Artist and Model, 1973–74 (illustration credit 12.1)
When Hockney visited Bradford on his return to England, his mother found him “rather quieter than usual somehow—tho’ I don’t know where or why.”1 He had got back to London to find that most of his friends were out of town, and he didn’t have Celia Birtwell to talk to as she had her parents staying. Only Mo McDermott was left, who had just moved into the renovated basement of Powis Terrace, but he immediately brought back memories of Peter. “The basement is almost finished,” Hockney told Henry Geldzahler, “and is quite beautiful. Mo is quite delighted, although he tells me Peter is very jealous. I must admit—rereading what happened to poor Emma Bovary made me think of him a little—or is that very unFreudian of me?”2 Hockney’s decision to escape to Paris made sense in light of the fact that, as he also told Geldzahler, “I do notice … a strange feeling, and I’m almost ready to reach for the Valium again.”3
Before he left, he ran into Peter Schlesinger in London, a meeting that helped clarify his feelings. “I did see Peter for about an hour,” he wrote, “but there is so much bitterness between us still, that I think it’s best to forget him for a year or two.”4 In addition to seeing it as a convenient haven, Hockney had another good reason to visit Paris. For some time, the Berlin publisher Propyläen Verlag had been encouraging him to produce a print for a portfolio called Homage to Picasso, in which seventy artists had been asked for their own tribute to Picasso. Though it was never intended to be published posthumously, the artist’s death was the catalyst that finally persuaded Hockney to agree. The only person he wanted to work with was the man who had been Picasso’s etching printer for twenty years: Paris-based Aldo Crommelynck.
Artist and Model, 1973–74 (illustration credit 12.1)
Crommelynck was a mesmerising figure—tall and gaunt, with long spindly fingers usually stained with ink and nicotine. Apprenticed at seventeen to the French printmaker Roger Lacourière, he worked not only with Picasso, but with other great artists such as Léger, Miró and Matisse, and he soon emerged as the principal creative force in the studio. With his brother Piero, he opened his own atelier in Montparnasse in 1955, attracting major talent such as Le Corbusier, Giacometti and, notably, Braque, and when in 1963 he heard that Picasso needed a printmaker close to where he lived, he established a studio in a former bakery in Mougins and began a partnership that was to last until the artist’s death. During these ten years Picasso produced some 750 intaglio plates, including the notorious “Series 347,” an edition of largely erotic etchings showing Raphael and Rembrandt painting and coupling with their models, which, in 1968, the Art Institute of Chicago deemed “unfit for public consumption.” After Picasso’s death the brothers returned to Paris and opened a studio on the Left Bank, in the Rue de Grenelle.
Hockney used to joke to his friends, “I can now afford a garret in Paris,”5 and, if it didn’t exactly fit the description, the apartment he moved into at the beginning of May, borrowed from an artist friend, was both tiny and uncomfortable: he described it as “pretty horrible—not even a chair to sit and read in.”6 To make himself feel at home, he began a small painting of his mother in oil paint. “Mo says he loves the smell,” he commented. “So do I.”7 He loved these first few months working with Crommelynck who, though they had never met, already knew about his work from Richard Hamilton, another of his clients. “It was thrilling,” Hockney recalls, “to meet somebody who’d had such direct contact with Picasso and worked with him such a lot. He taught me marvellous technical things about etching.”8 One of the things that Hockney so admired about Picasso, and could identify with, was the fact that he made all his own prints in the traditional way, working on the plates himself, scratching, cutting, chipping or whatever was required.
He threw himself into his studies with the great printer, who taught him how to master two important techniques. The first was the “sugar lift,” an established process using a saturated sugar solution mixed with poster paint that allows the artist to paint what he wants to etch directly onto the plate, just as he would onto canvas. Once the sugar has dried, a very thin layer of acid-resistant varnish is painted over the plate. The plate is then put into a bath of warm water and, once in the bath, the sugar begins to dissolve, eventually pulling completely away from the plate to leave an open area that can be aquatinted, etched and printed. It was a technique that Hockney knew, but had struggled with. “Every time I’d tried it in London,” he wrote, “I’d had to chip the varnish away and the sugar didn’t come off. Or, if it came off, it lifted off lots of other varnish as well.”9 When he had finally mastered this process, he couldn’t wait to tell Maurice Payne, who already knew it well, and in his excitement he made a picture to demonstrate what he had learned, Showing Maurice the Sugar Lift. “Maurice at first was a bit offended by the title, because he said, ‘People’ll think I don’t know about sugar lift.’ I said, ‘Nobody knows what sugar lift is.’ And I explained, ‘Look, Maurice, it sounds like the name of a song: Showing Maurice the sugar lift, cha, cha, cha.’ ”10
More important still was that Crommelynck taught him to do coloured etching, using a method that he had invented himself which allowed the artist to draw from life in colour on one plate, dispensing with different plates to register the colours. “This was very, very ingenious,” says Hockney. “Before this method, the trouble was that it was impossible to be spontaneous with etching if you were using colour. You had to plan things very carefully, but this allowed spontaneity. I was quite thrilled with it.”11 So excited was he when Crommelynck first told him about this technique that he immediately dropped the portrait of Gustave Flaubert he was working on, and insisted they try it out that very afternoon. The result was the Picassoesque Simplified Faces, a series of four heads created entirely from geometric elements. Other prints followed, including two of windows in the Louvre, and, later, a portrait of Gregory Evans in red checked shirt and blue jeans. This was done in London when he was hungover after a night out and was drawn straight from life. With his tousled hair and far-away look, it captured exactly how he must have been feeling. “People are always amazed when they see the prints,” Hockney commented, “and are very surprised they’re etchings; they think they’re lithographs and all kinds of things.”12 Picasso himself never actually tried out the technique, which was invented just before he died, making Hockney the first artist to make serious use of it, a source of pride for both him and Crommelynck. Hockney recalled, “He said to me after I’d been there a while and we got to know each other, ‘It’s a pity you didn’t come earlier, you’d have really liked Pablo … and he’d have really liked you.’ ”13
After a few nights in his uncomfortable apartment, Hockney moved into the Hôtel Nice et Beaux Arts in the Rue des Beaux Arts, a short walk from Crommelynck’s studio. He wrote to Henry Gelzahler, “I’m sat in a small room looking at the roofs of Paris … I have started work on two etchings—homage à Picasso … The exhibition opens in Berlin on July 15, so as usual I should just get them done in time … Paris is lovely and peaceful, after London that is. It just gets so emotionally hectic for me there.”14 Picasso would surely have been charmed by these etchings had he lived to see them. The first, titled The Student—Homage to Picasso, shows an older, rather professorial version of Hockney carrying a large portfolio of his work, smartly dressed in jacket, spotted bow tie and broad-brimmed hat and seeking the approval of a much younger-looking Picasso, depicted as a head perched on top of a column, at the age he might have been when he was being lionised as the inventor of cubism. It is a throwback to Hockney’s earlier works that were drawn entirely from his imagination, and were the first sign of an attempt to move away from naturalism.
The second etching, Artist and Model, even echoes Myself and My Heroes, the 1961 etching in which Hockney portrayed himself admiring Gandhi and Walt Whitman, in this case Picasso being the figure of hero worship. It is a touching image in which he sits naked before the maestro’s piercing gaze, his nudity defining him not as a fellow artist but as a model and innocent disciple who lays no claims to his greatness. “We are witness to a meeting of apprentice and master,” Geldzahler pointed out, “the innocent and uncorrupted showing his work to the great artist of the century.” He went on to comment that the special joy of the etching for him was “the intrusive palm tree that pridefully bursts forth on a line directly above the young man’s genitalia, masked as they are by the table.”15 Hockney pooh-poohed this as being another example of Henry’s obsession with Freud.
For some time, Geldzahler had been toying with the idea of doing a book on Hockney, a project with which the artist was fully prepared to cooperate, and for the purpose of which he had rented Casa Santini, Mario Amaya’s Italian villa outside Lucca, for the summer. “Mario’s house is definitely OK for August,” Hockney wrote, “and I have been to see Phaidon about the book. I think you might be able to get some expenses for the summer immediately.”16 The idea was that they should hole up together for a few weeks and thrash out the form the book would take. It was suggested that Henry should fly to Paris, and they could then leisurely drive to Italy, stopping off for a few days at the Grand Hotel, Vittel, to get them healthy and in a working mood. He asked Geldzahler to find out from Mario “a. how to get to the house from Lucca. b. Is there a telephone. c. Is there a record player (I know they have real opera in Italy, but a bit of music would not be amiss, would it?) etc. etc. etc.”17 He ended the letter saying that Kasmin had broached the subject of royalties, adding, “I told him I didn’t care what my share was, as I don’t make my living from books, so I’m sure whatever you suggest will be O.K.”18
They arrived in Italy at the beginning of August, and were soon settled into the villa, a lovely old Italian farmhouse with a large covered terrace, from where Hockney wrote to his parents on 3 August, “It’s beautiful here, but rather remote (45 minutes drive to the nearest town) therefore very good for work. Every morning Henry and I write notes for the book and then in the afternoons I draw or read … It’s wonderful having no telephone (in London it seems to ring about 60 times a day) and the slight inconvenience we soon get used to. It also encourages letter writing …”19 Inside there was a living room furnished with huge yellow 1930s sofas and chairs and a cast-iron stove. There was also a shower, where Hockney one day took photographs of a visiting American friend, a young photographer called Don Crib. “It was a simple room, tiled, with no curtain,” he recalled. “I love showers. A shower is more ideal than a bath for showing off the body. The sight was beautiful with the figure and the water flowing.”20
Immersed in the peace and quiet, with not a hum to be heard, and only the occasional car horn to disturb the silence, Hockney felt the cares and tensions that had been assailing him slip away. “We write every morning on a terrace overlooking a pleasant valley,” he wrote to Kitaj, “a lady from the village comes and cleans (Henry) and makes us lunch, and the afternoons are spent drawing or reading. We usually go out in the evenings for dinner … Henry and I get on extremely well—no emotional hangups, which makes me feel calm and rested …”21 He enjoyed the writing, which he found easier than he had expected, telling his mother that it was “obviously a habit one can get into,”22 and completed a number of drawings. These included a charming study of his bedroom mirror, draped with scarves and bow ties, and a number of studies of Henry, usually engaged in his favourite pastimes of reading and smoking cigars.
For two weeks the days drifted by until their idyll was rudely interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Kasmin, who had fled in a hail of pots, pans and glasses from his holiday home near Carennac, after driving his wife, Jane, from whom he had separated, incandescent with rage by telling her that he had fallen in love with his new girlfriend, Linda Adams. He arrived exhausted after driving at speed with only one overnight stop at Arles, accompanied by two white-faced passengers, the architect and designer of the new Clifford Street Gallery, John Prizeman, and the rather eccentric figure of Eugene Lambe.
A striking-looking Irishman with a full red beard and more than a passing resemblance to Lytton Strachey, Lambe was the oldest of four brothers, the rest of whom were high-flyers in the British Army. He was the opposite, a vegan, who dressed entirely in canvas and cotton and wouldn’t wear leather in case it had come from a slaughtered animal. Immensely well read, he had abandoned a law degree to move in with George Lawson and Wayne Sleep, who were now living in Powis Gardens, in the capacity of both a friend and a gentleman’s gentleman. “He certainly used to do the laundry,” Lawson recalls, “and I would often find myself saying, ‘Lambe, Lambe, where are my shirts?’ Because he looked like a professor, we always called him Doctor Lambe, though the Doctor was a bit spurious. He had been at Trinity for ever and knew absolutely everybody and everybody knew him because he was so striking-looking.”23
Hockney was immediately intrigued by him, and made a fine drawing of him in coloured crayon, sitting on the terrace wearing a cotton smock and a wide-brimmed hat. “I watched him doing the big, finished drawing,” said John Prizeman, “sitting in front of Eugene, staring at him intently. He started at the top of the blank page, slowly filling in Eugene’s hat, and working down the page, like unrolling a curtain.”24 With their work interrupted, Geldzahler and Hockney felt compelled to entertain their guests, one day taking them for a swim at the magnificent Renaissance palazzo, Villa Reale, the home of the Pecci-Blunt family, one of whom, Camilla, was married to an LA art dealer, Earl McGrath, and photographed Hockney among the statuary and the group dancing on the lawns. Then, after Kasmin and the others had left, Hockney and Geldzahler visited another great villa, La Pietra, outside Florence, celebrated for its beautiful gardens and statues and the great collection of art and books it housed. It was home to the legendary aesthete and man of letters Harold Acton, the model for the character of Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. John Pope-Hennessy, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, took them, and Hockney wrote to Ron Kitaj: “The house and garden are so beautiful and I thought he was charm itself, and quite genuine … just the four of us had lunch in that enormous dining room … We had a pasta to start with and Henry was served first. He just couldn’t get it out of the dish properly and as I began to laugh, Henry said he felt like Charlie Chaplin. J P-H and Harold Acton politely tried to ignore it which made me laugh all the more as it made Henry really look like Charlie Chaplin …”25
By the end of the month, they were both ready to leave and get back to their normal lives, if with some trepidation. “The other evening we had been to Lucca for dinner,” Hockney told Kitaj, “and arrived back about 11:30. I made some tea and we sat ourselves on the porch in our regular seats. As Henry poured I fiddled with the radio to get the BBC World Service on the short wave. Henry then announced we had only six cigars left and I said we were like a couple of old rubber planters whose only worry was when the next shipment of tobacco would arrive. We laughed but it did seem true. I think Henry dreads the return to New York as much as I do to London.”26
Henry Geldzahler and David Hockney (illustration credit 12.2)
Hockney dreaded the old distractions, chief among which was the continuing soap opera of the lives of Clark and Birtwell. When Birtwell had returned to London in April, their relationship was at a low ebb, Clark’s recent behaviour having been less than satisfactory. “I flew back in Ahmet Ertegun’s private jet to New York,” Birtwell remembers, “and I got the most terrible, terrible backache in the plane. We arrived in New York and we stayed in a basement flat belonging to Henry Geldzahler, and Ossie immediately wanted to go off with Mick Jagger and Bianca and I was stuck in his basement flat with the babies … I was in terrible pain and I just couldn’t wait to get back to London. Ossie couldn’t care less and he whooshed off for three days to be with Mick and Bianca. By then I had had absolutely enough.”27
Clark saw things differently. On a whim, with the idea that it might save his marriage, he sold Kasmin the picture Hockney had given them for £7,000, and put a deposit on a large house in Cambridge Gardens, which he intended to do up as a family home. “I was quite hurt …” Hockney wrote to Henry Geldzahler. “I know he needed money very quickly for his house, but somehow it made me a little sick that my sentimental gesture had been turned so quickly into something else. Celia does not talk about the house. I think she has no plans to live in it. She says she would like to be alone for a while in Linden Gardens if only Ossie would leave. I don’t think he will, but I think the crunch is coming shortly.”28
Hockney did have a good reason to return home. Paul Hockney was now sitting as a Liberal councillor in Bradford and he was there-fore able to invite his parents to the city hall when, on 8 September, J. B. Priestley was made a freeman of the city. “All parties—Conservative, Labour & Liberal gave speeches of welcome,” wrote Laura in her diary. “Paul represented his party (alone) & was very funny & very good—we are very proud of him.” There was more, she recorded: “J.B.P is to have a portrait done by David commissioned by the Corporation.”29
When originally approached with this commission by John Thompson, the director of Bradford City Art Gallery, Hockney had once again been extremely reluctant to agree. Thompson had then asked Paul to act as intermediary, making it difficult for him to say no. The result was a compromise. Hockney would agree to a drawing, but not a painting. “We thought it would be good,” Thompson told the Times correspondent, “if Bradford’s most famous artist could draw the city’s most famous author … It will go into our collection and we shall probably make it the centrepiece of a special exhibition. It will be our first Hockney original.”30
The sitting took place in London on 14 September at Priestley’s flat in the Albany, off Piccadilly, and the result was a series of three pen-and-ink drawings, in two of which Priestley is sucking on his pipe, while in the third, the one ultimately chosen by the gallery, he holds the pipe in his hand while looking intently at the artist. According to Hockney, there was little conversation between them. “He just sat there, looking big.”31
Hockney found himself dreaming of his idyllic holiday, writing to Henry Geldzahler, “… the Summer was fabulous, without a doubt it was the nicest summer I have spent since 1966. Thank you. At the time I loved it, in retrospect it seems to get better every day … London seems very gloomy.” He cited Birtwell’s absence as one reason for this, and also Mo McDermott’s very low spirits. “I notice he stays up here more and more,” he wrote, “and at times he even looks as though he is about to Panic.”32 What Hockney did not realise, and was to remain unaware of for another year, was that McDermott was using heroin. “This started in the early seventies,” Celia Birtwell remembers, “but he lied to everybody and he just got thinner and thinner.”33
For myriad reasons McDermott had become an integral part of Hockney’s life. To begin with he was stylish and had an eye for what was good. “I once took Mo to visit Freddie Ashton,” Hockney recalls. “He saw two marble obelisks on Freddie’s mantelpiece. The next day I was at his flat in Ladbroke Grove and I saw these two obelisks, and when I got close to them I noticed they were made of cardboard … He’d just copied them. Mo could make anything and I quickly saw that.”34 He was extremely practical, if occasionally a little undisciplined, and a talented artist himself, which made him a valuable studio assistant. He had also created his own business making and selling decorative trees and flowers cut out of wood and hand-painted, a number of which would, at any one time, be dotted about Powis Terrace. “Mo could even clean up quickly, even if he was a totally ‘sweep it under the carpet’ person. I remember once when my mother came,” Hockney recalls, “and he had put my pornographic magazines under the sofa and I saw my mother sitting on the sofa and the pornographic magazines sticking out from under it, and I thought, ‘Good old Mo!’ ”35
He could make Hockney laugh to boot, a trait required of anyone who might wish to join his circle, and Hockney also admired his self-confidence when it came to his sexuality, which McDermott had no inhibitions about. “He could be a little whore,” Hockney says, “with one fantastic talent, which was that he could fuck anything and it didn’t seem to matter to him. I said to him that it was a talent I didn’t have. Sometimes he used to say to me, ‘What will happen to me in my old age?’ and I used to tell him, ‘There’ll always be someone looking for the comforts that you can bring them, Mo.’ ”36 For some time he enjoyed an arrangement with Peter Coats, the erudite and gentlemanly gardening editor of House & Garden. “We called him ‘Mr. House & Garden,’ ” Hockney recalls. “He would say to Mo, ‘Tell me about the Beatles,’ and Mo would say, ‘I don’t know the Beatles,’ and he would say, ‘Well, pretend you do.’ Mo knew what to do for the gentlemen. He was very sharp like that.”37
David Hockney and Mo McDermott (illustration credit 12.3)
In the mood Hockney was in, it is not surprising that he even began to consider giving up Powis Terrace and moving elsewhere. He had heard that the painter Rodrigo Moynihan was selling his house in Argyll Road, Kensington, and expressed an interest in buying it. He particularly loved the garden. “I do think that eleven years in the same place is about enough,” he wrote to Geldzahler, “and somehow Powis Terrace isn’t the same as it used to be with Mrs. Evans gone and Joan the dry cleaners.”38 Not even Birtwell’s eventual return could lift his spirits. “Things haven’t been so good since the Clarks returned,” he wrote a few days later. “Ossie seems terrified as if his world is about to collapse tomorrow, and while it frightens Celia a little she does have sympathy for him now … I think that’s very sweet and natural.”39
He tried to get back into work, starting a new version of George Lawson and Wayne Sleep, but he got nowhere with it, and realising that there was nothing to keep him in London any longer, made the decision to return to Paris for at least a year. He told Clark, who had finally been kicked out by Birtwell, that he could move into Powis Terrace. “I am leaving London Thursday evening,” he wrote to Geldzahler. “Maurice is driving me and a lot of equipment … I’m looking foreward [sic] to it, I think, more than my first trip to California. The relief of getting out of London and being able to work all day long will ease my life so much … It’s all very well having excitement or turbulence in one’s life, but then one needs a period of reflection to sort it out. That’s why I look foreward to Paris so much. I hope to work it all out on canvases.”40 Working on the oil painting of his mother had made him fall in love with oils again, and he decided to abandon acrylic for the time being. “Oil painting is such a delight again. One doesn’t have to hurry, or keep bits of colour with labels on etc etc.”41
Hockney was to spend the better part of the next two years in Paris, living in a beautiful apartment in the sixth arrondissement rented from Tony Richardson. 3 Cour de Rohan was a romantic place, hidden away behind the Rue Saint-André des Arts and accessed through iron gates, behind which lay a series of three connecting courtyards, parts of which dated back to the fourteenth century. The French painter Balthus had once had a studio in the same building, and Hockney too soon fell under the spell of its ivy-clad walls, ancient trees and cobbled surfaces. It was close to L’Odéon Métro station; he used to tell would-be visitors, “Just pass the statue of Danton and you will find me.”42 He arrived on 4 October, and was soon settled in, writing to Geldzahler, “Paris is very pleasant. For the first time in years I can have eight hours a day painting alone with no disturbances. The telephone only seems to ring two or three times and it’s usually only friends arranging dinner. I’ve started a few french lessons but my progress is slow, and after a hard day painting it’s a little hard to concentrate, but I intend to slog at it.”43
He soon established a routine. “I used to have my breakfast out at the Café de Flore and read the papers,” he recalls, “and then after that I’d come back to the flat and paint. I might go out to lunch at one of the little places on the corner—there were loads of places—and then I’d work in the afternoon, and about five or six o’clock I’d walk down to the Café de Flore or Les Deux Magots. At first I thought that old bohemian Paris had gone and then I realised that in fact I was living in the last bit of it. The Left Bank was still cheap. There were a lot of hotels which you could live in for not that much money, so I was always meeting all kinds of people. I lived on cash and I used to walk everywhere. I could walk to the Louvre. I could walk to the Pompidou, to the Opéra, to the Coupole. I hardly ever took a taxi. I really liked my routine. If I didn’t want to go to the cafe I didn’t, I just worked.”44 The apartment consisted of one large room with a high ceiling, which he used as a studio, a kitchen and two or three bedrooms. “I’ve got settled in and started a painting of the mirror in my room at Lucca,” he wrote to Geldzahler. “As it seems a time for reflextion [sic] in painting, I thought it a good subject. I only brought oil paints here, and it’s very exciting using them again. I’m quickly adapting my techniques to it.”45
Hockney was at a crossroads in his life. “I was thinking about many things and about certain attitudes to painting I felt were dead,” he wrote. “I was trying to break out of something … of what I called obsessive naturalism … Usually when I get into that state I have to do something, so I just sit and draw in some way or other. At that time I felt almost as though I should go back to drawing skeletons, as I did when I was a student at the Royal College of Art, thinking, what shall I do?: I’ll make a study of the skeleton; what should I do?: I’ll make some drawings of my friends; I’ll make them slowly, accurately, have them sit down and pose for hours.”46
One of the first to be drawn was Celia Birtwell, who came over to Paris on a number of occasions in November. “The whole point of going was to be drawn by him,” she recalls, “so I always took a pile of things with me … One day I had met this woman in Earls Court who had a trunkload of the most marvellous pieces of silk lingerie, and I took them with me to Paris. That’s when he drew me in all those pretty clothes, and in the dirndl skirt with the flowers on it. If I was there for a week he would do several drawings. They were done in pencil, and each took about four or five hours to draw. The best drawings he ever did of me were done in those three months.”47 These, notably Celia in a Black Dress with Red Stockings, Celia in a Black Dress with White Flowers, Celia Wearing Checked Sleeves and Celia in a Black Slip, Reclining, are more than just beautiful drawings, for they also reveal the artist’s feelings. Indeed, they might be the work of an ardent lover, in that they imbue the model with a sensual warmth and femininity. They are sexy. “In the French drawings, when we were very close,” she told the art historian Paul Melia, “there was something going on between us which I think he portrayed through those drawings. He said to me that this was his way of expressing how he felt about me.”48
Just as he had cultivated an entourage of friends in London, so in Paris Hockney moved among an eclectic mix of Europeans and Americans, many of whom appear in his drawings from this period. Chief among his French friends was Jean Léger, a young designer for Helena Rubinstein, who Hockney liked to say “works in a lipstick factory.”49 A good-looking, highly cultivated Parisian, always impeccably dressed, with a quiet sense of humour and a twinkle in his eye, he had met Hockney in London in 1967. An etching of 1971, Rue de Seine, shows the view from the Paris apartment Léger shared with his lover Alexis Vidal, an interior designer, where Hockney often used to stay; it was published in an edition of 150 by Petersburg Press to raise money for the National Council for Civil Liberties. Léger, the subject of a large and affectionate drawing, Portrait of Jean Léger, spoke fluent English and, according to Celia Birtwell, acted as a kind of chaperone to Hockney, whom he was thrilled to have living in his home city.
Gregory Evans was also living close by, in the Rue de Dragon off the Boulevard Saint-Germain, having split up with Nick Wilder and come to Paris with the intention of studying fashion. He had turned up after a period of floating around Europe and getting into a number of scrapes, including being refused entry to the UK by Customs and Immigration at Gatwick airport after arriving on a flight stoned out of his head. “In Los Angeles,” Evans recalls, “I had been to the George Trippon School of Fashion Design to learn technical aspects of pattern-making and cutting, and I had this fantasy while I was there of going to fashion school in Paris, and I did none of it.”50 Instead, supported by a private income, he set about having a good time. It was a great moment to be in Paris, a time of change, as the last breath of the post-war society of poets, actors, artists and musicians combined with an influx of a young international set of models and designers connected with the fashion industry. “I didn’t even speak French and wasn’t fluent enough to go to any kind of serious school, but I have to say it was probably the best time of my life. I loved Paris. It was a fantastic time. It was so new and exciting and thrilling. The first year I lived there I probably never went out before four o’clock in the afternoon and I never went to bed before seven or eight in the morning.”51
Since his apartment was only two minutes’ walk from the Café de Flore, Evans would amble down there in the early evening and seek out the familiar figure of Hockney, who stood out from the crowd with his colourful rugby shirts, red braces and odd-coloured socks, and often wearing a panama hat or even a beret. They would drink white wine, and talk about life, and a true friendship slowly developed. “I went to the opera with David,” he says. “We travelled. I used to love spending time with him watching him paint. Occasionally David and I would lunch and then we would go to the Louvre in the afternoon. We’d go in the side door and there would be nobody there.”52
Among the other regulars at the Flore was another of Hockney’s friends, an American painter called Shirley Goldfarb, whose curious appearance also singled her out. “She was a most extraordinary woman,” Jack Hazan remembers. “She always dressed as a beatnik with long black dyed hair. She had massive bulging eyes all mascaraed up and she always wore the same clothes—a roll-neck black sweater and jeans with high-heel clog boots.”53 Goldfarb had come to Paris to fulfil her romantic dream of being an artist living against the backdrop of the city of artists. She had taken a tiny studio in the Rue Liancourt in Montparnasse, where she lived with her husband, Gregory Masurovsky, a graphic artist, and a wiry little Yorkshire terrier which accompanied her everywhere. Here she would work on large abstract-expressionist paintings executed using a brush/palette-knife technique. “I paint a square every day,”54 she used to say, speaking French with a strong American accent, by which she meant a one-inch square of paint on the canvas. For twenty-five years she sat every day at the Café de Flore, in her latter years writing a journal, posthumously published as Carnets Montparnasse, 1971–1980. Though her intensity and her social ambition made most people run a mile, Hockney adored her.
“I thought she was funny,” he recalls. “She liked mocking things, and we became quite good friends. I used to dine at the Coupole a lot and Shirley would come looking for me, and when she found me she’d sit down at the table and if she ordered lobster I knew I would have to pay for it. People used to think she was taking advantage of me, but I said, ‘Well, if I was in her position I would do the same.’ She had no money and in those days you could live in Paris like that. She told me sometimes she would sit down with no money at all and somebody would come along and pay for her. She and Gregory lived very modestly, but she thought they were privileged living in the most beautiful city in the world.”55
Fascinated by their relationship, Hockney naturally saw them as a subject for a new double portrait. They had lived in two tiny little rooms for over twenty years, Gregory, who was very quiet and reserved, having the windowless back room, out of which he could not go without passing through Shirley’s room at the front. “Their relationship is a weird subject,” Hockney wrote. “He can’t go out of the building without her seeing, but she can. They are married but they are apart.”56
Shirley Goldfarb and Gregory Masurovsky, painted in acrylic after a drawing, showed their curious living conditions, with Shirley seated on a chair in her studio, while Gregory perches on the edge of a single bed in his cubicle.
Another eccentric woman who fascinated Hockney was the stage and costume designer Lila de Nobili, an Italian from a grand family, whose designs had included the celebrated Visconti production of La Traviata with Maria Callas. “The set … was of such refinement and elegance,” wrote the television producer Peter Adam, “that it made reality look shoddy.”57 Her appearance was less refined than her creations, however, dressed as she always was in rather shabby shawls and stockings. Hockney met her through Tony Richardson, with whom she had collaborated on The Charge of the Light Brigade, and she had also designed both Ondine and Sleeping Beauty for Frederick Ashton at the Royal Ballet, where she was known to the company as “Knobbly Lil.”58 When she first came to tea at the Cour de Rohan, she had just come out of retirement to design Manon Lescaut for Visconti at the international festival in Spoleto in Italy.
De Nobili lived in just the kind of Paris garret that Hockney used to joke about owning. “One afternoon we went to her tiny little apartment,” Celia Birtwell recalls, “which was right at the top of this staircase that went up for ever … And there was this little flat, with a minute kitchen—I remember it had a Belfast sink and there was this great big box of Persil sitting there. She had cats and it was just the perfect scenario—this highly regarded, rather marvellous-looking woman living in this tiny flat.”59 A shy and quite reclusive woman, she had no telephone, and only one teacup, which particularly amused Hockney. He perfectly captured these elements in his beautiful and touching drawing, Lila de Nobili. “She had an almost masochistic humility,” wrote Peter Adam, “and a closed nature at odds with all those inflated egos in the world of theatre and opera, like a strange bird who had fallen out of a nest.”60
In December, Andy Warhol, over in Paris to discuss an upcoming show of his Mao portraits at the Musée Galleria, visited Hockney at the Cour de Rohan. “David took a couple of Polaroids of him,” Celia Birtwell recalls. “David was talking about all these portraits he was doing, and he had all these palettes all over the floor covered with different-coloured paints and I remember Andy Warhol saying, ‘Oh, I really like those palettes,’ and I thought, ‘Trust you to look at the palettes rather than the picture he was painting.’ Then we all got into a cab with some Frenchwoman, and she started talking in French to someone else, and Warhol said sharply, ‘Stop speaking in that language. Speak in English.’ That was typical of him. He had real command and wanted everything done his way.”61 The Polaroids were later used as the basis for a coloured crayon drawing of Warhol.
Among a number of handsome young men in Hockney’s drawings from this period were Randy Hunt, a friend of Henry Geldzahler’s; Carlos, whom he met through Lila de Nobili; Mark Lippscombe, a friend from LA; and the exotically named Jacques de Bascher de Beaumarchais, a lover of Karl Lagerfeld, and nicknamed by Hockney “Jacques de Quelque Chose.” A French aristocrat, who claimed to be descended from the author of the Figaro plays, he was slim and good-looking, with a pencil moustache. Hockney made several drawings of him, including one of him wearing a sailor’s suit. “He was extremely stylish,” he recalls, “and obviously based himself on a kind of Proustian figure. I remember one of his parties. He would have all these unbelievable French soldiers, big butch soldiers, lining up to fuck him. There were some marvellous orgies organised in Paris. They were really well done because the French pay tremendous attention to detail.”62
Among all the young men, however, there was only one serious lover. Writing to Henry Geldzahler in January 1974 about a proposed trip to New York, Hockney announced, “Yves-Marie has entered my life. I asked him to come to New York with me, although it’s a bit difficult with his mother and school etc., so I don’t know if he’ll come, but don’t be surprised if he arrives with me.”63 Yves-Marie Hervé, always referred to as “Yves-Marie de Paris,” was a young student at the École du Louvre to whom Hockney was attempting to teach some English. “He was a very pretty boy with masses of dark hair falling forward,” Kasmin remembers. “He was a gay man’s dream boy, nice-natured, willing, not at all camp; he looked like someone who needed to be loved. It was impossible not to like him. He was desirable even if you weren’t gay.”64 To Celia Birtwell he was “super French, and he had this wonderful draped hair. I can see why David liked him; he looked marvellous, he was a wonderful poser and he knew how to dress. He was petite, like a toy.”65
Just as with Peter Schlesinger, their relationship was that of teacher and pupil, and Hockney spent many hours introducing him to his favourite museums and exploring the little back rooms at the Louvre, where the supposedly less interesting pictures were hung. At the Museé d’Art Moderne, he took him to Brancusi’s studio. “I loved that room,” he wrote, “with the dust on it, the pieces in it and that marvellous atmosphere. Next door was that other terrific room with the González sculptures, which have always affected me. He was a wonderful sculptor. So I was, in a way, looking at art of the long past, and at early modern art, which of course was made in Paris …”66
Naturally Hockney also wanted to introduce Hervé to the work of Picasso, which involved a trip down to Avignon, where the late works were being shown in the Musée du Petit Palais. Hockney arranged for them to stay just outside Uzès with Douglas Cooper, whose great collection of cubist art, built up since the 1930s, included the work of Braque, Léger and Juan Gris, as well as Picasso. Hockney found Cooper enthralling company, if infuriating. “He was quite a fascinating person,” he says, “but he had the emotional age of somebody of about seven. There was a mad side to him which I rather liked.”67 Cooper’s twenty-year friendship with his great hero and neighbour, Picasso, had ended on the fateful day in 1970 when he dared to tell the artist that it was time he recognised his illegitimate children, Paloma and Claude. Losing his temper at this reminder of his mortality, Picasso threw Cooper out of his studio. “There was a steep flight of stairs leading down from Picasso’s villa to the front gate,” his partner John Richardson later recalled, “and poor Douglas paused on every step, kneeling and weeping and grovelling and begging to be forgiven! It did him no good at all.”68
In spite of the fact that Cooper had made it quite clear that he thought the late Picassos were “terrible,” when Hockney and Hervé went to Avignon he insisted on accompanying them. “We arrived there,” Hockney recalls, “and he goes in and starts telling me immediately how dreadful they are. So I said to him, ‘Can I just have a short time looking at them by myself?’ Then I did say to him, ‘Well, I can see one thing anyway, which is that they are about being an old man. Perhaps you’ve not seen that.’ I started taking a few digs at him, because he was trying to give me the impression that from the moment he was banned from Picasso’s studio, all his paintings went to rack and ruin.”69
Yves-Marie, New York, 1974 (illustration credit 12.4)
On their trips away together and in Paris, Hervé became the subject of numerous drawings—lying on a sofa in the Paris studio reading Jean Cocteau, curled up seductively in Henry Geldzahler’s New York apartment, sitting on a chair reading in the garden of Le Nid de Duc. Spending so much time in Hockney’s company meant that his English came on in leaps and bounds. Not so Hockney’s French, partly because he put very little effort into his lessons, and secretly rather played on speaking the language with a thick Yorkshire accent. “I’ve been a bit slack with mon francais,” he wrote to Geldzahler on 17 January, “as I’ve been working hard painting and looking after my parents here for a few days. I drew them, but we also saw a lot of Paris, they said they had a marvellous time so I feel quite good.”70
Even though it was only for a few days, for Kenneth and Laura their trip to Paris was a welcome break from the hardships back home, where Edward Heath’s government had brought in a three-day week to combat the problems of rising fuel prices. “In England,” Hockney told Geldzahler, exaggerating just a little, “there is no electricity gasoline trains or TV, but Celia says everybody is having a good time (Isn’t it lovely, just like the war). I do think people love to suffer collectively, don’t you?”71 Among the drawings Hockney executed of his parents during their four-day trip was a touching study of Kenneth in coloured crayon, sitting in a chair with his arms folded.
As well as showing his parents the sights, another distraction from his French lessons was dealing with a visit from Clark, who was on best behaviour with his new landlord. “Ossie came for the weekend last week. He was charm itself. Making the tea, sweeping the floor, entertaining visitors for tea etc. but he did want something from me. He has now moved into my studio to make his dresses (Mo is converting the large sitting room back to a studio) and I’m told I wouldn’t recognize the place. I now tend to read actions in your Freudian way and see it as a way to keep me away from London and Celia, for underneath all his activity here I did detect a fear.”72
Hockney was working on three oil paintings that were intended for a show which the British Council was putting on in Paris in October at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The first was the double portrait Shirley Goldfarb and Gregory Masurovsky, while the other two came about directly from his endless expeditions to the Louvre. Contre-jour in the French Style—Against the Day dans le Style Français—a typical playful Hockney title—was inspired by a window in the Pavillon de Flore, at the south-west corner of the Louvre, which was showing an exhibition of French drawings from the Metropolitan Museum. “The first time I went,” he wrote, “I saw this window with the blind pulled down and the formal garden beyond. And I thought, oh it’s marvellous! marvellous! This is a picture in itself … So I took some photographs of it, made a drawing, and started painting.”73 Consciously drawing on a traditionally French style, the pointillist technique of the neo-Impressionists, helped him to loosen his brushwork again, and from the start the painting went well. The result beautifully depicts the light passing through the translucent blind and its reflection in the parquet floor. The picture that followed this, Two Vases in the Louvre, echoed the print of Jean Léger’s apartment, Rue de Seine, with the window looking out onto a view across the courtyard to the Rue de Rivoli.
However much Hockney loved his Paris life, there were times when he found the French quite exasperating. He wrote to Henry Geldzahler in February still fuming about “a story of Paris and French rudeness,” which had occured two days previously when he had taken Shirley Goldfarb and her husband to dinner at Maxim’s to celebrate their twenty-first wedding anniversary. “Shirley comes in a dress and Gregory in his leather jacket and tie. As the Maitre D is showing us to our table he says—feeling Gregory’s jacket—that it’s not pretty (joli) enough for Maxims. I couldn’t believe my ears and assumed I’d heard it wrong. The place of course was full of businessmen in hideous suits (that didn’t fit them).”74 They went on to Régine’s nightclub, for which Hockney had been sent an entry card, where a “gestapo-like” waiter told Hervé to put on his jacket when he got up to dance. “He was the smartest person in the place … Anyway when we were leaving they told me to put on my jacket in a most unpleasant manner. I said … it was everybody’s privilege who was leaving to do it how they wished. I tore up the card (it was plastic so it took some time, rather spoiling the effect) and gave it back to them.”75 He later exclaimed to Ossie Clark, “Paris would be beautiful if only the English lived there.”76