When it comes to acknowledgments in a book like this, I feel a bit like David with a deck of Polaroids in my hand, getting set to splay out the pattern—only, in this case the deck of names spreads out over decades, and the patterns turn in and in on themselves: a four-dimensional kaleidoscope.
For starters, of course, there are the remarkable assistants and more-than-assistants from Hockney’s own shop: majordomos Karen Kuhlman, Julie Green, and Gregory Evans; the photographers Richard Schmidt and Jean Pierre Goncalves; the ever hospitable and cheerful Elsa Duarte; and house intellectual (and master detective) David Graves, ever teeming with fresh hunches and insights.
And then, especially during the Looking Glass passion, where would any of us have been without the University of Arizona’s optical wizard Charles Falco? Similarly, time and again I found myself turning for guidance and perspective to the Getty’s John Walsh; the National Gallery’s Arthur Wheelock; and Gary Tinterow and Mike Hearn at the Metropolitan.
I boggle at the number of editors who over the many years have lent their sage counsel to this evolving project, starting at the New Yorker with William Shawn and followed by all three of his successors as editor in chief (Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown, and David Remnick), as well as my own editors there over the years: John Bennet, Pat Crow, and Jeffrey Frank. I’ve lost track of which particular fact checkers there shepherded which particular piece, but I salute the entire incomparable kennel! In addition, I am happy to be able to thank Raymond Foye at the Petersburg Press and Mark Horowitz at Los Angeles Magazine.
At the LA Louver Gallery, Peter Goulds and Elizabeth East were wry and steadfast and always wonderfully supportive.
At the University of California Press, editor Stephanie Fay and her crack trouble-shooter Eric Schmidt lavished steadiness, humor, and grace on what developed into an improbably complicated publishing process, and Sandy Drooker proved as marvelously resourceful a designer as she had been on the Irwin project on which we first collaborated almost thirty years ago (as hard as that is for either of us to credit).
Parts of this book have come into being under the protection of each of my three agents—Flip Brophy, Deborah Karl, and now Chris Calhoun—and I am more than glad to be able to doff my cap to each of them here.
My endlessly forbearing and put-upon bride, Joasia, forbore all with never-less-than-bemused good cheer, and our daughter, Sara, veritably grew from infancy into adulthood lapped along by these dialogues, the smartest of us all, and the funniest.
And then finally, of course, there’s David. My subject and my teacher and in the end my friend. This book owes all to his brimming generosity of spirit and insight, and to his inextinguishable love of life.