Ideas. They brought around a plate and we spewed them out, patting our mouths dry with towel supplied. This done by chick who asked, ‘So what else is there?’ She looked sly and vaguely intelligent. ‘I’ll show you – quick into the fire escape, I suppose there is one’ – ‘Yeh, but it’s occupied.’ – ‘Huh, at this time of day’ – ‘Yeh, well you gotta have luv, luv.’ – ‘Yeh. Later maybe.’
WHEN HOCKNEY AND BATES finally touched down at Newark Airport after their long trip, they were picked up by John Craddock, a young English aspiring filmmaker who’d moved to New York in 1959 and was studying in the Film Department at New York University (NYU). Apple says that Craddock was a friend of Bates’s occasional girlfriend Joy Knightley. Knightley had written to Craddock asking if Bates could stay with him in Manhattan for a couple of weeks; it ended up being a couple of months.
Hockney, meanwhile, was due to stay with Mark Berger’s father and stepmother in suburban Long Island (Craddock doesn’t remember whether Hockney stayed that first night at his place before moving on to the Bergers). Berger, on exchange at the RCA for only a year, had already returned to the States and was actually in hospital with hepatitis when Bates and Hockney arrived, but Hockney moved into the Berger residence nonetheless. In Christopher Simon Sykes’s telling, Berger’s father – a pharmacist – liked Hockney well enough, but found him offbeat. His wife Helen, though, wasn’t so impressed when the young artist dripped ink on her carpet. Eventually, the behaviour of Hockney and his friends would become too much for the Bergers senior, culminating in an altogether more significant moment in Hockney folklore than the carpet stain: the first time he bleached his hair.
But before that: Hockney’s friendship with Berger became his vital entry point into New York’s gay scene where, he felt, he could be much freer than in London, and where gay life was much more organised. Berger also introduced him to Ferrill Amacker, whom Hockney would eventually move in with in Brooklyn Heights. Hockney described Amacker to Sykes as a ‘bohemian’ who had money so didn’t have to work, and said they were occasional lovers. Hockney says that he was thrilled by the city, and that he and his friends ‘revelled in a Bohemia that went on night and day’. Bates didn’t share Hockney’s enthusiasms for Amacker, though, which may be why the pair saw each other less during the second half of their stay in the States.
Hockney also had business to conduct in New York. Robert Erskine had suggested Hockney take some of his prints to show William Lieberman at MoMA. Lieberman acquired works including Mirror, Mirror on the Wall for MoMA’s collection, and helped Hockney sell the rest of his editions, netting $200. Lieberman also arranged for Hockney to spend some time making new prints at the Pratt Institute. Whether Bates had followed Hockney’s lead or acted independently, he also wrote in a letter to his friend Leon Lesnie in Auckland that MoMA had accepted some of his work on the same trip: a ‘[f]ew old posters and things’.
But this wasn’t the only professional opportunity on the horizon for Bates. Over the previous year in London, he had attended weekly workshops run by Bob Gill, a gifted graphic designer who’d moved from New York to London in 1960 to take a position at the Charles Hobson Agency (it didn’t last long: in April 1962 Gill co-founded the Fletcher/Forbes/Gill studio). Gill was part of an increasing traffic between the London and New York advertising worlds, and his workshops were a vital part of Bates’s exposure to the best Madison Avenue work being done at the time. Apple remembers a lot of Americans participating in the workshops, and can’t remember if it was Gill himself or another of them who gave him the letter of introduction that would lead to one of the most transformative periods of his early career: a month-long internship with one of the twentieth century’s great commercial typographers, Herb Lubalin.
Already, then, the young men were starting to strike out on different paths: Hockney, the ambitious painter and printmaker embracing New York’s gay scene; Bates the aspiring young art director keen to learn from the best of the best in an ambiguous business – mass communication.
In 1961, Herb Lubalin was part of the Madison Avenue powerhouse agency Sudler & Hennessey, which specialised in work for the pharmaceutical industry. He was also vice-president and creative director of the agency’s commercial advertising arm, known as Sudler, Hennessey & Lubalin. According to biographer Adrian Shaughnessy, Lubalin was ‘an ace talent spotter’ who’d hired George Lois – who became arguably the greatest art director of the 1960s and 1970s – and Andy Warhol, who did occasional illustrations for the company in the late 1950s. (Years later, in 1975, Lubalin was commissioned to design the cover of Warhol’s book, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.)
Shaughnessy writes that while at Sudler & Hennessey, Lubalin developed his ideas about ‘graphic expressionism’ and ‘word pictures’: namely, that typography wasn’t just a way to make a message more visually compelling but was itself a carrier of concepts and ideas. Lubalin once told Idea Magazine that: ‘The American people react to ideas. We are a concept-conscious society’, and in the late fifties and early sixties he was putting this to the test, through several projects that subsequently became iconic moments in the history of American design.
One of the clearest examples of his worldview came in an advertisement for Sudler & Hennessey’s services: ‘let’s talk type’, the ad reads, before its instruction to potential clients: ‘let type talk’. In 1962, Lubalin worked on a campaign for CBS, one of Sudler & Hennessey’s most important clients. ‘What in the world is going on?’ reads the copy, below overlapping, near-illegible headlines in different types – Lubalin’s design standing as a metaphor for the fast pace of current events and the way CBS made sense of them for its audiences. Geopolitical issues were a common thread in Lubalin’s work: in 1960, he was commissioned to create a sixteen-page spread for the Russian-language magazine Amerika, published by the US Department of State and distributed in the USSR. Civil rights were deeply important to Lubalin, too; in the mid-sixties he made ads for Ebony Magazine, some of which directly referenced racism against African-Americans. And he was opposed to the Vietnam War. In 1968, Avant Garde Magazine, which Lubalin art-directed, ran an anti-war poster competition. Billy Apple was among the winners. And one of the judges was Larry Rivers.
Avant Garde was a magazine project Lubalin worked on with the publisher Ralph Ginzburg; their third and final collaboration. The second was Fact – a kind of satirical take on mid-sixties current affairs. But the first was Ginzburg’s most famous and controversial: Eros – a quarterly magazine of high-end erotica and sex-related articles, which lasted only four issues, in 1962. Most famous among them was Issue 3, which featured Bert Stern’s nude images of Marilyn Monroe taken weeks before her death. That same issue included French erotic postcards; a long article about Samuel Roth, the pornographer whose case in the Supreme Court established the ‘prurient interest’ standard; a philological discussion between two language experts about why the English language has so few slang words for the clitoris; and a condensed version of Fanny Hill, the eighteenth-century book of erotica that, when published in its entirety in the US by Putnam in 1963, went all the way to the Supreme Court as another test of the Roth judgment (once again that hero of anti-obscenity litigation, Charles Rembar, led the defence).
If Issue 3 was the raciest of the four Eros publications, it was Issue 2 that caused the publication’s eventual downfall, and the conviction of its publisher Ginzburg – ironically, under the very Roth case law he’d published an article about. Issue 2 opened with an article by Faye Emerson called ‘We all Love Jack’, about President John F. Kennedy’s effect on women. ‘First there were the “jumpers”,’ Emerson opened:
It began with the primaries, when John F. Kennedy was fighting desperately for the nomination a lot of Americans thought he was too young, too Catholic, and too rich to deserve. His political advisers and the press, alert to any straw in the wind, began to notice an odd reaction in the crowds. An increasing number of young women seemed to be traveling by pogo sticks and when Mr. Kennedy approached, they bounced in the air like lady jumping jacks. They shrieked ecstatically, threw kisses and waved madly at their hero.
The short essay goes on to discuss ‘Jack’s’ effect on women from all strata of society: teenage girls; the ‘astonishing number of ladies in café society’ who seemed to have had an intimate relationship with him at some point; and ‘“the touchers.” These were for the most part respectable, mature women who, with incredible determination and stamina, fought their way close to Mr. Kennedy, patted him gently and retired dazed and happy.’ A photo-essay, across several double-page spreads and laid out by Lubalin, followed Emerson’s piece, showing women looking at Kennedy with expressions that were often comically overloaded with desire.
The article was a canny, and funny, early foray into a discussion of a president who wasn’t just a leader but an image and an object: a figure the American public projected onto as much as followed. The Kennedy Administration didn’t see the funny side, though; and Ginzburg’s big problem was that JFK’s little brother Robert was also the country’s top lawyer, the Attorney-General of the United States.
Initially, the US government held back because Robert Kennedy was concerned that prosecuting Ginzburg would look like political interference. But when Issue 4 of Eros included images of a naked black man and white woman together, the prosecution began. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Rather than falling on the ‘prurient interest’ criteria, the judges emphasised Ginzburg’s motivation: that his business model was to sell a publication on the grounds of titillation rather than artistic or journalistic merit. Ginzburg was convicted, in the end, of promoting himself – albeit classily – as a smut peddler, even if his publications weren’t actually all that pornographic.
What Bates encountered in Lubalin in 1961, then, was a deep thinker and a social liberal who believed in civil and sexual rights, freedom of expression, and the conceptual potential of graphic design as a progressive social force. Bates, armed with his letter of introduction, showed Lubalin some of his RCA posters. And in Apple’s words, the older designer gave him ‘a hundred dollars and a corner office’ for a month.
When I asked Apple what Bates had to do while he was in Lubalin’s office, his answer was quick and straightforward: nothing. He wasn’t required to work on specific briefs. Instead – much like the licence Richard Guyatt had granted him back at the RCA – he was free to roam. And that’s what he did, soaking up as much as he could from some of the best technicians, copywriters and commercial artists in New York. Apple recalls two figures as being particularly important: the designer and, as Apple remembers him, sometime copywriter Ernie Smith, and the lettering artist John Pistilli, the man who made Lubalin’s typographical designs a reality.
Without any specific projects, it would have been easy for Bates to come and go as he pleased. But Apple says he showed up every day, and that the most important thing he learned in Lubalin’s office was that good ideas – and not just good-looking designs – were essential. A letter to Lesnie in Auckland that Apple thinks Ann Quin wrote for him once he was back in London confirms this. ‘Time-table first day,’ Quin/Bates writes,
nine ackemma, strolled up the avenue, Madison (you know) and strolled into one of the taller sky-scrapers and caught an overnighter to the top floor. Fascinated, caught it down again. Then went up again to the thirteen – just above the basement and took up position behind a desk. Nine-fifteen, morning coffee. Ideas. They brought around a plate and we spewed them out, patting our mouths dry with towel supplied. This done by chick who asked, ‘So what else is there?’ She looked sly and vaguely intelligent. ‘I’ll show you – quick into the fire escape, I suppose there is one’ – ‘Yeh, but it’s occupied.’ – ‘Huh, at this time of day’ – ‘Yeh, well you gotta have luv, luv.’ – ‘Yeh. Later maybe.’ ‘Bi.’ – ‘Bi. I’ll bring around the plate again later and send someone to clean up your shoes.’
Apple remembers cigar smoke and shoe-shine boys, and the quote above plays directly into Mad Men tropes, all the way down to its implicit misogyny. But as much as Lubalin was one of advertising’s heroes at the time, he was also one of its doubters, eventually leaving Sudler & Hennessey to set up an independent design studio because he felt the ad industry underestimated the intelligence of the American people. Bates wasn’t oblivious to this himself: he was still having his own internal battles about whether advertising was the way forward for him. This was exacerbated, as Christina Barton has written, when Hockney visited him at Lubalin’s offices and dashed off a drawing called Madison Avenue. Lie$, Lie$, Lie$, 1961, which portrays Bates in a drip-dry suit. The title’s moralising dollar signs say everything about Hockney’s attitude towards the men Bates was learning from.
Bates was well and truly familiar with how many of his peers felt about the advertising industry – that mass consumerism, while interesting subject matter, was also, in the end, the enemy of high culture. The 1951 book The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man by Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan – his first great examination of America’s advertising and pop-culture industries – had been circulating among the young RCA artists in London: Derek Boshier, for example, cites it as a big influence on his work at the time. In it, McLuhan framed mass consumerism – supported by the mass communication of Hollywood and Madison Avenue – as a kind of organised violence against critical thinking. ‘[I]t has long been plain’, he wrote,
that the executives of production and selling have been thinking in military terms, smashing public resistance with carefully planned barrages followed by shock troops of salesmen to mop up the pockets. It will take more than a change of vocabulary to eradicate this lethal aspect of know-how, for it is not easily separated from its origins or its uses. The public may smile at the suggestion that it need be perturbed at being the target for a barrage of cornflakes or light bulbs. But this industrial ammunition has the character of exploding in the brain cortex and making its impact on the emotional structure of all society.
Boshier literalised McLuhan’s ideas in paintings like Special K, 1961, which included the distinctive Kellogg’s ‘K’ logo. The painting featured prominently in Ken Russell’s 1962 film about four young British Pop artists, Pop Goes the Easel. As we watch Boshier sit down at his table and hear the artist’s own voiceover, it’s clear he’s channelling McLuhan: ‘I’m very interested in the whole set-up of the American influence in this country,’ he says,
I’m interested in the, sort of, infiltration, of the American way of life. And I think it’s through advertising and advertising techniques that this infiltration has come through. I think the Englishman probably starts with America at the breakfast table, starting with the cornflake packets, which are American in design, American in packaging, and American in the whole set-up: the giveaway gifts, the ‘something-for-nothing’ technique.
As if to hammer home the McLuhan-esque message, the ‘giveaway’ Boshier pulls from the cereal box on his table is a toy missile.
Boshier’s stance here is one of critique. In a 2013 interview, he made clear that rather than celebrating American consumer culture, he was deeply wary of its encroachments on British life. Chris Stephens has described the paintings Boshier made while at the RCA as an ‘extraordinary body of work’ that examined ‘the contrasts between the rising hegemony of the United States and the declining imperial power of Britain, and that between corporate strategies and the apparently increasingly homogenized individual’. The defining visual embodiment of that ‘homogenized individual’ in Boshier’s paintings from 1961 and 1962 was a falling, or ‘fallen’, man – who had in fact originated in an RCA painting assignment. The students had been required to respond to an historical work; Boshier chose William Blake’s Simoniac Pope from Blake’s illustrations for Dante’s The Divine Comedy.
Across a number of paintings, Boshier used this figure to channel his interest not just in McLuhan’s analysis of mass communication but also in Vance Packard’s ideas in the 1957 bestseller The Hidden Persuaders, which had exposed how American ad men used ‘motivational research’ to manipulate the needs and subliminal desires of consumers. The title of Boshier’s So Ad Men Become Depth Men, 1962, for example, is taken directly from the title of a chapter in Packard’s book. In the painting itself, a mouth is squeezed between the handles of a pair of toothbrushes to which giant tubes are applying toothpaste. Falling towards the bottom right of the painting is a succession of male figures, which gradually disappear, replaced by handguns – another reference to the advertising industry’s ‘weaponisation’ of consumer desire. In The Identi-Kit Man, 1962, similarly aggressive toothbrushes scrub away at Boshier’s male figure, whose arms and legs morph into toothpaste, all within the silhouette of a jigsaw piece – which, in Stephens’ words, refers to ‘the fragmentation of identity’, a threat to the self from advertising’s psychological warfare. The head of Boshier’s ‘identi-kit man’ has snapped away from his body in an echo of the earlier 1961 work, Man Playing Snooker and Thinking of Other Things, in which a schematic male head has its cranium compartmentalised into visualisations of contemporary crises, including the hydrogen bomb and postcolonial troubles in the Congo (Frank Bowling also made work about the situation in Congo in the same year: his Martyrdom of Patrice Lumumba), as well as references to that ubiquitous popular American publication Mad Magazine.
Bates’s position, by contrast, was more complicated, because as much as he understood the debates about mass communication, he’d also been drawn into its beating heart, Madison Avenue. Creative directors and specialist typographers like Lubalin were also at the sharp end of the theories that McLuhan was, in 1961, formulating as his book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, which he would publish the following year. In it, McLuhan argued that the invention of the Gutenberg press, and in particular moveable, reproducible type, represented a profound shift in the way Western societies thought and were organised. This change, he argued, moved Western civilisations from oral to visual cultures: language and image, in other words, were inextricably linked. ‘As the literal or “the letter” later became identified with light on rather than light through the text,’ he wrote,
there was also the equivalent stress on ‘point of view’ or the fixed position of the reader: ‘from where I am sitting.’ Such a visual stress was quite impossible before print stepped up the visual intensity of the written page to the point of entire uniformity and repeatability. This uniformity and repeatability of typography, quite alien to manuscript culture, is the necessary preliminary to unified or pictorial space and ‘perspective’.
Designers like Lubalin and Bates, who were both equally obsessed with typography’s function as a conceptual and visual form – as carrier of message and image – were the modern inheritors of this print/visual revolution: ‘Gutenberg Men’ who corralled the technologies of reproducible type and mass communication to sway the masses.
The additional complexity, when deciding how best to critique mid-century advertising’s social and conceptual effects, was that the work being produced on Madison Avenue was, very often, astoundingly good. Apple remembers the work of this era with remarkable accuracy, given nearly sixty years have passed. In particular, he remembers that his host John Craddock had a stack of New Yorker magazines in his apartment, which Bates would flick through to look at the advertisements. Over that summer, the New Yorker included some of the classic campaigns of the era, including full-page ads for American Airlines, Kodak, Schweppes, Revlon, Coca-Cola, Gordon’s Gin and Cutty Sark Whisky.
There were though, for Bates, two standout campaigns from that period. One of them is regarded as perhaps the greatest print ad campaign of all time: Doyle Dane Bernbach’s work for Volkswagen. DDB began working with the German car manufacturer in 1959, and developed the iconic ‘Think Small’ campaign which made the VW Beetle’s greatest weakness in the American automobile market – its tininess compared to American cars – its greatest strength. Small meant affordable. Small meant easier to park. Small meant cheaper insurance. Variations on the hugely successful concept came thick and fast, including one with ‘Lemon.’ as its strapline, followed by an explanation of VW’s rigorous factory controls. The New Yorker ran others that summer. ‘Why does this station wagon look like a bus?’ one full-pager asked, making a virtue of the VW van’s snub nose. ‘Impossible.’ was another, an ad that went on to explain that, because VWs were cooled by air rather than water, it was impossible for them to overheat. ‘You might get all steamed up,’ the copy read, ‘but not your Volkswagen.’
One of the great innovations of the VW ads was their stark, clean layouts, which were developed by the art director Helmut Krone (who Bates met that summer). Unlike most American car ads, which were filled with smiling suburban families driving down freeways or standing next to their oversize cars and oversize houses, there were seldom ever people in Krone’s VW ads. They were essentially studio portraits of the cars – minimally presented objects against blank backgrounds. The ad copy also turned the logic of American auto on its head. This was the height of the conceptual advertising that figures like Bill Bernbach, Krone and Lubalin were spearheading at the time.
So, too, was the Wolfschmidt vodka campaign, developed by arguably the most influential agency of the era, Papert Koenig Lois. (Julian Koenig had also worked on the original Volkswagen campaign before leaving DDB; and George Lois had worked at Sudler & Hennessey with Lubalin.) That Apple was able to place his encounter with the Wolfschmidt ads to that summer in New York illustrates just how much they impacted him – and, given his own eventual transformation, they might well have planted an idea that there was something inherently American about fresh produce.
The most famous of the Wolfschmidt ads were a pair. In the first, a bottle of the vodka stands next to a tomato. ‘You’re some tomato,’ the bottle says. ‘We could make beautiful Bloody Marys together. I’m different from those other fellows.’ ‘I like you, Wolfschmidt,’ the tomato replies. ‘You’ve got taste.’ The second ad in the pair depends entirely on the success of the first. This time, a Wolfschmidt bottle, horizontal, nudges its neck towards an orange. ‘You sweet doll,’ the bottle says, ‘I appreciate you. I’ve got taste. I’ll bring out your inner orange. I’ll make you famous. Roll over here and kiss me.’ But the orange isn’t having any of it. ‘Who was that tomato I saw you with last week?’ it asks.
PKL were also behind a well-known television campaign for Xerox in 1960, in which a chimpanzee called Sam makes photocopies for his boss, showing how simple the machine is to operate (in early 1965 one of the first exhibitions Apple made after moving permanently to New York was called ‘Apples to Xerox’). That same year, PKL also made print ads for Coldene. On a completely black ground there are two statements: ‘John, is that Billy coughing?’ one asks. ‘Get up and give him some Coldene’ comes the reply – which, despite its sexist tone, was a brilliant way to represent a married couple lying in bed in the middle of the night, hearing their kid coughing: a breakthrough in using text as image.
Just like DDB’s Volkswagen ads, there was no extraneous detail in much of PKL’s work – no smiling models, no atmospheric setting, just a stark ground where idea, image and message come together seamlessly. Campaigns like these leave no doubt that in the hands of Bernbach, Lois, Lubalin, Krone and a small group of other Madison Avenue revolutionaries, advertising became an art form in its own right. It might have been, in Hockney’s eyes, ‘Lie$, Lie$, Lie$’, but it was subliminal and conceptual thinking of the first order, as culture-shaping as any of the art or literature then being made. And, for a month at least, Bates got to stand at the coal-face.
In one of those same 1961 New Yorkers Bates flicked through at Craddock’s apartment was a review for a book about America’s jazz scene, just published: Nat Hentoff’s The Jazz Life. Hentoff, at that time a columnist for the Village Voice, was a jazz-world insider: not just a writer but also the former New York editor of Down Beat; a friend of several of the leading musicians of the day; and briefly the director of Candid Records, a label that released albums by Charles Mingus, among others.
The Jazz Life is an on-the-ground account of what the New York grind was really like for professional musicians. For most, except for the very small handful at the top of the game like Miles Davis, it was pretty terrible. Hentoff described poor pay, racial discrimination both ways (including the reluctance of some black musicians to hire white players), long hours, unscrupulous club owners and even worse booking agents, alcohol and drug dependency, and the constant sense that, even if you ‘make it’, your fan base can move on from you in a heartbeat, forever chasing the next hot thing.
But Hentoff also showed that jazz, as a truly American art form, was in the midst of a revolution, which he described as a ‘changing intellectual climate’ led by some of the great pioneers then active in the New York scene – premier among them the likes of Davis, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. Rather than simply referring to this shift as ‘hard bop’, Hentoff suggested that the main characteristic of the new jazz, which had emerged in the 1950s, was that it was ‘an object in itself, a non-functional music in the sense that it is no longer designed for dancing or background listening’, and that this, despite its comparative toughness, was attracting a sizeable audience.
Central to this revolution, he argued, was the club scene rather than the recording studio. Although albums were important both for profile and income, it was in the clubs where musicians really hammered things out – and that discerning audiences understood this too. ‘In more and more clubs,’ he wrote, ‘the audience expects the experimenting and “stretching” out to be done during working hours for them, and not later for musicians only. As Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman have proved, it has become “commercial” (in the denotative sense of that word) to be as uncompromising in public as one wants to be.’
Bates had already established, through the RCA’s Jazz Society, his reputation as the college’s most obsessed jazz fan. New York’s jazz scene – which Cannonball Adderley described to Hentoff as ‘like a world governing body of jazz’ – was as much a draw for the young artist as Madison Avenue had been. This was also the main point of connection between him and his host Craddock, who was then aspiring to make ‘a really great jazz film’. Craddock says that when he first arrived in New York in 1959, he kept notes on everyone he saw perform in the clubs.
Apple recalls that, very early during his stay, Craddock took Bates to see the Miles Davis Quintet, and that pretty much every night after work, Bates would hit the jazz clubs, either with Craddock or on his own. Throughout July alone, Bates would have had the opportunity to see Eric Dolphy and then Coleman at the Five Spot; Coltrane and Art Blakey at the Village Gate; Buddy Rich at Birdland; and Monk at the Jazz Gallery. In a letter to Lesnie, Bates also described having a run-in with one of the biggest acts in town. ‘Saw every one who’s any one in music,’ he wrote. ‘Had a drink at Vanguard with a doll and was interrupted by Chico Hamilton. “Blow buddy, blow, she’s mine.”’
In The Jazz Life, Hentoff makes an important point about New York’s club scene around the late fifties and start of the sixties. ‘Much has been written about the “inner democracy of jazz”,’ he wrote,
insofar as the alleged absence of racial prejudice among musicians is concerned [something Hentoff disputes later in the book]; but actually, much of what the music has done to blur and, in many cases, erase racial lines has happened within its audiences…. What jazz has created … is one of the very few areas in American life where whites and Negroes, otherwise residentially segregated, have been able to form relatively casual friendships.
New York was, at the time, a comparatively liberal city. But as Hentoff points out, black musicians who had relationships with white women still risked assault, or worse, when they went out in public. Inside the clubs, there was often a different respect, although Hentoff tells the story of one club owner who stopped booking Charles Mingus after pressure from Greenwich Village cops, because of the number of mixed couples his gigs were attracting. ‘That guy encourages miscegenation,’ the cops told the owner.
The spring and summer of 1961 also saw the first Freedom Rides, as busloads of activists from the north travelled to southern states to test new anti-segregation laws. The 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v Board of Education had started the dismantling of Jim Crow. Rosa Parks’s action in 1957 had led to the Montgomery bus boycotts. That same year, Little Rock Central High School became the subject of world focus as the National Guard was ordered in to make sure the school integrated. And in February 1960 four black students initiated sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, occupying seats at a whites-only lunch counter. Over the next two years, sit-ins would develop into a national civil rights strategy.
Jazz was – is – an overwhelmingly black art form, and inevitably it became closely associated with the civil rights movement throughout the sixties, via figures like Mingus, Archie Shepp, Coltrane and Nina Simone. Hentoff, too, was involved in the civil rights movement, and as a columnist wrote about political issues just as much as jazz. In 1960, the drummer and band leader Max Roach made this connection crystal-clear with We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, released by Candid and with liner notes by Hentoff. The album’s cover was an obvious reference to the Greensboro sit-ins, as Roach, along with two other black men, sit at a lunch counter, with a white server over Roach’s shoulder. The record itself was entirely focused on black rights, from the legacies of slavery and inequality in America to apartheid in South Africa. Among its featured musicians was the Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji. In late July 1961 Bates would have been able to see Olatunji perform in New York at Birdland, and then later in the summer at the Village Gate with Coltrane.
It’s little wonder Bates was out at the clubs most nights, and that he told Lesnie he’d seen ‘every one who’s any one’. Jazz in New York in 1961 was, in the words of Hentoff, ‘beginning what should be its most daringly exploratory decade’. He was right: that September, Coleman released his groundbreaking album Free Jazz; Coltrane would release A Love Supreme in 1965; and Davis would close out that decade with In A Silent Way, 1969, and Bitches Brew, 1970. Bates had seen all of them during a vital incubation and experimental period, from which they’d go on to create some of the most important music of the twentieth century. To hear performers of such quality play every night was a huge leap from his excitement, just a couple of months earlier, at having had the chance to catch a set by Monk, or watch Freddie Redd and Jackie McLean in the stage version of The Connection.
Seeing those performers live and so intimately also developed Bates’s understanding of, as Hentoff puts it, jazz’s ‘object-ness’: the idea that it was a stand-alone art form of ideas rather than an entertainment. In that sense, it wasn’t so far from the conceptual work he was seeing during the day from Lubalin, Ernie Smith and John Pistilli at Sudler & Hennessey (Lubalin had also made a design and typography portfolio in 1960, called ‘Come Home to Jazz!’). Bates had put himself in a position to witness some of the great breakthroughs in arguably the two most influential art forms of America’s mid-century: jazz music and advertising. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that when he arrived back in London later that year, he began to consider himself an ‘Ideas Man.’
The New York trip was formative for Hockney too, though in very different ways. The success of the prints he’d made at the RCA, via the support of William Lieberman, was an early clue that graphic work would come to play an essential part in his output, and in his mythology. Nowhere is this clearer than in his first major body of work, ‘A Rake’s Progress’, 1961–63, which was based on drawings he made and experiences he had over that summer in 1961. Building on earlier paintings like We Two Boys Together Clinging, in which Hockney himself is a masqueraded presence represented through a numerical code, here he dialled things up so that he became his work’s central protagonist: a conscious performance of self that cast the artist as subject and object.
‘A Rake’s Progress’ is made up of sixteen etchings that tell the story of a young innocent – Hockney – losing himself in the pleasures and dangers of gay New York. But the series is also Hockney trying to get a thoroughly British art-historical monkey off his back: William Hogarth’s eighteenth-century series The Rake’s Progress, about a young man who receives an inheritance and proceeds to spend, drink and fuck it all away before ending up in debtors’ prison and, after he loses his mind, Bedlam. Both series, more than two centuries apart, are moralising tales about the dangers of money, temptation and vice. But as Marco Livingstone points out, Hockney’s was also a ‘warning to himself as well as to others of the loss of identity which occurs when one bows to external pressures. The destruction of innocence and individuality, we are reminded, is not simply a matter of personal morality. Also at issue is the corruption and debasement of art.’
That moralising tone in his drawing for Bates – lies, lies, lies – was clearly part of a wider concern Hockney had about art’s commodification and the impact of advertising and consumerism on society, but also about his own potential to get lost in the attractions and promises of American life. As was often the case during this period, there was a literary bent to his hero’s journey: a Tate Gallery Report from 1972 states that the young artist had already read the works of Theodore Dreiser, whose novel An American Tragedy from 1925 tells the story of a young man’s moral and sexual downfall when he moves to the big smoke.
The first plate of ‘A Rake’s Progress’, The Arrival, is a scene-setter in which we see Hockney, carrying a case, arriving in the metropolis. The words ‘Flying Tyger’ shoot out from behind him, referencing the plane he and Bates had travelled on. But it’s also as though Hockney himself is part of the plane, like his feet have touched down and now it’s time to continue on foot (this effect of words conveying motion is something he also includes in Flight into Italy – Swiss Landscape, 1962, ‘thats [sic] Switzerland that was’ shooting out from behind Michael Kullman’s Mini van). In the distance is a skyscraper, a portentous visual shorthand for the city about to unfold in front of him (Hockney says that part of the thrill of New York was the tallness of its architecture, compared to the UK and Europe). Next to that is a dark portal similar to the mirror in the earlier Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: a threshold through which the young man is about to pass. The Arrival also sets the tone for the way Hockney presents himself throughout the series – a stark young man whose face is a bare outline of his humanity: glasses, close-cropped hair, and an expressionless mouth, a single horizontal slit that never opens. True to the cautionary shape of his story, this is a man to whom things are done: a product of external forces rather than the determiner of his own journey.
The second plate, Receiving the Inheritance, drives this home. Hockney sits at a table with an art collector, an arch-capitalist with bald head, goatee beard and bow-tie. The collector holds a bill of sale for Hockney’s etching Myself and My Heroes, which is lying face-up on the table. The bill says $20, but next to the man’s mouth is a different price, $18. The Hockney figure sits impassive, staring straight ahead and seemingly naked, with a speckle of chest hair (like the photo of him and Bates on the beach together): a limbless torso acquiescing wordlessly to the ten percent discount.
Receiving the Inheritance is also the plate that sets the rake’s demise in train. It’s a direct reference to the first plate of Hogarth’s series, in which the protagonist Tom Rakewell, having just received his inheritance from his father’s estate, is being measured up for new clothes while he pays off a young woman he no longer wants to marry. Rakewell’s new-found wealth leads to the themes of Hogarth’s second plate, his entry into London high society. Similarly, for Hockney, his third and fourth plates capture his own engagement with the upper echelons of American society: first, Meeting the Good People (Washington); and second, The Gospel Singing (Good People) Madison Square Garden, a reference to Hockney hearing the black gospel singer Mahalia Jackson perform. Like some of the jazz musicians Bates was seeing live, Jackson was one of the great performers of her generation and an important figure in the civil rights movement. Hockney once again casts himself here as passive, with arms folded and legs crossed. In a way similar to Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style, he presents himself as a seated figure inside a box, a comparatively tiny form inside the stage Jackson is standing on as she belts out ‘Hallelujah’.
After Rakewell has his high-society moment, Hogarth starts his rake’s descent, the third plate in the series a pub orgy in which a thoroughly wasted Rakewell enjoys the entertainments of London prostitutes. Hockney’s debauch, across a succession of plates, is less obviously sexual, and more loaded with a kind of sullen longing. In The Start of the Spending Spree and the Door Opening for a Blonde, we see the Hockney figure, naked again but for that chest hair, with a huge bottle of Lady Clairol hair bleach on top of his head. In front of him is a door – again, like the mirrors and portals in other works, a compositional divide that also acts as a threshold – beyond which is a radiant sun and palm trees: the promise of new American beginnings. The idea that doors would open for him with his new, golden look was taken from the pop culture message that blonde women were the sensual ideal, a trope cemented by the incredible cultural force of Marilyn Monroe’s image at the time, but also imprinted on the American psyche by Clairol’s blonde campaigns of the late fifties and early sixties. The breakthrough campaign had been ‘Does she … or doesn’t she?’, written by one of the few women copywriters at the top of the Madison Avenue game, Shirley Polykoff, of Foote, Cone & Belding. Polykoff went on to develop Clairol’s ‘Is it true blondes have more fun?’ ads – the campaign that led Hockney to bleach his hair in the first place.
Hockney then replaces Hogarth’s pub orgy with two scenes. The first is The Seven Stone Weakling, in which his rake stands under a tree in Central Park, passively watching fit men jog by. The second is The Drinking Scene, in which we see our hero from behind, standing at a New York gay bar, a taller man putting his arm around his shoulder. In the bottom right corner are two more men, facing out, one with his hand on the other’s shoulder, a couple of tears rolling down his cheek. In the next plate, Hockney explicitly refers to Hogarth again. Marries an Old Maid mirrors Hogarth’s The Marriage, in which Rakewell, now broke, marries an old woman for her money, all the while eyeing up her young maid during the ceremony. Hockney’s marriage takes place in another of his doorway-portals, which could just as easily be a dark space for a clandestine sexual encounter.
From here, Hockney’s rake begins to lose his identity even more quickly: he’s witness to an arrest in Viewing a Prison Scene in which two male arms, one naked and one besuited, are handcuffed together. It’s at this point that the rake himself becomes a sculptural object – a torso with no arms or legs, like the remnants of a classical statue. In the distance is the outline of another man, with a prison number written across his chest, a harbinger of the rake’s eventual fate. In Death in Harlem, his physical detachment from his surrounds becomes even more pronounced as a dead figure lies in a bed while Hockney – a bust printed in red – floats freely.
In The Wallet Begins to Empty, Hockney has assumed his full form again as he’s cast out by his old maid and the art collector. For the first time in the story we see real emotion from him as he stomps down a staircase, shoulders hunched and head dropped, dejected, the spike of the Washington Monument standing alongside his ostracisers. He sinks into drink in Disintegration, his head breaking free from his body. In Cast Aside, his bust form has become the size of a trinket, thrown by a giant hand into the mouth of a monster. In Meeting the Other People, he encounters a man at the bottom of a long staircase wearing a t-shirt that says ‘I swing with WABC’ (a reference to a popular radio station that played Top 40 pop songs in New York); the man has a wire running up to his ear and musical notes emanate from a transistor radio in his back pocket. It’s the prelude to the rake’s final downfall, in the last plate of the series, Bedlam. The institution’s name is scrawled in red on a blank wall faced by five men, all wearing the same ‘I swing with WABC’ t-shirt, all with transistor radios, all with that same wire running up to their ears. The only way to identify our rake is by a tiny arrow above his head. Having passed through that threshold in The Arrival, and having sunk deep into the fabric of the American metropolis, his disappearance is complete.
The implication here is that conformity is a form of madness, and that popular culture is the cause of this loss of self. There are echoes here again of McLuhan in The Mechanical Bride:
The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.
Hockney was clearly aspiring to that ‘especial heroism of effort’, making work that showed his deep desire to resist the processed, canned nature of contemporary culture. But ‘A Rake’s Progress’ also seemed to signal a new approach to self in his work: an understanding that an identity could be both a subject and an object, something internal and lived but also performed and externalised. There had been hints of this thinking in works like Mirror, Mirror on the Wall. But ‘A Rake’s Progress’ gave those instincts a new scope and scale.
It’s difficult to overestimate just how important ‘A Rake’s Progress’ became in establishing Hockney’s public persona and his status as one of the foremost artists of his generation. When he returned to London for the 1961/62 year, he’d planned to make a series of eight prints based on his trip to New York. Robin Darwin, though, encouraged him to think bigger, and to expand it to over twenty so it could be printed by the RCA’s Lion & Unicorn Press. Hockney settled on sixteen, but wouldn’t finish them until 1963, after a second trip to New York. He then sold the publishing rights to Paul Cornwall-Jones of Editions Alecto for £5,000 (paid over three years): an absolutely monstrous sum for the time, and for an artist who’d graduated only the year before. In 1961, Hockney had been excited to have a few hundred quid in his pocket for his trip to New York. After he sold ‘A Rake’s Progress’, he was loaded. It was this money that carried him, eventually, to California – the land of palm trees and sunsets and swimming pools and beautiful men and art collectors he intuited in his New York prints, and which eventually became synonymous with his best paintings.
The last straw for Mark Berger’s parents, when it came to their house guest Hockney, is also one of the most significant moments in the artist’s early story. Hockney’s biographer Peter Webb tells it like this:
One evening, Mark and he [Hockney] were watching television in the house with Barry [sic] Bates from the Royal College, who was also visiting New York, and Ferrill Amacker, a friend of Mark’s from New Orleans. They were all a little drunk when an advertisement for Lady Clairol hair colouring came on the screen: ‘Blondes have more fun. Doors open for a blonde.’ Hockney announced that if that were so, he was going to dye his hair. The others all agreed to do likewise and they went out to buy some Lady Clairol from the drugstore. They set to work immediately, and by the time Mark’s father returned home, all four were blonde. He was furious, and said he was not having such behaviour in his house.
In Christopher Simon Sykes’s later biography, Bates is absent from the scene. But there are contemporaneous documents that support his presence. Bates’s girlfriend Ann Quin, writing as him in late 1961 or early 1962, makes a clear reference to Hockney in an untitled fragment. ‘Called round at 2 a.m. to say goodbye before going to Paris,’ she has Bates say, ‘guess he was in love with me at one time. Went round together in New York, until he shacked up with this guy [Amacker, in Brooklyn Heights]. Yeh we went blonde together, dyed it overnight at some party so they told me.’ And in the letter to Leon Lesnie from the same period that Quin likely also wrote, he/she writes, ‘Accidentally bleached my hair at a party one night, so I found out (doors open for blondes) this boy insisted on running his fingers through my hair.’ Apple thinks this likely happened in the second half of their trip, after he’d finished up at Sudler & Hennessey.
It’s clear that the transformation had nowhere near as much significance for Bates as it did for his friend; the bleached hair was an essential aspect of the transformed Hockney who returned to London, and the RCA, for his final year in September 1961. With the money he’d made from selling his prints via Lieberman, Hockney had also bought an American suit, and he’d taken up cigar smoking, as evidenced by the photos of him and Bates together at Coney Island.
These were youthful affectations, but they were also symptomatic of a new way of thinking about self: from that moment on, David Hockney was ‘David Hockney’, as much a public manifestation of an artistic identity as a real person. This is not at all to suggest that he became somehow insincere. But it is to suggest that his change, and his maintenance of it for years – particularly the blonde hair – demonstrated that he was more aware than most of his contemporaries that artists needed to be known, and seen, and heard: defined not just through their work but in relation to the world.
Aside from the perceived sexual allure of blonde hair, which was played upon – and preyed upon – by Clairol and its brilliant copywriter Polykoff, bleaching one’s hair is a very particular process: a stripping out of what was there before, rather than an adding in – a kind of ‘fresh start’. Its appeal, then, to so many American women might not just have been its fashionability but its thoroughly existential American-ness: the prospect of shaking off one’s past and becoming someone new. Certainly for Hockney, and later on for Bates, it represented just that.
It also seems relevant that, over the course of the summer, the major exhibition at MoMA was the largest survey to date of Futurism, a radical art movement born in Italy in the early twentieth century. It crashed into the world with a manifesto written by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: a wild and proto-fascist veneration of machines, technology and individualism that called for an erasure of the art-historical past, and a new art that embraced the accelerated times and the industrial forces causing this speed. In his catalogue essay for the show, Joshua C. Taylor wrote:
Like many of their fellows elsewhere, the Italian Futurists were fighting the estrangement from the world, the lonely isolation of the individual that was not only the inheritance of the artist but a common threat to modern man. They rejected firmly the temptation to brood over man’s plight, sentimentalizing over his helplessness in the way fashionable at the turn of the century. They turned against the Lombard tradition that encouraged a crepuscular sadness to invade the works of even the most methodical divisionists. With Nietzschean arrogance they despised the weak and the timid, the thoughtful or hesitant, and wished to feel themselves rash, audacious, and capable of infinite accomplishment. They wanted their art to restore to man a sense of daring, an assertive will rather than submissive acceptance, to break through the insulating shell of self by sheer force if need be.
It’s easy to see how Bates, who’d already expressed enthusiasm for Futurism’s conceptual cousin Dada, would have been attracted to this proposition (soon, he’d be producing his own manifestos with Quin). His love for the technologies of his own time, particularly in the printing and advertising worlds; his desire to transcend his New Zealand roots and become a major international figure; and his interest in individual acceleration, rather than collective wellbeing, also made Futurism a natural fit.
In just a couple of months, Hockney and Bates had encountered exactly the kinds of cultural experimentation and freedoms they’d hoped for when they paid for their cut-price plane tickets to New York. For Bates, the conceptual thinking he was part of on Madison Avenue during the day was complemented by the musical revolution he saw night after night in the city’s jazz clubs. For Hockney, the successes of the Lieberman sales, combined with his embrace of New York’s gay bars and cruising spots with Berger and Amacker, gave him a new opportunity to be himself, and, eventually, to manipulate and perform that self in his work and in his daily life. Both returned to London for their final year as ‘changed men’. ‘I arrived back looking like Kennedy,’ Bates wrote to Lesnie, ‘except I had a hat on, chewed gum and called everyone buddy (or darling).’ Hockney’s new blonde hair and his cigar habit were talking points at the RCA too.
The hair bleaching had been a point of connection between the two men, but it was also arguably the last meaningful one. Both were beginning to manifest new ideas of what an artist could be, but in opposite ways: Bates now relentlessly driven by ideas and looking towards new technologies and the future; Hockney more interested in grappling with, and conquering, the shadows of art history.
These differences of approach were cemented by the very first works each of them made when they returned to the RCA. Hockney made A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style, 1961, his biggest painting to date at around two metres by three, partly because ‘people were already grabbing places where they were going to paint the whole year. I’d got that big stretcher and I thought, I can grab a bigger area to paint on it, so I’ll do it first; it’s a good reason for painting this picture, it means I get more space. Selfish, I know.’
There was, of course, more to the work than that; it was based on a C. P. Cavafy poem called ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ which, Livingstone suggests, attracted Hockney for its ‘wry comment on human nature: our tendency to inflate our self-image by contrasting ourselves with those we deem inferior, and the ease with which we can invent false motives for our actions and then delude ourselves into believing them.’
Bates, meanwhile, returned to his poster designs. At Sudler & Hennessey he’d got into a conversation one day with Ernie Smith. Smith asked Bates what he was working on, and the young man told him that as soon as he got back to London he had to produce a poster for the RCA’s Film Society screening of Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni, 1953. The film is about a group of unemployed chancers in their twenties, drifting through a summer and refusing to grow up. On the spot, Smith came up with the headline for Bates’s poster: ‘PSST!! Hey you, Spiv!’ It was a perfect play on the film’s plot, but also on Bates’s prospective art student audience. Smith quickly came up with the rest of the poster text:
The lights are low at the JCR, our brothers are there. Why not join us and them in breakin’ the joint apart? Fred Fellini’s chief buster, buster. You take your cue from him. Okay, not a word to Joe. See you Thursday, 7.30, outside.
In London, Bates printed Smith’s words, white on plain black paper, with no images or extraneous detail. It embodied everything he’d picked up from Lubalin, Smith and their colleagues, and the wider revolution in advertising’s treatment of image and text: a marriage of language, idea and target audience, stripped down to its essentials. Bates would soon be deploying exactly the same tactics in his art.
Hockney and Bates stayed close after the New York trip. In October, they travelled together to the wedding of printmaking student Michael Adams in Cornwall. It was there that Ron Fuller, the student who’d given Hockney so much technical know-how on making etchings, photographed them together – Hockney wearing Adams’ Union Jack waistcoat, Bates sharply dressed alongside him. Bates played jazz that night on the church’s bells, channelling the music he’d heard in New York. The pair huddled together that night on the stone floor of a lean-to attached to the Rose Cottage on the Heligan Estate.
What they didn’t know was that the New York they’d just left was about to come to them, in the form of Larry Rivers – regarded, at the time, as one of America’s most significant contemporary painters, and a key figure in the post-Abstract Expressionist ‘New York School’. His arrival at the RCA in November 1961 would have a profound effect on Bates, and present an unexpected writing opportunity for his new girlfriend, Ann Quin.