David Hockney with Pentax (illustration credit 11.1)
David Hockney with Pentax (illustration credit 11.1)
Hockney’s break-up with Schlesinger was the first really painful thing that had ever happened to him, and he took it very badly. He returned to London and his beautiful new flat, in which almost everything reminded him of his lost lover: the dining-room table and chairs, the leather sofa, the Lalique lamps, his paintings on the walls, and in the studio, on the easel, the almost completed Sur la Terrasse, a picture that exudes melancholy and nostalgia. They filled him with a deep sense of emptiness. He had no appetite for going out, or for staying in. “It was very traumatic for me,” he wrote, “I’d never been through anything like that. I was miserable, very, very unhappy. Occasionally I got on the verge of panic, that I was alone, and I started taking Valium … It was very lonely; I was incredibly lonely.”1 Things got worse when Schlesinger returned to London and was living just round the corner in his studio in Colville Terrace. “David never really accepted it,” Schlesinger recalls. “He was always asking me to a party or inviting me to dinner and asking me to do this and that, and there were tears and him asking me to move back in, pleading and pleading. And of course he was asking everybody for advice and they were giving it. Henry said, ‘Buy him a ring,’ and somebody else said he should buy a building with two studios so I could have a separate life. This all went on for some time.”2
If it can ever be said that there was a silver lining to this dark cloud, it was that Hockney soon discovered that the solution to his unhappiness was to throw himself into work, initially for fourteen or fifteen hours a day, the result being that over the next year he was to produce an enormous volume of work. The ghost of Schlesinger haunts many of these paintings, not least Sur la Terrasse, a ravishing picture in blues and greens. It must have been hard for Hockney to put the finishing touches to it. There is an air of loneliness too about Pool and Steps, Le Nid de Duc, which shows a pair of Schlesinger’s sandals lying beside a swimming pool that is otherwise deserted. It is a painting that successfully makes use of a stain technique, favoured by American abstract artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, to depict the water, in which acrylic paint diluted with detergent and water is stained into the weave of the canvas. The fact that the picture was started in May 1971, while Hockney and Schlesinger were still living together, does not detract from the suggestion in the finished work of a relationship with somebody who is no longer there.
A new painting, which Hockney began in September, was Still Life on a Glass Table, in which he revisited the favourite theme of painting transparency. In 1967, he had made an ink drawing, A Glass Table with Glass Objects, in which he tentatively explored this subject, but while that was a rather clumsily executed and naive sketch, the 1971 work is a masterpiece, “a virtuoso display,” wrote Marco Livingstone, “of Hockney’s recently acquired perceptual conviction in dealing with the refraction of light through glass, the reflections off it and the modifications of surface through it; yet through all this transparency he manages to endow the subject with a credible sense of weight and mass.”3 Though Hockney saw this as a fairly straightforward painting, various friends pointed out that all the objects on the table either belonged to or were particularly loved by Schlesinger, which led him to question whether unconsciously he might have chosen them to reflect his emotional state.
The only painting he made at this time that can be said to have had no associations with Schlesinger was Rubber Ring Floating in a Swimming Pool, a very simple picture which on first sight could be taken for a Max Ernst abstract, and which was based entirely on a photograph taken in Cadaqués. “It’s almost copied from it,” wrote Hockney. “I was standing on the edge of the pool, the pool water was blue and there was this red ring, and I just looked down and pressed the shutter … At first glance it looks like an abstract painting, but when you read the title the abstraction disappears and it becomes something else.”4 To Henry Geldzahler, this painting was an indication of how Hockney was still interested in modernism, even if he had chosen to distance himself from it. “… he’s interested in modernism, he’s interested in goofing on it, he’s interested in learning from it, he’s interested in painting now, he’s interested in the whole panoply.”5
The most important painting which he began work on at this time was a portrait of Schlesinger inspired by the accidental juxtaposition of two photographs lying on the studio floor. “One was of a figure,” he wrote, “swimming underwater and therefore quite distorted … and the other was of a boy gazing at something on the ground; yet because of the way the photographs were lying, it looked as though he was gazing at the distorted figure. The idea of once again painting two figures in different styles appealed so much that I began the painting immediately.”6 Schlesinger is the subject of Portrait of an Artist, dressed in a pink jacket and looking down into a pool with an underwater swimmer in it. He painted the swimmer first, using the same thin acrylic wash technique that he had employed on Pool and Steps, Le Nid de Duc in order to emphasise wetness. He then, however, coated the rest of the canvas with gesso, the traditional mixture of glue, chalk and pigment used to prepare surfaces, which prevented his altering either the position of the pool or the figure, and immediately got him into difficulties. “The figures never related to one another,” he recalled, “nor to the background. I changed the setting constantly from distant mountains to a claustrophobic wall and back again to mountains. I even tried a glass wall.”7
He made occasional trips to Bradford and, though he never shared his unhappiness with his parents, was able to do things for them that took him temporarily out of himself. “David arrived at 11am,” wrote Laura on 5 October, “& we went to Leeds where we visited shops whilst David called at Leeds Art Gallery … then we went on to Harrogate. In Harrogate we bought gloves and a lovely suit for me (Ken’s choice) & some shirts and bow ties for Kenneth. What generosity & how I enjoyed shopping amongst beautiful things with no restraint—but most of all I love David’s kindness of heart—the pleasure he gets from giving I can understand as from what he gives me, I can now give to others.”8
On their return home she recorded: “David took several photo-graphs of Ken & I for a picture he is going to paint.”9 This is the first mention of Hockney’s intention to paint a portrait of his parents, an idea conceived while Laura had been in hospital, but which was not to come to fruition for another three years. These photographs were the basis for drawings he completed early in 1972, notably The Artist’s Father, 1972, which shows Kenneth slumped in the corner of a sofa, wearing a three-piece suit, a bow tie, and with a different watch on each wrist, a habit he had fallen into in case one of them might be wrong. He looks crumpled and ill at ease, quite in keeping with his character, in contrast to the two drawings of Laura, both titled The Artist’s Mother, in which she looks completely relaxed, her attention entirely focused on her son. Of these two, one in ink and the other in coloured crayon, the latter was worked into a small oil painting, Mother in a Wicker Chair, which remained unfinished.
When Mark Lancaster returned to London from Cadaqués in late October, he found Hockney deeply depressed. “David was completely heartbroken,” he recalls, “so I suggested to him that one way to deal with this was to do something he’d never done before, to go somewhere fabulous he’d never been and forget about everything. I said, ‘Why don’t you go to Japan?’ and he said, ‘That’s a good idea,’ and the next day he called me up and said, ‘Do you want to come with me?’ ” It is clear, however, from a postcard Hockney wrote to Henry Geldzahler a few days later that he was not yet ready to give up on Schlesinger. “I leave November 8 for Japan with Mark Lancaster. I think Peter and I will work it out by Christmas. I admire his stubbornness and love him very much so it [sic] must. I have been working very hard. Why don’t you come to London for Christmas … Give my regards to Broadway and all the boys on 42nd St.…”10
Lancaster jumped at the prospect of a trip to Japan, and joined Hockney in California a fortnight later, where he had been visiting Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy and pouring his heart out to them. “Peter and David both confided in us about the break-up of their relationship,” Bachardy remembers, “and we did our best. But what more can you do than give your ears? Peter was very determined. I don’t think he really understood what real artists are like, that they are obsessed by their work. David just didn’t pay enough attention to Peter. That is the truth, and in the end Peter was independent enough to say it wasn’t good enough. We were so sympathetic towards David, who was hurting so much more than Peter.”11 But Hockney was also secretly angry with Isherwood for having advised him to give his younger lover his wings, anger which he expressed in late-night calls to Jack Larson and Jim Bridges. “At a certain point,” Larson recalls, “David started phoning Jim and me late at night just weeping that Schlesinger had left him and he blamed the advice that Isherwood had given him. Isherwood said you could only have a long-term relationship with a younger man if you left them free to have affairs with other people. Otherwise you just couldn’t keep them.”12
“Mr. Whizz’s Tour” of Japan began in the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square, San Francisco, on 11 November, its first day commemorated with a pen-and-ink drawing of Lancaster asleep in his bed, a familiar subject for Hockney. He made hundreds of drawings of his friends sleeping, who often woke to the sound of the scratch of a pen nib on cartridge paper, or the whirr of the electric pencil sharpener. From San Francisco they flew to Honolulu for two days, staying in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki Beach, known as the Pink Palace, where the spirit of Peter Schlesinger caught up with them. “Mark had a shirt,” Hockney wrote, “exactly like one Peter had been wearing once when I’d drawn him; I didn’t know this until one morning I woke up and the shirt was lying on a chair, and I drew it, early in the morning.”13 This drawing later became the painting Chair and Shirt, another melancholy evocation of lost love.
Hockney’s initial impressions of Japan were not good. “Kenneth Clark was really right about Tokyo,” he wrote to Henry Geldzahler, “it makes Los Angeles look like Paris. After the first day and the excitement wears off, I realise what a mess it really is. When it was rebuilt after the war they forgot to plan parks in it, so apart from the Imperial Palace grounds, which no one can enter, there are no Parks in the centre of the city. The air is twice as bad as New York. People walk around wearing masks all the time. I’m assuming it’s to filter the air.”14 Nor was he impressed by the art he saw there, which he described as being like “Woody Alan’s [sic] versions of Japanese versions of Pop Art.”15
Their next stop, however, was the ancient imperial city of Kyoto, whose status as an artistic and cultural centre had meant that it had largely escaped bombing raids in the war, and its superb temples, parks and buildings had mostly survived. Hockney loved it, and immediately missed Schlesinger. “It’s very beautiful here,” he wrote to Geldzahler, “and I think because of that I miss Peter enormously. It’s knowing he would love it so that makes me a little depressed he’s not here. Also I’d love to suck his cock.”16 In another letter written on the same day, he told Ron Kitaj, “Mark is an enjoyable and intelligent travelling companion who likes what I do and of course shares an interest in seeking out the night life, but its [sic] not like travelling with Peter and I know its unfair of me to expect it to be, but I can’t help it really. It sure is the real thing I’ve got and I suppose if Peter stays away I’ll suffer for quite a long time …”17
In the Municipal Gallery of Kyoto, Hockney found some Japanese art that he really admired, in a show called Modern Painters in the Japanese Style, and was fascinated to find that all the artists were old men in their seventies. “There was a beautiful painting on silk,” he told Geldzahler, “called Osaka in the Rain, done in 1935. The nearest thing in my cogniscance [sic] was Dufy—but it was really a lot better than that.”18 As for the Japanese boys, “they are as exquisite as the Zen gardens. I have done a few drawings and taken eight hundred photographs … and really have been turned on so much that if I never left Powis Terrace for five years I’ve enough in my head to keep me going.”19
Staying at a hotel in Kobe two days later, Schlesinger telephoned at midnight, and there was a row when he reiterated that he had no intention of ever moving back into Powis Terrace. “He said he enjoyed living in his studio alone,” Hockney confided to Geldzahler, continuing, “I’m not sure what to do now … I must have some physical affection from him on my return or I must seek it elsewhere, and while I can’t abandon him, if I actually find someone to share things with, my loyalties I have for Peter for what he gave me will be transferred.” Seeking advice, he broached the subject of his difficulty in meeting Peter’s sexual needs. “The way I look at our problem is one of Peter’s lack of confidence and his apparent envy of mine. Yet he knows the truth about mine. I only have confidence about one thing—my work. Therefore I make it important to me. I really don’t have sexual confidence any more and I’m sure Peter knows that. That’s what makes me sad as I think he is using that knowledge in a cruel way … I am perfectly prepared to accept the differences between us as individuals, it seems to me he has the difficulty doing that. I am a gregarious Yorkshireman and he is a rather quiet Californian. Surely the two can be compatible if they like each other? Or should I have another gregarious Yorkshireman as a friend?”20
For Hockney, the highlight of this trip was Macau, the Portuguese colony south-west of Hong Kong. “Macau is divine,” he told Geldzahler. “You must go there … you’d love it. It’s a combination of the Orient and old crumbling faded Europe. Very very beautiful … We had lunch at the Bela Vista Hotel on the Verandah looking over the South China Sea. It was very romantic … and it made the food terrific. The set lunch was believe it or not written in English and was ‘Green Pea Soup with Croutons,’ a ‘Fish Cutlet,’ braised ox tongue with white sauce and for a moment I thought I was on British Railways going to Bradford, so we washed it down with Mateus Rose, to help the starving Portuguese.”21 They also attended an opera in the Macau casino, during which, he reported happily, “you can sit and have a Chinese lunch, walk about and smoke while it’s on—you can’t do that at the Met.”22
Their next stop was Bangkok, the highlight of which was a visit to a male brothel, even though “afterwards I did have terrible guilt about it—you know decadent westerners exploiting the natural beauty of a lovely country etc.”23 His guilt was not strong enough, however, to stop him returning on their last night in Bangkok. “We put on our new Hong Kong made white suits, went to the brothel, asked for two skilful boys and just sat and watched them do all their tricks. It was like a Francis Bacon painting—I must admit though I think it was genuinely decadent, as when we got up to rush to the airport the boys immediately stopped. Silly romantic me thinking they would ignore us and go on having fun.”24
The last port of call in the Far East was Burma, where they stayed in the Strand Hotel in Rangoon, a city that appealed to him because “unlike most cities of South East Asia it’s completely untouched by America, therefore full of crumbling colonial British buildings, most of them with the signs still on—Barclays Bank etc. Like most Communist countries all there was for sale in the shops was toilet rolls and crude soap. Nevertheless the Strand Hotel … seemed to ignore all this and everyone acted as though it was 1925. There was a fat lady pianist in the Palm Court with a rather seedy violinist alternating with a small swing orchestra. I loved it all.”25 Hockney depicted this scene in a drawing of Lancaster sitting in a chair in the very grand Palm Court, titled Mark, Strand Hotel, Rangoon 1971.
The original itinerary had been to fly from Burma to India, and from there to travel to Afghanistan, but this was cut short with the outbreak of war between India and Pakistan on 3 December so the intrepid travellers found themselves instead in Istanbul, which was bitterly cold, and finally in Rome. From here Hockney wrote to Geldzahler expressing his continuing indecision as to what he should do about Schlesinger. Celia Birtwell, in whom he was increasingly confiding, had advised him to forget Schlesinger, on the grounds that he was behaving in too cruel a fashion. “It saddens me,” he admitted, “but I think I’ll have to. I’ll just leave him completely alone and see what he does, although the moment he appears lost, I’ll possibly cave in as usual. He did write me a rather naive letter about how he’s not left me, although if he hasn’t I don’t know what it is he has done.”26
With hindsight it is easy to understand Peter’s apparent indecision. “I was being a little equivocal,” he recalls, “because I was trying to spare his feelings. I was twenty-three and muddled and all his friends were putting pressure on me, saying things like ‘How can you be so mean to him?’ and ‘You’re ruining his life’ and ‘You’re so cruel.’ ”27 For this reason he made the mistake of agreeing to meet Hockney on the day he returned, a reunion that did not go well. “I suppose it’s all over,” Hockney wrote to Geldzahler. “It is painful and I am unhappy as I’ve really had to tell him that I can’t really see him for a while, as it’s too difficult for me. You see I think it’s a bit unfair of him to welcome Eric with open arms and sex, and me with a rather nervous coldness. He then refuses to stay saying I was too stoned—having not smoked for five weeks, Ossie’s joint handed me at the airport had really made me high. Anyway Henry it’s too difficult if he won’t let me express my love in any way now, and so all I can do is try and forget and see how he feels in two or three months …”28
Hockney returned to London bearing two sketchbooks filled with drawings and a tight schedule ahead of him, as he had an upcoming show with André Emmerich in New York. “I must really get down to painting now,” he wrote, “as the show is in April and although I have Mo as an assistant I actually have to do the paintings myself, which do take some time, and I must begin my Japanese pictures.”29 Curiously the first of these, Mount Fuji and Flowers, a painting that uses the same stain technique as Pool and Steps, Le Nid de Duc, is a very romantic view of Japan, as far removed as one could imagine from a country in which, as he put it to Kitaj, there was “hardly a patch of land that could hold a factory that has not got one.”30 Considering he saw little of Mount Fuji and did no drawings of it, it is a fantasy, inspired by the traditional woodcuts of nineteenth-century Japanese artists such as Hokusai, its images sourced from a postcard and a Japanese flower-arrangement manual. Henry Geldzahler considered it “a very beautiful and perfect picture”31 and later bought it for the Metropolitan Museum.
A mark of Hockney’s ever increasing fame was his being asked to appear on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, whose deviser and presenter, Roy Plomley, interviewed well-known people and asked them to choose the eight records, plus one book and one luxury, they would take with them if forcibly stranded on a desert island. For Hockney, who had been brought up in a house in which the radio had played such an important part, and who was still an avid listener, painting and relaxing to the sound of the radio, it was incredibly exciting, and he made his appearance on 5 February 1972.
His choices, mainly classical, were spur of the moment, and would, he said, have been completely different had he made his choice on another day. He began with Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, not the orchestral version, but the Liszt transcription for the piano, played by Glenn Gould, because when he had first heard it at George Lawson’s house, it had made him laugh. This was followed by another piano piece, Erik Satie’s “La Belle Excentrique,” played by Aldo Ciccolini, which romps along in the manner of a piano rag. Then his favourite composer, Richard Wagner, made his first appearance, with the great German bass-baritone Theo Adam singing “Verachtet mir die Meister nicht,” an aria all about art from Die Meistersinger. Following this came a section from Les Biches by Francis Poulenc; then “San Francisco,” from the film of the same name, and sung by its star, Jeanette MacDonald. He chose it because “it’s about California and a very pretty song, and really I like it because it used to be sung by a marvellous drag queen in a bar … and he actually looked like her in the film and swung out into the bar on a swing—it was really terrific.”32
Record number six was the Monte Carlo Opera Orchestra playing the overture to Fedora, “a marvellous corny opera” by Umberto Giordano, which Hockney told Plomley he liked to play once a month while working. Then came Marilyn Monroe singing the “very affecting” “I’m Through with Love” from Some Like It Hot, while his final choice was back to Wagner with the “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde, which he described as being “almost the same thing … it’s just high art form,” and which he picked as the record he would take with him if allowed only one out of his eight choices. Not surprisingly, his luxury turned out to be “some paper and some pencils and a battery-operated pencil sharpener,” while his book, to accompany the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, was a pornographic novel, Route 69 by Floyd Carter, author of such titles as Battle of the Bulges, Big Joe, Camp Butch and Forbidden Fruit. He chose it to stop himself fantasising too much. “I think it was written in a back room on 42nd Street,” he said, “and it’s full of bad grammar and spelling mistakes, but quite touching in its way, and it covers a great number of interesting things.”33 Not surprisingly, his mother was slightly perplexed by this choice. “Listened again today at the usual time,” she wrote, “—his choice of book to take was most unusual—was he joking—just one of his ‘cheerfully disrespectful’ idioms … I love him very much. I know he loves the life he lives and is very lucky to be able to do as he pleases & thereby earn a living.”34
After this brief distraction, he was back in the studio with Portrait of an Artist, with which he was still struggling. ‘The longer you work on a painting,” he wrote, “the more you’re loath to abandon it, because you think throwing away six months is terrible. So I struggled on and on and fiddled on with it, realizing it didn’t work, couldn’t work … it was the angle of the pool which was causing me all the problems. I couldn’t alter the water section and it was impossible to adjust it, so I decided to repaint the picture completely.”35 He also took the decision to destroy the first version of the picture, so it would be out of his mind, but, because parts of it were well painted, he cut the canvas up very carefully, removing one portion depicting a plant growing from the edge of the pool, which he later framed and gave to the Clarks as a late wedding present.
By the time he had made up his mind to start the picture again, it was late March and the Emmerich exhibition was due to open in May. Even though Kasmin told him he was mad, Hockney was confident he could repaint it in two weeks, since he knew what he had done wrong and how to make it right second time around. In need of more references to work from, he decided to make a trip down to Le Nid de Duc. He was, however, unable to ask Schlesinger to accompany him because, unbeknown to him, he had flown out to California with Jack Hazan, who had persuaded him to film some swimming pool sequences for his movie. Instead he took Mo McDermott as his stand-in, along with the pink jacket Schlesinger was wearing in the picture, and a young photographer, John St. Clair, to be the underwater swimmer.
They spent several days at Le Nid de Duc, where Hockney posed McDermott by the edge of the pool and St. Clair swam back and forth beneath the surface for hours on end. “To get different kinds of distortion in the water,” he wrote, “I had John swim underwater in different light conditions … and with different water surfaces … and I had Mo gazing at him with the shadows in differing positions.”36 While this was going on he took hundreds of photographs using a brand-new Pentax Spotmatic II, a fully automatic camera that allowed him to shoot much more quickly and get much better exposures. On their return to London they took the film straight from the airport to a processing lab in north London so that it would be developed within twenty-four hours. With the exhibition due to open in New York in a few weeks, time was running out.
Somewhat ironically, Jack Hazan, whom Hockney had been trying to avoid for so long, contributed to helping him finish on time. At the beginning of 1972, feeling a little guilty about France the previous summer, Hockney had tentatively allowed him to do some more filming, capturing him painting in his studio, as well as in conversation with Henry Geldzahler, Patrick Procktor, Celia Birtwell and Joe MacDonald, a young male model from New York. When Hazan, who had witnessed the destruction of the original, heard that he was going to repaint the portrait, he asked if he could film it. “I said Oh my God, no,” Hockney recalled, “I’m really going to work eighteen hours a day on this with Mo. Mo’s going to do all the spraying to keep the paint wet. The last thing I want is somebody interfering.”37 Hazan’s solution to this was, in return for occasional access to film, to offer to lend him a set of daylight lights for a fortnight, which would enable him to work in the right lighting conditions at night as well as during the day. “And I agreed,” said Hockney, “just so that I could have the lights and work night and day … painting it only took about two weeks, but every single day I think we worked eighteen hours on it.”38
Schlesinger returned from LA just in time to agree to pose for some photographs for Hockney, who was having difficulty because all the shots he had were of Mo, while any drawings of Schlesinger were done for the previous version of the painting. “I had to do it in the same light as the south of France,” Hockney wrote. “Of course London, which is farther north, does not have the same light. Capturing the shadows the right way, trying to recreate the same light, meant going out early in the day. I photographed Peter in Hyde Park on an early Sunday morning.”39 The image he actually used to paint the figure was one of his earliest composite photographs, in which a number of the images were glued together in order to provide more detailed information than could be obtained from the enlargement of one negative. The first one, taken in Paris in 1969, had been a jokey image of Hockney and Schlesinger seated on a park bench, in which they had each taken a shot of the other and pieced the two prints together. These composite photographs, which were later to gain in complexity and become a major part of Hockney’s work, were initially fairly simple and were often used to deal with architectural subjects on his travels, where he was having a problem with perspective. “I did try using a wide-angle lens,” he told Marco Livingstone, “but I didn’t like it much. Its distortions were extremely unnatural … I thought, ‘Why don’t you just take many and glue them together?’ It would be more like the real thing than a wide-angle lens which makes the verticals go this way and that way … I don’t like distortion in photography.”40 But they were also used for portrait subjects, such as in a sitting he did with Rudolf Nureyev in November 1970, at his house in Richmond.
Portrait of an Artist was completed just in time to be sent to New York for the exhibition. “I varnished it,” wrote Hockney, “… and the next morning we got up at six o’clock to begin rolling it. At eight-thirty the men came to collect it to send it off on a plane to New York, and it got there just in time … I must admit I loved working on that picture, working with such intensity; it was marvellous doing it, really thrilling.”41 Though the finished work is an impressive painting by any standard, it was also of great importance both to Hockney as an expression of his loss and to Schlesinger as a measure of self-esteem. “In titling the painting Portrait of an Artist,” Henry Geldzahler commented, “David is giving Peter his birthright, his mess of pottage—he’s calling him an artist. It’s very difficult to have your progeny learn to fly. And I think for David this is a very important painting psychologically because it gives Peter dignity, allowing him to be the artist that he is …”42
In gratitude for all his hard work, Hockney took Mo McDermott to New York with him for the opening at André Emmerich. They stayed with Geldzahler on 7th Avenue, where Hockney did a coloured crayon drawing of his host sitting in an armchair, wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt and smoking one of his trademark cigars. Geldzahler told him afterwards that it was the best drawing ever done of him. At the time he was involved in raising money for the Phoenix House Project, a non-profit organisation that aimed to provide help for the victims of drug and alcohol abuse, and had asked various artists such as Joseph Cornell, Jim Rosenquist, Adolph Gottlieb and Alex Katz to provide an original work of art for him to sell on behalf of the charity. When Hockney offered another portrait, Geldzahler recalled telling him, “ ‘You really can’t because I am fund-raising for them. It would look a little funny.’ So he said, ‘Well,’ and just sat down with an etching plate and in about an hour, he did my jacket, my hat, my pipe and my iced coffee. I like that print because it’s a portrait of a subject with the subject missing.”43 It was this etching, Panama Hat, which Hockney gave to him to sell.
The exhibition, David Hockney: Paintings and Drawings, opened on 13 May with French Shop, painted in September 1971, on the cover of the catalogue. It was taken from a photograph of a grocer’s shop in the French spa town of Miers, “one of those little French towns,” wrote Hockney, “where, occasionally, when they build a shop, they try and blend it in with the old ones. Its architecture seemed so simple that it could almost have been erected by a builder, not an architect … this little building had a purity that I found very attractive.”44 The show also included Pool and Steps, Le Nid de Duc, Chair and Shirt, Still Life on a Glass Table, The Island and Sur la Terrasse, but its star was undoubtedly Portrait of an Artist. The circumstances of its sale, however, caused Hockney some grief.
Kasmin did his utmost to try and prevent Hockney’s work falling into the hands of speculators, and had already warned André Emmerich about this. Hockney was happy that the Philadelphia Museum had shown an interest in Portrait of an Artist. Unfortunately, while they were biding their time coming to a decision, a man walked in off the street, an American, apparently with money to spend, who gave the impression that he was a friend of Hockney’s and who seemed to know the painting well. Assuming him to be bona fide, Emmerich agreed to sell him the picture, the most expensive in the show, for $18,000. Within a few months the painting was with a London dealer, who took it to an art fair in Germany, and it ended up being sold to a London collector for nearly three times its New York price. When Hockney found out he was very upset. “The guy had been sent by some dealers in London to buy the picture tricking both André and myself,” he recalled. “Within a year people had made far more on that picture than either Kasmin, André or I had. Considering the effort and trouble and everything that had gone into it, it seemed such a cheap thing to do …”45
It was not the money that was at the heart of Hockney’s annoyance about the fate of this painting, but the fact that he had put the better part of six months of both his emotional and working life into it only to find it whisked away from under him. Though money took away the stress of having to churn out work in order to survive, it had never been that important to him, other than as a means of paying for materials, giving him freedom to travel anywhere and allowing him to go to a restaurant without worrying about how he was going to pay the bill. He called himself “restaurant rich.” “If you’re an artist,” he wrote, “the one thing you can do when you get money is use it to do what you want in art. That’s the only good thing you can ever do for yourself. As an artist, what do you need to live on? As long as you’ve got a studio and a place to work in, all you’re going to do is paint pictures all day long.”46
On his return to England after the Emmerich show, Hockney had two portraits in mind. The first was another double portrait, of his old friends George Lawson and Wayne Sleep. Since Sleep was a dancer and Lawson played the clavichord beautifully, it seemed obvious to give the painting a musical setting. After making a number of drawings and taking numerous photographs, he decided to pose them in George’s tiny mews house in Wigmore Place, with Lawson at the clavichord and Sleep standing in the doorway listening to him playing. “The pose was interesting,” Lawson recalls. “Wayne was looking at me at the keyboard, standing and listening. I think it was a nice conceit that he had a ballet dancer not moving just listening. I wanted the painting to be called ‘A Flat,’ because I was actually playing the note A flat.”47
From the very start, however, Hockney struggled with this painting, becoming increasingly obsessed with making it more and more naturalistic. “Six months I worked on it,” he wrote, “altering it, repainting it many times … I kept taking photographs, thinking it was finished myself, and then deciding it’s not right, no, that’s not right. I drove Mo mad. He thought it was wonderful at times, and then he’d think, oh my God, he’s at it again … Looking back now, I can see that the struggle was about naturalism …”48 At one point he made a cut-out of George which he took to his studio to help him decide the placement of the figure. “I would draw on it and cut it and move it about on the painting, then draw it back in.”49
To distract himself from these problems, he began to prepare for the other painting he was considering, a portrait of himself with his parents, which Henry Geldzahler had suggested. “I said that it would be very important for him to know how he felt in relation to his parents,” he wrote, “and how he felt they feel about each other. ‘Get all three of you into a painting,’ I said. ‘You are going to have to do some very hard thinking in visual terms.’ ”50 On 1 July he drove up to Bradford. “Today David is coming,” noted Laura, “& hopes to take photographs for a large picture he is going to paint.”51 Unfortunately he arrived home to find his father “writhing and groaning” on the floor, after an apparent diabetic fit. He was rushed into St. Luke’s Hospital, where the doctors thought it was possible he might have suffered some kind of stroke. When he eventually came round, dazed but able to recognise the family, Hockney took a photograph of his bedside table, complete with vase of flowers, water jug and tumbler, an invitation to the Emmerich exhibition, and a small plastic box bearing the legend “BEST DENTURES.”
Kenneth spent two weeks in St. Luke’s recovering from what turned out to be a condition related to his diabetes, so the preliminary work on the new portrait was postponed till Hockney returned to Bradford at the beginning of August, after two weeks with Henry Geldzahler in Corsica. “David arrived at 12 noon,” Laura wrote on 2 August. “I was showered with gifts … I had no flowers—so David went off to get some—(he wants some in the picture) & returned with two dozen carnations white & pink & 8 gladioli. Oh! They are so gorgeous—the roses in my garden (after the rain) would not have supplied such an array. We cleared up while he was out so room was ready. He preferred back room & took many photographs, and both of us sat for drawings.”52 Further sittings took place in London ten days later, when Laura noted: “I feel so tired when ‘sitting’ for David—he must find it difficult & I do not feel at my best.”53
In the latter half of 1972, Hockney had another concern: Kasmin was pressuring him to produce enough pictures for a show in December. Jack Hazan had filmed Kasmin for his documentary ringing Hockney from the gallery to complain that he had a queue of people wanting paintings and nothing to offer them. Though this scene was entirely invented, with Kasmin talking into thin air, it reflected the truth. The ongoing problem was that as Hockney had become more successful, there was less need for him to churn out pictures, and he had the luxury of being able to spend more time on individual pictures. “In the past the only reason I didn’t was that I couldn’t,” he wrote. “As an artist who was earning his living by painting I needed the money. The pictures were cheap. I had to do a few … just to keep going. There’s nothing wrong with deciding that, since the pictures cost so much, you only need to paint ten a year to keep yourself going … I work it out and think, I don’t need to paint more than this unless I want to.”54
The upcoming show was of particular importance to Kasmin and Sheridan Dufferin as it was to be the last show at their gallery. They had taken the decision to close for a variety of reasons, not least because the lease had only two more years to run and there were plans to redevelop the whole section of Bond Street in which it was situated. Deep recession was looming in America, the most severe since the end of the Second World War, and they were fearful of a global financial crisis. “At the same time,” Kasmin remembers, “Sheridan’s interests were beginning to move elsewhere. He was taking more of an interest in British sporting pictures, and Indian miniatures, and was buying pictures of India by Daniell and other English artists. I was also not having a happy time personally and I was running out of steam.”55 To tide them over they took out a lease on new premises in Clifford Street, further down Bond Street.
What made it even more important that Hockney should finish the double portrait of George Lawson and Wayne Sleep in time for this show was that he had relatively little other work to offer, apart from his Japanese paintings, and one or two from his travels in Europe. “We both thought the picture would be ready,” he recalled. “It looked as though it was finished in October … but I struggled on and on, and in the end I wouldn’t let him show it. I said, ‘No, I can’t, because it’s not right.’ ”56 This was disappointing, not just for Kasmin but for McDermott, who had been so encouraging, and for Sleep and Lawson, who had given up so much time to pose for it. “It didn’t get finished,” Lawson remembers, “and my belief is it was because Wayne and I were getting on terribly well, and Hockney had broken up with Peter, and I think his inability to complete the picture reflected what he was thinking, and that was, how annoying it was that he had, in his mind, introduced us, and there we were having a nice time and he wasn’t. He said there were problems with the vanishing point or something like that, but I think that the real reason was an emotional thing. It’s a pity because if he had been able to paint listening, I think it would have been wonderful.”57
Without George Lawson and Wayne Sleep, Kasmin’s final exhibition, which opened on 11 December, was a bit of a damp squib, with a smattering of small canvases, including the Japanese paintings, Mount Fuji and Japanese Rain on Canvas, which were outnumbered by drawings from his travels, together with various studies of Schlesinger, Birtwell and his parents. “By comparison with the one in New York,” Hockney commented, “this looked rather a wishy-washy show, really. I wouldn’t normally have shown small pictures like that, without showing a big painting as well.”58 The critics were largely unimpressed, Guy Brett’s review in The Times being typical. He referred to Hockney’s “refined technique,” which he, “to judge from his new exhibition at Kasmin, has been exercising … without much to say. In his new paintings he continues with his liking for commenting on the strategies and stage-craft of other artists past and present, but they lack his customary edge. It is left to the drawings to fill us in with Hockney’s meandering itinerary from hotel to swimming-pool in the company of his friends.”59 Though the reviews were unmemorable, an unfitting end to a relationship with a remarkable gallery, the gallery itself went out with a bang. “After the gallery closed,” Kasmin recalls, “we all went to a great big dinner-dance at the Savoy, all the artists worldwide that Sheridan and I represented, the whole lot. It marked the closing of the gallery and made an event of it.”60
At the beginning of 1973, feeling tired and not a little depressed, Hockney decided to spend some time in California, where he was sure the sunshine and the boys would give him a much needed shot in the arm. He planned to create a new series of works on the theme of weather, which would reunite him with Ken Tyler and Sid Felsen at Gemini. He settled into the Chateau Marmont and was soon writing to Ron Kitaj, “California has been very pleasant so far. I should have come here 6 months ago. I’m sure it’s partly because I’m working in a new environment and a new medium but I’m enjoying it enormously … I haven’t taken Valium since I’ve been here and the temptations of grass have only occurred twice. I arrive at Gemini at 8:00 a.m. much to the surprise of the printers who tell me that the artists don’t usually show up till 11 … Ken is such a good printer. It’s terrific getting into complicated lithography again. There’s no one in London can print like him. Every little thing I put on a stone really appears. I’ve almost completed the first four. Rain, Mist, Sun and Lightening [sic], and hope to do four more—Snow, Frost, Wind and a Rainbow … I feel quite marvellous and in excellent health. Early bed is doing wonders for my energy.”61
At the beginning of February he rented a beach house in Malibu belonging to the actor Lee Marvin, and Celia Birtwell came out to visit him with her two boys, Albert, aged three and a half, who was nicknamed “Chappie,” and George, aged one and a half, and a nanny. “Living with two chicks and two brats is not what you’re used to,” she told him, “but don’t worry.”62 In the past six months, she had become very close to Hockney, partly because of her link to Schlesinger and partly by their mutual unhappiness. Clark was at the height of his fame, his clothes all the rage not just in London, but in Paris and New York. Celebrity had gone to his head, however, and his constant desire to party with the jet set, his affairs with both men and women, combined with his massive intake of drugs, had put enormous strain on his marriage. “We had some really nice times very early on,” Celia recalls, “but then as he became more famous he lost the plot. I think he felt he could get away with having his own life, and having me in the background, planted there as a homebody, keeping it all together. I was quite prepared to do that, but not on those terms. Sometimes he would come back for two days, bringing a friend so I couldn’t shout at him, probably some gorgeous woman who he knew I would like, and playing those sorts of games. It was a nightmare really.”63
Birtwell’s gentle feminine side strongly appealed to Hockney, and when he saw that she was hurting emotionally just as badly as him, he opened up to her, finding at last the perfect shoulder to cry on. “I think he found we spoke the same language about his unhappiness and his broken heart,” she says, “so he used me as his confidante.”64 As they licked each other’s wounds, he began to transfer all the feelings he had felt towards Schlesinger onto her. Having her with him in California made him begin to feel calm. “… I’m getting used to life here,” he told Kitaj. “At first it was very strange but Celia was so marvellous. She understood my moods and why I seemed so distant. She likes it here, although I think it’s mainly the change, and the fact that she hasn’t cried for a month … I think I’m better off staying out of England for a while. I think of Peter of course … and I have received a few letters from him, but I just don’t want to return to that lingering pain, and staying here with Celia is finally getting rid of it.”65
It was close to being a happy time for him. He immersed himself in the work, revelling in the technical difficulties involved in the creation of the weather lithographs, which were to be a follow-up to The Hollywood Collection he had previously produced for Gemini. These were entirely inspired by prints of the weather he had seen in Japan and were to prove a welcome break from the constraints of naturalism he had been experiencing in his portrait work. The resulting prints are both playful and clever. Of the six in the series, Snow is the one most obviously based on Japanese woodcuts, Rain the most abstract, memorably depicting the experience of rain by using highly diluted lithographic ink which literally runs off the page, while Wind has the wit, depicting four of the prints being blown through the air past a street sign for Melrose Avenue. One just knows that the artist had fun making them. Hockney also immortalised Ken Tyler in a full-length lithograph, which in tribute he titled The Master Printer of Los Angeles.
At the end of each day he drove the forty miles back to Malibu to enjoy a semblance of family life with Celia, Albert and George, whom he was teaching to walk. “That’s when I really got to know Celia,” Hockney remembers. “She is very, very sympathetic and she knows how to make me laugh. She plays with words, which I like, and she has a sense of the absurd. We got very close and I suppose I was in love with her.”66 It was a love that was never physically consummated. “He slept in the same bed as me a few times,” Birtwell says, “but it was just cuddling like friends. I think David was very frightened physically, and I don’t think it was easy for him to have a physical relationship. You can’t be closer than being in bed with somebody, but he was very shy with me like that, and nothing was ever said. Then Ossie came down like a bloody boomerang and ruined the whole thing.”67
Hockney too blamed it all on Clark. “I did consider having a physical relationship with her in California,” he says, “but then Ossie turned up with a massive amount of drugs and got her to go off to Palm Springs for a weekend with the children, and he told me to stay behind.”68 It is a version of events he shared with Ron Kitaj, writing that he was “snuggling up to Celia” and “Ossie must have judged the time this would take and arrived to break it up. At first I didn’t know what to do so I retreated and took up my usual position of observer, but living with them closely I see what Celia really has to put up with. The experience has made me much closer to Celia, and further away from Ossie. I confess I don’t really understand him, but he really is terrible to her …”69
Clark had been offered a free flight back to New York on board the private jet of Ahmet Ertegun, the president of Atlantic Records, and insisted that Birtwell and the children fly with him. Hockney turned down the opportunity to travel with them, and chose instead to leave Malibu for LA, where he spent some time with Nick Wilder, now his official dealer in California. In 1970 Nick had moved his gallery from La Cienega Boulevard to Santa Monica, into the then rather seamy area between La Cienega and North Robertson, which was known as Boys Town, because of the largely gay community that resided there. The move fitted the “bad boy” image he had cultivated in the late sixties when he had participated wildly in the sex and drugs scene after losing a handsome lover, a ranked tennis pro, to suicide. “I ran around a lot after that to fight off depression,” he recalled. “I went to the bars and the clubs … no orgies, just a different partner every couple of weeks or months. I was living such a fly-now-pay-later existence nobody wanted to be my boyfriend … I never thought of myself as promiscuous because all the while I was looking for Mister Right.”70
By the time Hockney was visiting in 1973, Wilder had long since found his “Mr. Right” in the person of Gregory Evans, a boy some twelve years his junior who had been born and brought up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and had run away from home in 1967, at the age of fifteen, to become a hippy in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. “I ran away from a typical middle-class American upbringing,” Evans remembers. “I was attracted to San Francisco—1967 was the Summer of Love, and I just knew that I belonged there. I fell into sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll and living in communes.”71 He went to LA three years later with some friends of his who were performing in the musical Hair, and eventually met Nick Wilder and began to hang out at his gallery. Within a month of their meeting they became lovers. “Nicholas was totally unique and passionate about art,” Evans says. “He liked to talk about it, to explain to you exactly what he did love about pictures and what he thought made pictures good. I liked that. And he made me feel liked. He was very engaging and he liked being with you and he made you feel that. He was also extremely funny with a sharp wit. He knew all the jokes, all the nasty jokes. I always had a sense of humour, and water seeks its own level.”72
Gregory Evans was already friends with Peter Schlesinger, whom he had met with Wilder in LA in the summer of 1970, and he had first met Hockney in 1971 when he and Wilder had been passing through London and had briefly stayed in Powis Terrace. Now he had the opportunity to get to know him better. “Nicholas had The Hollywood Collection of prints in storage in the gallery, and I remember him showing them to me and I knew they were unique. But that’s all I knew about David. I didn’t know any of the other work. He was very successful, but he was always friendly, and loved talking about himself and what he was doing and this is the enthusiasm he’s maintained for ever.”73 Hockney was likewise attracted to this handsome young boy with a wry sense of humour, and being intrigued by the relationship between him and Nick, considered painting their portrait.
Gregory Evans and Nicholas Wilder, Appian Way, Hollywood, 1973 (illustration credit 11.2)
At the turn of 1973, Wilder and Evans were living in a house in the Hollywood Hills on Appian Way, and Hockney executed a number of drawings and photographs of them there. “What attracted me in this Hollywood house,” he recalled, “was the window, like a big aquarium—it looks wonderfully exotic to an English person.”74 Sadly the painting was never realised, which at the time Hockney put down to the same problems with naturalism he had experienced with the portrait of George Lawson and Wayne Sleep. He did, however, create a “joiner” out of six photographic prints that gives an idea of what the double portrait might have been like, showing them in their living room, with Wilder seated and Evans standing by the picture window.
To escape both from Schlesinger, whom he was still missing dreadfully, and from the dramas surrounding the Clarks, he came to the decision to spend some time in Paris. “I began to think of Peter,” he wrote to Kitaj on 1 April, “and so I have written to him telling him that the real reason I’m going to go to Paris is that I really don’t want to see him. I realize I must make an effort and try and get the last bit of that affair out of my head …”75 He also saw it as an opportunity to regroup. “I was in a state of confusion and I felt I had to get away from London … I had been struggling with the paintings, like the one of George Lawson and Wayne Sleep … There was something wrong in what I was doing and I had to find out what it was and I needed peace and quiet. It was always hard to get peace and quiet in London. There were always people asking, would you do this, would you talk on that, would you do a television programme, would you do the other?”76
He left California a week later, on 8 April, a day that was to be etched into his memory for the rest of his life. En route to visit the famous French film director Jean Renoir, the news came on the car radio that Pablo Picasso had died. This came as a terrible shock to Hockney, who had thought of Picasso as invincible, the immensely powerful life force that he was. It was the first time Hockney had felt the loss of someone he deeply respected, but when he arrived at Renoir’s house and broke the news, the elderly Frenchman merely commented, “What an un-Picasso thing to do.”77 For Hockney, however, as his closest friend Henry Geldzahler noted, it represented “loss of innocence, the realization of death’s inevitability.”78