pull My Daisy’s opening frames, we hear the ethereal voice of Anita Ellis singing lyrics that were written in a kind of ‘exquisite corpse’ game by Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac and Neal Cassady, and set to music by David Amram:
Pull my daisy
tip my cup
all my doors are open
Cut my thoughts
for coconuts
all my eggs are broken
The camera pans through a Bowery loft, before fading to a bird’s eye view of a dining table. It cuts, and there’s a woman in a kimono opening the shutters of the loft’s enormous windows. We hear Kerouac’s voice for the first time:
Early morning in the universe. The wife is gettin’ up, openin’ up the windows, in this loft that’s in the Bowery in the Lower East Side New York. She’s a painter and her husband is a railroad brakeman, and he’s comin’ home in a couple hours…. She has to get the kid up to go to school. Pablo. He says ‘why I have to eat that stuff all over again, that Farina. I ain’t gonna say I’m gonna live a hundred years, but I’ve been eatin’ Farina for about a hundred years.’
There’s an elaborate knock at the door. Pablo gets up from the table, and lets in Gregory Corso and Ginsberg carrying armfuls of booze. They make themselves at home and, despite the early hour, each crack open a beer, while Pablo’s hard-working mum, played in her first screen role by the French actor Delphine Seyrig, tries to get him ready for school. The pair kill time talking poetry until the man of the house and their drinking pal, Milo, gets home from work. As he comes through the door, in his railway brakeman uniform, we see the unmistakeable profile of Larry Rivers. Just behind him, wearing a tight beanie with ear-flaps, is Peter Orlofsky.
While the trinity of poets – Ginsberg, Corso, Orlofsky – play themselves, everyone else is in character. Rivers, playing Milo, stands in for Neal Cassady; Pull My Daisy is loosely based on an event in Cassady’s life. His wife, worried about Cassady’s bohemian lifestyle, organised a dinner with their local clergyman. In Kerouac’s version, the dinner becomes an absurdist set-piece. The ‘bishop’ – played by the young art dealer Richard Bellamy (who would become a crucial figure in the early success of Pop art in New York) – arrives with his sister, played by Sally Gross, and his mother, played by the painter Alice Neel.
The drunk poets harangue the bishop until the entire evening descends into farce. Amram, playing the character ‘Mez McGillicuddy’ – another hanger-on – starts to blow a French horn. Ginsberg grills the bishop on the question of what’s holy. Rivers/Milo blasts away on a sax. The bishop makes his embarrassed departure, just as Pablo, who should be tucked up in bed, emerges to join the party. Milo’s wife, understandably, is fed up and loses her temper. The poets and Amram/McGillicuddy get up to leave, and Milo/Rivers follows them (‘She’ll get over it’).
Beyond the film’s terrible sexism (Milo’s wife is just tying him down; the bishop’s mum is a bore; the bishop’s sister is prim and uptight), it’s an important document of just how intertwined the jazz (as expressed by Amram and Rivers), art (Bellamy, Neel, Frank, Leslie, Rivers) and poetry (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Orlofsky) scenes were in late-fifties New York. And Rivers was one of the most important links between all three.
So too was The Living Theatre. Established by Judith Malina and Julian Beck, it regularly staged events and experimental plays written by some of the great poets of the era. Rivers performed in several of the plays, including Kenneth Koch’s The Election (in which he played Lyndon B. Johnson). And, according to Rivers, he very nearly starred in The Connection. ‘After The Connection had been running for many months,’ he wrote in his autobiography What Did I Do?,
the lead junkie had to leave the production. I was offered his role. I guess my reputation as a sometime user of heroin and the fact that the character actually played the saxophone were behind Judith Malina’s offer …
But performing in The Connection would mean remaining in New York for the summer. My art and the lure of the Hamptons in the summer – sun and sea, the nearness to my sons, the pleasure of my regular pals – made me let the offer go.
It was this production of The Connection that Shirley Clarke saw and decided to adapt, and that Bates later saw in London. But for the lure of the Hamptons, both might have starred Rivers.
Those first two years at the RCA were a remarkable time for Bates and Hockney: a period in which both accelerated away from their peers, charged by their respective ambitions but also by the extraordinary cultural and artistic forces swirling around them. Picasso, Bacon and Abstract Expressionism were, in London, suddenly available to Hockney first-hand and at scale: forebears he would first grapple with, then push against. The confidence and intelligence of men like Kitaj, Berger and Berg also helped him along the path towards a highly personal content, which in turn gave him a figurative language he’d been craving.
For Bates, it’s no overstatement to say that Richard Guyatt’s vision in letting him roam free at the RCA changed his life forever. By becoming an ‘art director’, Bates was able to bridge the two seemingly separate worlds that had till then been holding his attention evenly: contemporary advertising and contemporary art. Unburdened by having to make things himself, he was able to speed up both the production and quality of his work, focusing first and foremost on the integrity of the ideas – the concepts – underpinning his output, whether a poster or an art work. And his deepening engagement with jazz and Hip culture was planting the seeds of a dramatic change.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see that both men simply had to go to New York that summer: too many things were pointing them across the Atlantic. They were cashed up and ready for a change of scene. And now they had a plane to catch.