Peter, 1969 (illustration credit 9.1)
Peter, 1969 (illustration credit 9.1)
Before his return to London at the beginning of December 1968, Hockney had been down to 42nd Street to stock up on the latest male physique magazines. With titles such as Golden Boys, Teenage Nudist and Champion, they were among the first American magazines to feature naked men full-frontal. As he passed through customs at Heathrow, a very young officer stopped him and asked him to open his bag. “I’d put the magazines on top of my clothes,” Hockney recalls. “They weren’t very sexy. They were pictures of naked men posing in sylvan glades, that sort of thing.”1 The customs officer took the magazines out of his bag, had a good look and told him he was confiscating them because they were pornographic. “I said, ‘You’ve got the wrong person today. I’m not a little businessman who’s going to run off. I’ll see you in court if necessary.’ ”2
When Hockney told Kasmin that he was prepared to fight the case, Kasmin suggested that it would be cheaper to fly back to New York and buy some more magazines. “ ‘That’s maybe what you’d do, Kas,’ I told him, ‘but I’ve got some principles.’ ”3 Hockney’s first step was to telephone HM Customs and Excise’s head office, where he was passed from official to official, each of whom told him that the magazines certainly qualified as pornography. “Finally I got to the top guy,” he recalled, “and he said, ‘Yes, we’re seizing them, they’re pornographic … in one of the pictures the boys have painted their genitals with psychedelic colours.’ I cracked up laughing on the phone and thought, if he doesn’t think it’s funny, I can’t communicate with him at all … I told him I would see him in court.”4 Hockney’s confidence that he could win a court case was bolstered by his knowledge that in the U.S.A., as a result of a series of Supreme Court rulings passed in 1962, similar photographs of nude men were not considered pornographic.
Next, he contacted the National Council for Civil Liberties who put him in touch with the prominent civil rights lawyer Benedict Birnberg, an outspoken defender of the rights of homosexuals. “I had a call from Martin Ennals, the general secretary of the NCCL,” Birnberg remembers, “asking me if I could help this young artist, David Hockney, who then came to see me in my office at London Bridge. He was artistically dressed, and he smoked prolifically. The legal atmosphere of the 1960s was still pretty repressive, with a lot of archaic legislation being enforced, so it was no surprise to me that Customs and Excise had seized these perfectly innocuous little magazines which they alleged were pornographic. They were just pictures of nude young men. So what? Quite frankly it was a ludicrous case. All I could really do was to raise hell over it, which I did as best I could.”5
Birnberg wrote to Customs and Excise threatening legal action if the magazines were not returned. Simultaneously Hockney was marshalling his own big guns, first persuading Sir Norman Reid, the distinguished director of the Tate Gallery, to write to them explaining that Hockney was an artist with a renowned international reputation who needed the magazines for his work, and then getting the art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, author of The Nude, to agree to testify for him should the case come to court. As the fuss intensified, the press took up the story. “The wicked censor strikes again,”6 wrote a correspondent for the Guardian under the headline “POP CUSTOMS,” which led to Laura Hockney getting wind of it. She was supportive. “Isn’t it awful,” she said in a telephone call, “when you need them for your work?”7 Before long the story had reached the ears of the Home Secretary, James Callaghan, who, having more pressing problems to deal with, such as the emerging conflict in Northern Ireland and the passing of the Race Relations Act, decided that prosecuting David Hockney would be more trouble than it was worth and instructed HM Customs and Excise to return his property. This they did, though without apology.
“I remember they were delivered back in a large brown envelope,” says Hockney, “that had OHMS written on it. There was a list of everything they’d taken, which had all been written down by the customs man in this incredibly repressed handwriting. I think they were frightened that if I took it to court I would win. I defend my way of life. I was prepared to defend myself because I thought, ‘If I don’t do it, who will? And if nobody does it, they just rule.’ ”8 It was an attitude that won him many admirers and made him something of a hero to the blossoming gay rights movement. “It really was quite an important little case,” says Birnberg. “It was a blow for liberation for David Hockney himself and it all contributed to the wave of emancipation that was going through at that time.”9
While Hockney was fighting Customs and Excise, he kept himself grounded by working on the portrait of Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott. The American poet and art historian David Shapiro, closely following the progress of this picture for an article he was writing for Art News, gave an atmospheric description of Hockney’s studio in Powis Terrace, which, he wrote, “serves as both beehive, arsenal and coffee-mill: a few oils, finished and un- against the wall (…photos taped to the canvas); T-fluorescents above; three windows to the west; a draftsman’s desk; copperplates; radio; Rowney stacking palettes; cans and rags; Vibo French curves; electric heater; Black and Decker finishing sander; The Splendour of Brass (Telemann Overture in D Major); Lyons pure-ground coffee filled with pencils; Eagle prisma colour and other acrylics; on the floor, telephone, stapler and knives; Rowney bristle series, photos of Henry Geldzahler, Christopher Scott and the work-in-progress against the wall; also pliers, paper, palettes, rubber rollers; on another wall a photo of the New York skyline, and the Duchess of Kent arriving to open St. Thomas’s; Richard Hamilton’s poster of the Stones; Hokkers green Liquitex; an Ashai Pentax; Lepage’s gripspreader; a jar of pennies …”10
With the recently finished Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, Hockney had broken new ground. His use of perspective draws the viewer into the picture, creating a triangular relationship between the subjects and the spectator. Isherwood frowns rather worriedly at Bachardy, reflecting his real-life concern that he had gone off to London for two months, while Bachardy smiles directly at the spectator, as if in some conspiratorial dialogue with the artist, a man of his own age. Though he preached a philosophy of sexual freedom between partners, once telling Hockney, “I have the greatest respect for lust,”11 Isherwood was prey to the fear that one day his much younger lover might leave him for someone else.
Hockney was developing the portrait as drama, and this is no-where better realised than in Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott, a picture that is awash with tension. In the middle of the canvas, on a huge pink sofa, sits Henry, jacketless, his formal waistcoat and tie suggesting that he has just returned from the office. Staring straight ahead at the spectator, he looks relaxed, and brimming with confidence, the very image of the important museum curator. To his left stands the slim figure of Christopher Scott, dressed in a raincoat and standing stock-still, gazing into the distance in a rather vacant fashion. Hockney liked to joke that it was “St. Henry radiating light, visited by an angel in a raincoat,”12 and it has often been compared by critics to traditional Annunciation scenes. “Christopher looks rather as if he’s going to leave,” Hockney later told Mark Glazebrook, the director of the Whitechapel Gallery, “or he’s just arriving. He’s got his coat on. That is how I felt the situation was … that’s all intended in the picture.”13
The involvement of the viewer in this picture is made all the more real by the sense that one is seated in a chair behind the glass table in the forefront. This was complicated to achieve. “It took me about two or three months to paint,” wrote Hockney. “To draw the floor I laid tapes from the vanishing point, which is about two inches above Henry’s head, to the bottom of the canvas. At one point in the work there were twenty or thirty tapes radiating from his head. I photographed the picture then—it looked like an incredible radiant glow from a halo round his head.”14
Though his large double portraits are among his greatest work, there is a glaring omission in the oeuvre. No painting exists of Hockney himself with Peter Schlesinger, the love of his life, though a drawing does exist depicting Schlesinger sitting cross-legged on a sofa with Hockney in profile walking towards him from the right. “The closest we ever came to a double portrait featuring myself and Peter,” Hockney recalls, “were photographs we took with each other in the photograph. I might have been thinking about doing a painting but we broke up, and it would never have happened after that.”15
Paris, December 1967 (illustration credit 9.2)
For the time being, however, life was rosy. “We set ourselves up in Powis Terrace in quite a domestic way,” wrote Hockney. “It was very happy, very nice. I painted away there, and Peter had a little studio round the corner in Notting Hill where he did some very big paintings; they were quite ambitious.”16 This domestic harmony was a big change in London lifestyle for David, who had been used to going out almost every night with Patrick Procktor.
Powis Terrace was being transformed by Schlesinger from the “dirty and messy and cold” flat that Don Bachardy had found when he had stayed there the previous April.17 His efforts did not go unnoticed by Ken and Laura, when they visited in early October. “David’s flat is beautiful,” wrote Laura, “—newly decorated in white walls and carpeted—large wall wardrobe with mirrored doors all around one bedroom. Kitchen modernised and very pleased I was to find he had a ‘help,’ a Mrs. Miller who is to come in three times a week.”18 There is no mention of their having met Peter, though they did meet on other occasions. “I met David’s parents several times,” Schlesinger recalls, “but we didn’t talk because they didn’t know what to say to me and I didn’t know what to say to them.”19
The new “help,” Mrs. Miller, was a Jamaican, a little older than David, who, when she wasn’t cleaning, worked as a film extra. She was interested in art—as a young girl, she told them, she had modelled for Jacob Epstein—and Schlesinger thought she was probably too elegant for cleaning. She spent much of her time sitting cross-legged on the kitchen table drinking endless cups of tea and smoking. “We were always hanging out,” he says, “smoking joints and discussing the paintings with Patrick, Ossie and Mo.”20 Hockney doted on her and never failed to ask her opinion on his work, while McDermott and Clark liked to tease her after Clark claimed to have found her in the kitchen putting talcum powder on her face in order to lighten her skin. She was a valuable addition to Powis Terrace, which, thanks to Schlesinger’s influence, was beginning to acquire some new furnishings, including a glass table from the über-fashionable contemporary furniture store Aram, on the King’s Road, and a huge new leather sofa bought from Harrods for the princely sum of £750. “I had never paid anything like that for a piece of furniture,” Hockney recalls, “so Peter went to Kasmin, who said, ‘Oh, David could afford three sofas like that.’ It was a terrific sofa and people could sleep on it.”21 Though his attitude to money was that he was rich if he had sufficient to do what he wanted, it still pricked Hockney’s conscience that the sofa cost more than his father earned in a year.
Schlesinger also enjoyed combing the antiques stalls on the Portobello Road on a Saturday morning. “We had very different tastes,” says Schlesinger, “because I liked finding old things in Portobello Market, while he just preferred things that were all new. I would buy a vase for a pound. He considered a lot of the stuff I bought as being junk.”22 Among the antiques he bought were a Charles Rennie Mackintosh chair, some Lalique lamps and a rococo sledge, which were interspersed with a small forest of coloured cut-out trees, made and painted by Mo McDermott. With all the surfaces painted white, the room looked very striking. “Peter made that lovely big room really beautiful,” Celia Birtwell remembers, “with the Mackintosh chair and the glass table, the big leather sofa and the Lalique lamps. He had a hi-fi system in three sections with speakers on either side of the wall, very expensive, but really the business then. It was his way of making his mark. He pulled the flat together and transformed it.”23
Birtwell was one of the first close friends that Schlesinger made in London. Her father was an estimating engineer in the textile business, and her mother a seamstress, making wedding dresses in Manchester; they brought up three daughters in a house full of books and flowers. She was the eldest and arty, and she always knew that what she wanted from life was new experiences. At Salford Art School, studying textile design, she met the rebellious young Mo McDermott, who in turn introduced her to “this really mad boy” called Ossie Clark, who was a student at Manchester College of Art, and another friendship was born. When Birtwell took him home, her mother immediately recognised his genius. “He liked my mother very much,” recalls Birtwell, “because she was extremely patient (unlike myself); she’d show him how to sew a collar or put a seam in. She had hours and hours of patience. She used to say to me, ‘He’s really special,’ or [of his clothes] ‘It’s a work of art, Celia.’ ”24
When, after Salford, Birtwell came down to London, her job as a waitress at the Hades coffee bar soon reunited her with Clark, since it was one of the favoured hangouts of the students from the Royal College. “D’ya like my fucking frills?” he remembered her saying to him. She was “dressed like BB, blue jeans and Victorian blouse, boots with a lavatory heel.”25 It was not long before they became an item, bound together by creative brilliance, her talent for textile design and his for cutting, not to mention a certain physical attraction. From the start, Birtwell’s friend and fellow lodger, Pauline Boty, warned her against him. “He could be a lot of trouble for you,”26 she said.
It was Boty who first pointed out Hockney to Birtwell while they were walking near Hennekey’s pub on the Portobello Road one Saturday morning. “I saw this extraordinary-looking guy with long hair wearing a maroon corduroy jacket,” Birtwell remembers, “and I said, ‘Who’s he?’ and she told me, ‘He’s one to watch and he’s at the Royal College and he always gets up in the social studies class and gives a lecture to the other students. He’s really smart.’ ”27 She finally met him when Hockney took up with Clark, though at first, probably out of shyness, he had little time for her other than the occasional “Oh, hello, love” when he would visit their flat in Blenheim Crescent. But this all changed in 1968. “One day we were round at Patrick Procktor’s,” says Birtwell, “and David came round and he had this rather attractive boy with him called Peter Schlesinger who was quite a gentle character, and he and I immediately got on really well. It was Peter that brought me and David together as friends because he couldn’t ignore me any more.”28
Schlesinger’s friendship with Birtwell blossomed because they were two of a kind, gentle, artistic and rather shy: Birtwell even thought that they looked alike. They were both less gregarious than their respective partners. “I moved to Linden Gardens to a first-floor flat in 1968,” she remembers, “and that’s really where I first began to see Peter a lot … Peter would come round and visit me in the evening and we’d sit and chat while David was out at parties, and then David would come round to pick him up to take him home.”
At weekends the two couples established a tradition of holding tea parties, invitations to which quickly became sought-after. “I like tea parties because they’re not like dinner,” Hockney used to say, meaning that people would leave after tea, allowing him to get back to work. Organised by Schlesinger, they had to be done in Hockney’s style, a throwback to his mother’s teas when he was a child, with a proper china tea service, and cakes and sandwiches. Invitations would go out to between ten and fifteen people, of whom there was a core group consisting of Patrick Procktor, Mo McDermott, Anne Upton, Maurice Payne, Kasmin and his wife Jane, Lindy and Sheridan Dufferin, Mark Lancaster and the Clarks, to which was added a cosmopolitan mixture of people Hockney might have run into during the week or was working with at the time, or who just happened to be cruising the Portobello Road on a Saturday. “Powis Terrace tea parties,” wrote Clark in his diary in 1969. “EVERYBODY THERE.”29
It was not long before these gatherings got out of control. “What happened later,” says Melissa North, a girlfriend of Tony Richardson, “was that after the flat was enlarged and all glammed up, it became a destination for collectors and smart American hostesses and people like that when they came to London. They would go to David Hockney’s for tea, and as the tea parties had always been very open, they suddenly went from being the same twelve people to being forty people and he didn’t like it any more.”30 “… the last one I gave,” he told Gordon Burn in 1971, “I invited about … well I invited thirty-two, but you know, people bring other people, so about sixty turned up. Well it was chaos! Not everybody could have a cup of tea, so I stopped giving them.”31
As they saw more and more of one another, Hockney and Birtwell gradually became friends too. “I soon discovered the great thing about her is that she is very funny,” he recalls, “and within ten minutes of meeting each other we were always laughing, and that’s what I loved about her. They say that laughing clears the lungs and I said to Celia, ‘That’s it. People who shouldn’t smoke are people who never laugh.’ So we became great friends.”32 It also suited Birtwell to have two kind gay men in her life at a time when life with Clark was becoming increasingly difficult. Clark’s career had taken off in 1965 when Alice Pollock, the owner of the fashionable boutique Quorum, on the King’s Road, had signed him up exclusively, and he was soon dressing the rich and famous at a time when London was seen as the most swinging city in the world, as well as designing stage costumes for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He had no qualms about throwing himself full pelt into the lifestyle that accompanied fame, but he had no backup, and this was to be his downfall. “Ossie was a terrific person,” says David, “but his tragedy was that he needed somebody to organise him, like I had Kasmin. But he didn’t have anybody who could do that for him at that point. The problem was simple, in that he used to work very hard to produce an incredible collection, and the moment he had some money, then he would stop. He was a rock ’n’ roller and he always wanted to go off to the rock ’n’ roll parties.”33 As the fame and the money went to Clark’s head, he started taking too many drugs, became sexually promiscuous, and was often violent to Birtwell, who leant on Schlesinger and Hockney for support.
When Hockney went home for Christmas that year, he left Schlesinger, who couldn’t afford to go home to America, behind in London. Though Hockney was only away for two days, they were not happy ones for Schlesinger. “The first Christmas I spent in London I spent on my own,” he says. “I wasn’t invited anywhere, and it was rather bleak.”34 Meanwhile, Laura recorded: “David came Christmas Eve and we had Pork and Christmas Pud etc.” He arrived home with a welcome and generous gift: the money for their trip to Australia. “Ken and I received a cheque for £800, with more to follow promised … What a day we had!!!” When he left Bradford on Boxing Day to return to London, she wrote: “Always feel flat when David has gone—but it has been lovely … I did ask if the trip was to cost him more than he expected, but he said not to worry—‘money is to use.’ ”35
By this point in his life, Hockney could easily afford to send his parents to Australia. Since his first show with Kasmin, his work had fetched more year after year, and his large pictures were now fetching between £1,000 and £2,000, at least a fivefold increase since 1963. “I had to keep adjusting the prices,” Kasmin recalls. “They never stayed still. There were many more people wanting paintings than there were paintings, and not just people who came to me as clients asking to buy one, but also people who had art galleries who wanted to have shows. Trying to work out how to ration out the paintings was one of the hardest jobs I had as an art dealer.”36
In 1968, Hockney had had one-man shows not only with Kasmin in London, but also at the Galerie Mikro in Berlin and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, not to mention appearing in group shows such as the Venice Biennale and Young Generation: Great Britain at Akademie der Kunst in Berlin; and in February 1969 the prestigious Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester gave him a mini retrospective, showing twenty-eight paintings together with a selection of prints. His ever growing international reputation now meant that his pictures were selling as fast as he could produce them, and his earnings were commensurate with this.
Much of his money came from the lucrative sale of his prints, and in March 1969, he began work on his next major set of etchings, a project that was to take up the rest of the year, to the exclusion of any painting. In December 1962, he had made his limited edition etching of Rumpelstiltskin, the strange gnomish character from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which he had loved as a child, giving them away as Christmas presents to his family and friends. Ever since then, he had wanted to illustrate a selection from the fairy tales, and eventually he suggested the idea to Paul Cornwall-Jones, who had by now split from his partners in Alecto to start a new imprint, Petersburg Press. Cornwall-Jones was only too happy to work with Hockney again and immediately started setting up the structure for the publication, bringing in Gordon House, who had designed the catalogues for the Kasmin shows, and the typographer Eric Ayers as the design team. “David wanted new original translations from the German,” Cornwall-Jones recalls. “He first suggested Isherwood should do it, so I went to see him but he didn’t want to do it. He then suggested asking Wystan Auden, but he wasn’t interested either. So I commissioned Heiner Bastian, a German who had been working at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, and he worked on it with me and my wife Tammy.”37
Hockney found the tales entrancing. After reading all 239, and researching various illustrated editions, notably those by Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, he initially chose twenty stories, of which fifteen were translated and twelve made the final list. He picked the stories, a number of them quite obscure, entirely for the vividness of the images they conjured up for him. “Old Rinkrank,” for example, begins: “A King built a glass mountain and announced he would give his daughter to the first man who could climb it without falling.” Just as Hockney was fascinated by painting water, so he was with the equally difficult technical problems of representing glass. He had always loved the verse from “The Elixir” by the mystical poet George Herbert, which runs:
A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye,
Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heav’n espy.
“That’s why … I chose the story of Old Rink Rank, about the glass mountain,” he told Mark Glazebrook in an interview. “I liked the problem of how to draw and represent a glass mountain. That was a nice little problem to give myself.”38 While trying to solve it, he made six or seven versions of the mountain, breaking up a large sheet of glass in the process and piling it up in the studio to draw it jagged. His eventual solution was to use the technique of reflection, revealing the king’s palace through the mountain, which also magnifies what it reveals.
It is clear from the work that Hockney derived enormous enjoy-ment from this project, drawing not just from the depths of his own vivid imagination, but on his great knowledge of the history of art, enabling him to reference the work of artists ranging from Leonardo to Magritte. This starts with the frontispiece depicting Katarina Dorothea Viehmann, the elderly German widow who gave the Brothers Grimm many of their stories, who is drawn in the style of Dürer. In “Rapunzel,” the story of a couple who give away their baby to an enchantress in exchange for some rapunzel flowers, he imagined that the reason the enchantress, whom he drew with a beard, had no children of her own was that she was so ugly no one would sleep with her. Because she was a virgin, he based the drawing of her with the baby on her knee on the Madonna in Hieronymous Bosch’s The Virgin and Child and the Three Magi. The prince who eventually comes to rescue the child, by then a beautiful maiden with long golden locks, was lifted from Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest. In “The Boy Who Left Home to Learn Fear,” the ghost which “stood still as stone” is reminiscent of one of Magritte’s “stone age” paintings, a series of 1950s works depicting organic objects turned to stone. It amused Hockney when distinguished art historians would write to him as if his references were their discovery, when to him it seemed obvious that he was quoting from a particular artist.
Not all the drawings are referenced from the past. Mo McDermott posed for some of the images in “The Little Sea Hare,” for example, while “The Boy Who Left Home to Learn Fear” opens with a picture of a comfortable armchair, a perfect representation of the security of home, which is lifted directly from a drawing he had once made of an armchair in the library at Clandeboye House in Northern Ireland, the home of Sheridan and Lindy Dufferin. In addition, photographs he had taken of castles on his Rhine trip the previous October proved valuable.
Though to begin with Hockney made preliminary drawings, particularly where the subject had some technical problem, as work progressed, more and more of the etchings were drawn straight onto the copperplates on special tables set up in Powis Terrace, before being placed in acid baths on the balcony, under Maurice Payne’s supervision. Since leaving Alecto, Cornwall-Jones no longer had a printing studio, so when the plates were ready, Payne took them down to the print department at the Royal College, where his friend Mike Rand let him proof them in the studio. Again a number of stories had to be culled. “I got carried away,” Hockney told Glazebrook, “and I did so many for some stories that if I had done twelve stories the book would have been so thick and so expensive that we couldn’t go on.”39 He had still completed eighty etchings before he knew he had to stop.
It was decided that the initial book would contain six stories, with a possible second volume if the first was a commercial success. When the time came for the paste-up, Cornwall-Jones thought Hockney might be interested in getting involved. “When I first showed him a paste-up,” he recalls, “he said, ‘Why are you bothering me? I’m painting and drawing.’ Anyway, with great reluctance he came round the next day to St. Petersburg Place, and he was grumpy because he felt he didn’t want to get involved in organising a book. In fact he started getting involved straight away, saying, ‘Oh, we don’t want to do this, we should do that,’ and he spent about a week reorganising the whole thing.”40 Hockney was determined that this should not be an “art” book with loose pages, but a real picture book in which on every page the image would be seen before reading the text it was illustrating. This would mean printing an etching on the back of an etching, a problem that was solved by simply doubling over the paper, an idea taken from Japanese books. Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm took over a year to produce and was published at the end of 1970. As a flyer for the book, a miniature version was published by the Oxford University Press, in a planned edition of 2,000: it ended up selling 150,000 copies.
In the canon of Hockney’s work, there is no doubt that Six Fairy Tales is right up there with the Cavafy poems, not just because of the superb quality of the etchings, but equally because of the sheer inventiveness and wit of his imagery. Hockney certainly considers it to have been a major work, not just for the time he spent on it but also for what he learned while doing it. “They’re more complex than my previous etchings,” he wrote. “First of all, instead of using aquatints to get tone I decided on a method of cross-hatching, which I used throughout. I just stumbled across it, and thought it was quite a good way to do it. And then I found that you can get very rich black by cross-hatching, then etching, then putting wax on again, and then drawing another cross-hatching on top on another, on another; the ink gets very thick … it was a step forward for me in etching techniques.”41
Though Hockney’s concentration on the Grimm project meant that no further paintings were completed in 1969, it was not to the exclusion of any drawing, and in May he took Schlesinger off to stay with Cecil Beaton at Reddish, near Salisbury in Wiltshire, whose portrait he was doing for an article in Vogue. Beaton had been one of Hockney’s earliest patrons, and he adored David. “We could not be further apart as human beings,” he wrote in his diary, “and yet I find myself completely at ease with him and stimulated by his enthusiasm. For he has the golden quality of being able to enjoy life. He is never blasé, never takes anything for granted. Life is a delightful wonderland for him; much of the time he is wreathed in smiles. He laughs aloud at television and radio. He is the best possible audience, though he is by no means simple. He is sophisticated in that he has complete purity. There is nothing pretentious about him; he never says anything he does not mean. In a world of art intrigue, he is completely natural.”42
The only other guest that Whitsun weekend was another bright young man, the flamboyant 34-year-old director of the National Portrait Gallery, Dr. Roy Strong. The year before, he had shaken up this previously stuffy institution by mounting a massive exhibition of Beaton portraits, a turning point in the gallery’s history and so successful its run had to be extended twice. His invitation to a quiet weekend turned out to be exactly that as Beaton, preoccupied with the portrait sessions, paid Strong little attention, abandoning him to paint watercolours in the conservatory and garden, as well as to waspishly observe his host. “Cecil is nothing if not vain,” Strong wrote in his diary, “so there was much coming and going with piles of hats from which Hockney could make a choice for Cecil to wear. David’s early attempts didn’t go down at all well, hardly surprising for his graphic style highlighted every wrinkle on Cecil’s face.”43
Beaton studied Hockney meticulously while he was being drawn and perfectly described how, like a monkey, Hockney squinted and grimaced up at him and then down again to his drawing pad. Beaton was impressed by how tireless Hockney was and by the infinite care and precision he took over his work, marvelling as he sharpened his pencils for the hundredth time. About the results, however, Beaton was not so happy, particularly the early attempts. “To begin with,” he wrote, “I was utterly appalled, having remained in some romantic but extremely uncomfortable pose for a great deal too long, when I saw an outline in Indian ink of a bloated, squat, beefy businessman. He laughed. No, it wasn’t very good, and he embarked upon another which turned out to be just as bad. About eight horrors were perpetrated while the days advanced until, finally, something rather good emerged. He was encouraged. He was enthusiastic. Would I sit again tomorrow all morning and then again after lunch. He eventually decided to draw me in pencil rather than ink and the result was different and better.”44
While Hockney was working on the portrait, Schlesinger was either doing his own sketches of Beaton, or taking photographs, demonstrating a great skill in capturing those fleeting moments that define an era, much in the same way as did his hero, the great French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue. One such image, taken in the conservatory, shows Beaton and Hockney seated in basketwork chairs. The former, dressed like an Edwardian dandy in a green velvet suit, yellow socks and a large velvet floppy hat, is leaning back, eyes skyward, his legs wide apart, with his camera placed strategically between his legs. David, sitting cross-legged and gazing affectionately at the photographer, brings the dandy right up to date in all his sixties glory, wearing a pink plaid suit, the ubiquitous odd socks in bright green and red, deemed a “retina irritant” by Beaton, and his trademark black spectacles “as large as bicycle wheels.”45
On their last night at Reddish, Beaton took them to dinner with Richard “Dickie” Buckle, the ballet critic of the Sunday Times, who had designed his exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery and whose Wiltshire cottage was the setting for Hockney’s painting Domestic Scene, Broadchalke, Wilts. After dinner Hockney regaled the company with his philosophy, showing that the idealism of the sixties had not quite passed him by. “David talked of the coming of the Golden Age,” Beaton wrote in his diary. “He had read many philosophers, and has thought a great deal. In the next forty years all will change. The computer will do away with work; everyone will be an artist. No need to worry, all the leisure in the world, everything will be beautiful. There will be no private property, or need to own anything. Everyone will be ecstatically happy. It was marvellous to see this white-skinned, champagne-topped, dark-glassed young man in pale pistachio green with bronze boots, orange and yellow alternate socks, holding forth with such vehemence.”46
Though the weekend was a success, the drawings he did were not among Hockney’s best, as was often the case with his commissions: Beaton was not someone he knew well, whose changing moods and emotions he had observed on a daily basis. He told Henry Geldzahler, for example, that the reason his portrayal of Christopher Scott in the double portrait is slightly wooden is that he hadn’t really known him or been sure how long he was going to be around. His drawings of Schlesinger on the other hand—sleeping, reading, swimming, clothed, naked—breathe flesh and blood into him so that the viewer feels he knows him. Somehow Hockney manages to convey his strong attraction to his lover. Nowhere is this more true than in a striking three-foot-high etching of Schlesinger naked in 1969, which employs two sets of perspective: one for the lower half of the body, in which he is viewing it from above, thus foreshortening the legs; and another for the torso and the head, seen on the level. The result gives the impression that we, like the artist, are admiring Schlesinger’s body from the feet upwards.
Hockney’s drawings of Schlesinger occupy a special place in his art, and are a record of his most precious relationship during one of the happiest times of his life. They also represent a travelogue of all the places they visited together—California, Paris, Marrakesh, Rome, Carennac, Vichy, to name a few—as well as Le Nid de Duc, Tony Richardson’s house, which was the setting for the iconic painting Portrait of an Artist. In the summer of 1969, he and Schlesinger made up a party there with Geldzahler, Kasmin, Clark and Birtwell. Richardson, who was in Australia filming Ned Kelly with Mick Jagger, had lent his house to Hockney for a month, leaving his girlfriend Melissa North to make sure things ran smoothly.
North was in her early twenties, a girl about town from London who, along with her friend Celia Brooke, used to be invited by Richardson to spice up dinner parties at his house in Egerton Crescent, South Kensington, where they would encounter the likes of John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, John Mortimer and other theatrical and literary giants. On one such occasion she found herself sitting next to David Hockney, who invited her to tea. They subsequently struck up a friendship, and when Hockney came to Le Nid de Duc in 1969, she fell completely under his spell. “I’d always had a weakness for him,” she recalls, “and that summer I fell madly in love with him so that if he spoke to me I would just sweat and blush and crumple. It sounds pathetic, I know. I found him very, very attractive, and I loved his work and I loved the way he was drawing all the time and the way he organised expeditions. He was always going to look at something, either the Miró Foundation or a show, and we’d all follow. He never stopped drawing, and then he started drawing me. It was absolute agony because I was having to sit there with him looking at me, and me thinking, ‘My nose is too big. I’m so plain. How embarrassing that he’s drawing me to be kind,’ and as I had this mad obsession with him, this attention was almost too much to bear. I was up there sweating and all my clothes would start sticking to me and I would get more and more humiliated. I think he must have sensed this sort of passion and he was very, very sweet to me.”47
*
Soon after their return to England, Clark and Birtwell asked Hockney to be best man at their wedding. The marriage took place in August and was doomed to failure; it might never have taken place had it not been that Birtwell was pregnant and had received a letter from her father as good as ordering her to get married. “So we just went out and got married,” says Birtwell, “and we dragged David along as best man. He turned up looking like an old wreck, so I said, ‘You could have just dressed up a little bit!’ so I think he put a carnation in his lapel, and we went off to the registry office.”48 The only other person present was Clark’s sister Kay, a nightclub chanteuse whom David had loved ever since she had told him, “What I love in the morning is a cup of coffee, a good cough and a cigarette.”49
The wedding took place at Kensington Registry Office with Birtwell dressed in a beautiful chiffon dress by Clark decorated with Birtwell’s trademark “Mystic Daisy” print. As they tumbled out after the ceremony, they stopped a vicar who was passing by and asked him if he would take their wedding photograph. He refused, no doubt because Birtwell was seven months pregnant and showing it. “Then we all went back to Powis Terrace, and had tea, and then the next day Ossie just buggered off with Chelita Secunda.”50 In his diary Clark noted nonchalantly, “Married Celia. Tears. ‘Tell me what you want, I’ll get you whatever you want’—Hockney, Kay a witness. DH promised Kay an etching she never got … honeymoon with another woman.”51 Hockney remembers that “we laughed at the time. We thought it was an odd way to start, but Ossie was an odd person.”52
Over the next few months Hockney completed a large number of drawings of the newly-weds in preparation for a proposed wedding portrait, trying both figures in different positions and with different looks on their faces. He also took many photographs recording the details he might use, of the vase, the book, the telephone, the lamp and the table. Peter Webb, author of Portrait of David Hockney, recounts Clark’s version of the moment Hockney found the perfect composition. “Ossie remembers … he had only just got up and so had no shoes on. He slumped into a chair with a cigarette, and Blanche, one of their white cats, jumped onto his lap. Celia was standing on the other side of the window with her hand on her hip, and Hockney said, ‘That’s perfect.’ He later added their Art Deco vase and lamp, and called the cat Percy, the name of Blanche’s son, because it sounded better.”53 The actual painting would have to wait for the time being, there being no room to work in the studio as every available inch of space was taken up with etching equipment.
Hockney also had plans for another large painting inspired by a trip he had made in September to the French spa of Vichy. This pretty town in the Auvergne had been known since the sixteenth century for its mineral baths and drinking waters, whose restorative powers were later made famous through the letters of the Marquise de Sévigné, who claimed that they had cured her of a paralysis in her hands. Its blossoming fortunes made it a centre of fashion, with a casino, new streets and villas, and even an opera house; up till the outbreak of the First World War, it had been the summertime music capital of France.
Hockney took Schlesinger and Clark with him to stay at the chic old Pavillon Sévigné hotel, in order to take the waters, and they drove down in a Triumph Vitesse, bought on the advice of Keith Vaughan with whom he had dined a few days before leaving. “The more I see of D.H. the more he impresses me,” Vaughan wrote of the occasion. “He has all the best qualities of his generation. Modest and self-confident, honest in speech, unconcerned with impressing yet considerate and well-mannered, impatient with all fraudulent or compromised behaviour, ardent, curious, warm hearted, uncorrupted (and probably uncorruptable) by success … he does what he says he will. Months ago … talking about special issues of stamps which I did not know about he said, ‘Oh, but they’re marvellous, haven’t you seen them, I’ll send you some.’ And two days later I get a postcard covered with about 8s 6d worth of special issue stamps. And the last time I saw him … just before he was motoring to the S. of France in his convertible Morris … I said, ‘You ought to get a Triumph Vitesse—they’re better than a Morris for long journeys.’ ‘Maybe I will. It’s an idea. I’ll go and buy one tomorrow morning. There’ll just be time.’ And he did.”54
Vichy was the first spa that Hockney visited to take the waters, the drinking of which took place in a lovely art nouveau building and involved a degree of ritual which was amusingly described by Wayne Sleep, on one of his visits there during a stay at Carennac. “When you arrive at the spa itself,” he wrote, “you are given your own glass cup in a string bag. Ladies in nurses’ uniforms ladle the water from the spring into your cup—and you then drink it. The sulphur content made a loo immediately necessary. It is very good for the system but the stink of rotten eggs can be hard to take. At dinner that evening I noticed that the majority of the guests looked half dead. So much for the water, I thought.”55
Le Parc des Sources, in the middle of the town, created in the time of Napoleon Bonaparte, had fascinated Hockney since he had first seen it the previous year, because of the way the trees had been planted in the form of a triangle in order to create a false perspective, making it look much longer than it really was. It reminded him of a sculpture, and gave him the idea to create a new painting based on one of his favourite themes, that of the picture within a picture. Taking three plastic chairs, he placed them at the edge of the park, and got Clark and Schlesinger to occupy the two right-hand ones as if they were watching a film or a play, leaving the left-hand one empty to signify where the artist had been sitting. He then took photographs of the scene from behind, which he would later use to create the painting. “I wanted to set the three chairs up for the three of us,” he wrote, “… then I’d get up to paint the scene. That’s why the empty chair is there—the artist has had to get up to do the painting. It’s like a picture within a picture; I was going to call it Painting within Painting, like Play within a Play. That gives it the strong surrealist overtones.”56
While Hockney had been engaged on the Grimm project, Kasmin had had to be patient. “It was always tricky with David,” he recalls, “because there weren’t that many paintings a year. There were plenty of drawings, but people always wanted paintings.”57 He was not idle, however, always thinking of new ways to further his artists’ reputations. When Charles Alan had to close his New York gallery for reasons of ill health, Kasmin pulled off a coup by persuading André Emmerich, one of Manhattan’s leading dealers in contemporary art, to take Hockney on. Emmerich was a soft-spoken, very straight businessman, who had a great interest in pre-Columbian art and a strong feeling for American abstract painting. He represented many of the artists Kasmin liked, and had shown Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler and the estate of Morris Louis in London, as well as Anthony Caro in New York. “He was a believer in order,” says Kasmin. “He had well-run galleries with well-spoken staff and was used to dealing with rich people. He was without any peculiarities of character at all, except that he was addicted to sweets … and his idea of generosity was to share a shoeshine with you in the office. Instead of saying, ‘Let me take you to lunch,’ he would say, ‘Let me buy you a shoeshine.’ He had a lovely big gallery and he always had at least one young gay man there, someone that David could talk and joke with. It was already the most important place to have a show in New York, and David benefited from being with a gallery that was primarily non-figurative.”58
Emmerich’s first show of Hockney paintings, in November 1969, included the three great double portraits, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott and American Collectors. Kasmin had pointed out to him that he should not sell to European dealers, who would simply take the work back to Europe to sell at twice the price, but try and find buyers in New York. One painting was already sold, however. Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy had been bought by an English lawyer, Sir John Foster, for $6,000 as a gift for his close friend, Marguerite Littman. Mrs. Littman, a Southern belle who lived in a grand house in Chester Square, had established herself as one of London’s leading society hostesses. Said to have been Truman Capote’s model for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, she was a confidante of Tennessee Williams, and had been Elizabeth Taylor’s voice coach on the film of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She was once with the great playwright beside the swimming pool of the Cipriani Hotel in Venice when, looking at a particularly thin girl in a bikini, she turned to him and said, “Look, anorexia nervosa,” to which he replied, “Oh, Marguerite, you know everyone!”59
Isherwood was among her circle of friends, and, after seeing the picture in Hockney’s studio, she had made it known to Sheridan Dufferin at one of her numerous lunches that she would love to own it. Its subsequent history is of interest, because it was a painting that meant a great deal to the artist, and it shows how easy it is for a picture simply to slip out of circulation. “David loved the picture because Chris and Don were friends of his,” Kasmin remembers, “and I was keen for it to go to the National Portrait Gallery as David is an English painter and Isherwood an English writer. Sheridan, however, put pressure on me to sell it to Marguerite. So it was bought by John Foster and on his death in 1982 the picture was sold to an English dealer, who sold it to a Texan billionaire for a great deal of money, a flash Harry who flew around the world in pastel-coloured aeroplanes. Hockney was broken-hearted about this. He literally wept. I couldn’t believe it had happened.” From the Texan it went to the Manhattan art dealer Andrew Crispo, who was later jailed for tax evasion, and from there it ended up belonging to the financier Gilbert de Botton who gave it to his wife Jacqueline as part of divorce proceedings, and with whom it still resides, its value having leapt from $6,000 in 1969 to several million today.
When Hockney returned to London after the Emmerich show, he began work on Le Parc des Sources, Vichy, the first picture he had painted for ten months, which was the longest period he had gone without painting in ten years. “I’d gotten to the point,” he wrote, “where I didn’t seem to care about the painted mark that much … Somehow a kind of painting block took over. Probably in the end acrylic paint did it, the burdens of it.”60 Getting back into painting proved difficult, since the new picture was large, as big as the double portraits, and he struggled with it. “I began working on it in January,” he wrote, “and it took me much longer than I expected … I think the difficulties stemmed from the acrylic paint and the naturalism, the fight to achieve naturalistic effect, the difficulty of blending colour, things like that.”61 The result is a masterful picture, surreal and strange, that fills the viewer with unease, posing the question as to what is going on psychologically with these two figures, lost in their own thoughts, Clark’s perhaps of his descent into chaos, Schlesinger’s of whether he might be becoming a prisoner in one of Hockney’s canvases. Hockney eventually completed it just in time for it to be included in the biggest exhibition of his work so far, a retrospective at one of the most influential galleries in London, the Whitechapel.
Always at the forefront of showing contemporary art, in 1938 the Whitechapel had been the first London gallery to show Picasso’s Guernica in an exhibition protesting the Spanish Civil War. Its landmark show, however, and a milestone in the history of British post-war art, was This is Tomorrow in 1956, which consisted of a series of installations assembled by various artists to represent their vision of the future. The director at that time was Bryan Robertson, who transformed the place into London’s most exciting exhibition space, opening British eyes to the work of American abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg and Mark Rothko. In spite of this, it was starved of funds and by the time Robertson retired, his successor, Mark Glazebrook, one of the founders of Alecto Editions, found the gallery’s finances in a parlous state.
One of Glazebrook’s first decisions was to invite Hockney to mount a retrospective of the past ten years. Glazebrook had, after all, been in the vanguard of Hockney admirers, having spotted him as a serious talent while he was still at the Royal College, and been the purchaser of what Hockney considered to be the best picture in his first exhibition, Play Within a Play. The Whitechapel exhibition, curated by Kasmin and Hockney, occupied the entire gallery, even overflowing into the foyer and back into previously unrevealed side chambers. It included forty-five paintings, from Doll Boy to Le Parc des Sources, Vichy; his complete graphic work, comprising 116 items; and forty-seven drawings. The enormous cost of mounting the show was partly defrayed by David, who, to raise money, made a special lithograph, Pretty Tulips, in an edition of two hundred, which was a sell-out.
Hockney left the hanging, which he always claimed he was no good at, to Glazebrook and Kasmin, and went away with Schlesinger and Christopher Isherwood to stay at Le Nid de Duc, only returning the day before the private view on 1 April. “We … went to the opening like everybody else; so it was a surprise to me,” he wrote. “… just a few days before we came back, I began to think Oh my God, all those early pictures which I haven’t seen in ten years are going to look terrible. When I saw them, though, I thought, they do stand up; they’re not that bad … I could see the way things progressed, how I’d taken one aspect of a painting and developed it in other pictures so that it changed quite visibly … It dawned on me how protean the art is; it’s varied, with many aspects, many sided.”62
His parents visited the show on 17 April, along with his brother Paul and family. They left Bradford at 5.30 a.m. on a very hot train and Paul’s children, Lisa and Nicky, were both sick. “Went from King’s Cross by tube to Whitechapel,” wrote Laura, “where David met us at the Gallery. There for an hour pre-opening time we viewed at leisure his wonderful exhibits of ten years work.”63 The critics were impressed. Guy Brett, writing in The Times, singled out the California pictures. “Many of Hockney’s recent paintings have been about California. So much so that one easily identifies his qualities, his whole painting style, with the vision he has given us of that place. Describing ‘California’ one describes a Hockney.”64 The Spectator critic Paul Grinke loved the portraits, “an area in which Hockney works with great feeling largely because he almost invariably paints personal friends or lovers, which is a good way of putting his sitters at ease and also gives us a more than usually intimate glimpse of their personalities. Of the recent portraits, the 1968 painting of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy … is a most accomplished work.”65 In Apollo, James Burr wrote: “His ability to parody the good manners of picture-making is brilliant,” ending his review: “This decade of Hockney’s achievement is erratic, but nevertheless recalls his humorous satirical gifts at their sharpest and most alert … It seems to have reached a point of development that looks ominously like a cul-de-sac, but no doubt by some unusual act of visual agility he will extract himself and continue his distinctively eccentric painting progress without which English painting would be markedly the poorer.”66
For Hockney, it was a remarkable end to the decade.