1 The Start of the Spending Spree and the Door Opening for a Blonde from A Rake’s Progress, 1961–63
This is the fourth edition of a book that has been in print continuously since 1981, when it was the first monograph to appear on an artist whose international reputation was already long established but whose work had until then evaded close art historical scrutiny. That initial opportunity, now thirty-five years ago, to provide a structure for an understanding of David Hockney’s development over the first two decades of his career was a great privilege, carrying responsibilities for the future reception of his work. Subsequent editions of this book published in 1987 and 1996 allowed me to build on that mapping of his evolution, always full of surprises and new directions. So it is now that, precisely two decades since the publication of the third edition, I have again welcomed the chance to chart the further development of an artist whose imagination, energy and desire for new sensations and for fresh ways of picturing the world have never flagged.
This expanded edition, which coincides with Hockney’s eightieth birthday and with the most extensive Tate retrospective ever accorded to a living artist, will be the most comprehensive in terms of its coverage of his production over more than sixty years in every medium that has fired his imagination: painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, stage design, video and a variety of investigations into new technologies and novel forms of picture-making that take full advantage of the possibilities open to artists in the early twenty-first century. I stand by almost every word that I published in the first three editions of this book, though, on re-reading my earlier texts, I have been surprised by my sometimes harsh judgments of works that with time I have grown to admire more unreservedly. I have resisted the temptation to make even the slightest amendments to the existing chapters to take into account later developments or my own changes of heart. I have not updated the list of Hockney’s publications on p. 11, for example. Only on p. 104 have I qualified my original assertion that he returned to watercolour ‘only on isolated occasions’ after his experiments in 1967, as this has since been contradicted by his enthusiastic embrace of the medium between 2002 and 2004, as described in the new fifth chapter. Hockney’s extraordinary decade-long examination of the Yorkshire landscape in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the centrepiece of this latest chapter, resoundingly negates my observation on p. 106, true at the time, that ‘England … has provided little stimulus to his imagination.’ One of Hockney’s great strengths has always been his willingness to change his mind, even to contradict his position, in order to give himself complete freedom of movement. It is therefore inevitable that some of the generalizations that still held true in 1996, when the third edition of this book was published, no longer stand.
Lengthy interviews that I conducted with the artist in Los Angeles between 22 April and 7 May 1980 and in London on 6 and 7 July of the same year were the source of quotations in the 1981 edition. These recorded conversations, now housed with my other papers and recordings in the Tate Archive, have been supplemented in the later chapters by excerpts from further interviews with the author. The first debt of gratitude that I expressed to the artist in the original edition of this book is therefore compounded by his continuing willingness to answer my questions over more than three decades. The ‘forthrightness and clarity of his remarks’ to which I referred in 1981 describe just as accurately his later pronouncements, always made passionately, with conviction and with a genuine desire to communicate his ideas and intentions as clearly in words as he has always done in his pictures.
The special thanks itemized in the 1981, 1987 and 1996 editions, particularly to all those who greatly facilitated my research in the late 1970s and early 1980s, of course still hold firm. Those who provided me with particular assistance then – including but not limited to Hockney’s first dealer, John Kasmin, and his colleagues, the print publisher Paul Cornwall-Jones, and two of the artist’s close colleagues, David Graves and Gregory Evans – all receive my renewed thanks all these years later. Over the last two decades, I have benefited also from prolonged contact and conversations with Hockney’s current dealers, including Peter Goulds of L.A. Louver, David Juda of Annely Juda Fine Art and Paul Gray, with the printer Maurice Payne, and with the devoted members of Hockney’s team, including, at different times, Karen S. Kuhlman, Richard Schmidt, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima and Jonathan Wilkinson. An invitation from the Royal Academy of Arts in London to co-curate ‘David Hockney: A Bigger Picture’, an immensely ambitious and hugely popular exhibition in 2012 of Hockney’s late flowering as a painter of the Yorkshire countryside, deserves special mention. Though everyone involved was gratified that the show broke all records, with some 650,000 visitors in London alone before it travelled in modified form to the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, on a personal level what most thrilled me was the unprecedented opportunity it offered to watch in such close proximity the work emerging over the course of several years. This was a real lesson in understanding the intricacies of Hockney’s creative process.
I have benefited inestimably from the more than a quarter of a century spent with my partner, Stephen Stuart-Smith, who not only worked with me on a major retrospective exhibition in Japan in 1994, ‘Hockney in California’, and more recently, in 2011, on the book published by his Enitharmon Editions, David Hockney’s My Yorkshire, but who also has been an intrinsic part of my friendship with the artist and my investigations of his work during these years.
The great challenge in this new edition has been to cover all the bases in the immensely prolific and surprising past two decades of Hockney’s life in art, when he has not only built on his earlier achievements in depicting the human figure and devising a wide range of forms of depiction, but also ambitiously reinvented himself in his maturity as a landscape painter of astonishing intensity. Now excitedly embracing his ‘late period’, he remains as engaged as ever with the questions he has always posed for himself – what to depict, how to depict it, and how to persuade the spectator that he or she is an active participant rather than just a passive witness – while managing still to re-energize his art with new solutions, fresh ideas and a technical mastery born of a lifetime’s experience.
Marco Livingstone
1 The Start of the Spending Spree and the Door Opening for a Blonde from A Rake’s Progress, 1961–63