Life of David Hockney

by Catherine Cusset

  They had loved each other for five years, had been separated for two. He was now thirty-six and Peter twenty-five. How could he, who had always been so happy, so full of energy, so meant for happiness, be destroyed by this obsessive thought that invaded him like a weed? And yet he had felt well in Lucca with Henry. Why in London did he feel the absence of any desire except to die? Love was an addiction. How could he get Peter out of his blood and become himself again? Leave London once more? Move to New York to be close to Henry? Leave, yes, but for somewhere where he wouldn’t risk running into Peter, where no one had known them together, far from friends whose patience in the past two years he had exhausted, and who would no longer put up with hearing the name Peter again.

  He chose Paris, where Tony Richardson loaned him an apartment that he owned in the Sixth Arrondissement.

  From the building located on a little street between the boulevard Saint-Germain and the Seine, right next to the Procope restaurant, everything was accessible by foot: the Louvre, where he went in the afternoons; the art and experimental movie theaters; the Seine, which was greener than the Thames; the Café de Flore, where he went to drink his morning coffee and eat a buttered tartine while reading the newspaper; La Coupole, where he met friends for dinner in the evening. The studio was an oasis of calm in this lively neighborhood full of students, artists, and intellectuals. Celia often came to visit him, and he drew her. He made new friends, including a French designer and his partner, and a couple of American artists who had been living for twenty years in a small railroad apartment where they also worked. The idea that the man, who worked in the room at the back, couldn’t go out without his wife seeing him amused David, who decided to paint them in their apartment. He would still cry when he thought of Peter, but he rediscovered the pleasure of wandering around and observing the street scene instead of being lost in himself. He met a French student at the Beaux-Arts, Yves-Marie, who became his lover, and got close to a young Californian, Gregory, whom he had met in Los Angeles at Nick’s apartment and who lived on the nearby rue du Dragon.

  He had spent six months in Paris and was beginning to feel better when he went to London to see the work of the filmmaker who had lent him his powerful lamps two years earlier. The film was called A Bigger Splash, from the title of his best-known painting. The narrative thread was extremely vague. The camera followed people who were part of David’s life: Mo, his assistant, who expresses his fear that David might go to live in New York; his friend Patrick, who stands in his studio, mirroring the portrait David had done of him; Celia with her first baby; Kas in his gallery during a fake telephone call asking David to paint more quickly because buyers are clamoring; and Peter, of course, having tea and chatting with Celia, strolling in the streets of London or diving into a pool. There were images of Powis Terrace, of the bathroom with the bright blue tiles, and even of New York, where, David now remembered, the filmmaker had accompanied him for an opening. None of it seemed of much interest, and he could have done without the images of Peter, which caused a painful clenching in him.

  Then something dreadful appeared: Peter in bed with another man. David was horrified, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the screen. For several minutes, each second of which stuck a very sharp needle into his skin, Peter and that man were caressing each other, kissing, taking each other’s clothes off, while the camera focused on Peter’s lips, cheeks, nose, freckles, rounded back and buttocks, bringing back all that David had suppressed deep down for years. The blow was so violent that the wall he had patiently constructed stone by stone for three years abruptly collapsed. Nothing was left but the pain of betrayal, a pain so raw that he felt he was naked and being stoned, one sharp rock after another. He felt betrayed not only by the filmmaker, but by Celia, by Mo, by all those who had participated in this charade. And by Peter, of course. Had his need for money led him to make this scene? If he was broke, why hadn’t he asked David? Out of pride? Had Peter ever had any real feelings for him? Where was the boy whom he had loved so passionately?

  At the end of the screening he could say only one thing to the filmmaker: “Please take out ‘Starring David Hockney.’ I am not a star. I am not a film star.”

  He would never again let someone into his life and steal images of his intimacy or bits of his heart.

  He returned to Paris a wreck. For two weeks he couldn’t get out of bed or see anyone.

  Would the pain ever go away? Weren’t three years enough?

  But perhaps the tsunami caused by the film was the salutary crisis, like the spike in fever that leaves the sick person exhausted, depleted, in sheets soaked in sweat, while signaling the end of the illness. Or perhaps the shock of seeing Peter do such a vulgar and cruel thing enabled him to realize that ideal love was only a fantasy. Or perhaps sorrow, like passion, lasts only three years. One morning when he awoke, he no longer felt the sharp agony that had sapped him for three years even when he attempted to cover it up. His obsession had evaporated. He was finally free and at peace. He saw Gregory more and more often and understood that their mutual feelings went beyond friendship. A new story was being born, cautiously, timidly, and surrounded by guardrails.

  When a director proposed that he paint the set for A Rake’s Progress, the opera by Stravinsky that would be performed at the Glyndebourne Festival, David had the impression that a door was opening through which he could escape. He had never designed a set for an opera before, but he seized the opportunity. It wasn’t just a distraction. The new work took him far from the double portrait that he had decided to drop. He would move into a new phase: instead of experiencing things dramatically, he would enter the world of drama. A Rake’s Progress, that story of perdition that had brought him success ten years earlier, would save him by giving him something other than himself to focus on.

  The day of the premiere, a year later, his restaurant owner friend organized a picnic on the lawn of Glyndebourne, where 120 bottles of champagne were uncorked for David’s thirty guests. The dishes were delicious and so abundant that he invited the singers and musicians. That extravagant party cost him more than what he had earned designing the set and costumes, but he had no regrets. There wasn’t an ounce of sadness in that extraordinary bacchanal. He had climbed up from the bottom of the abyss and was now standing on the edge of life. Literally. While sitting on the grass, quite tipsy, contemplating the sun that was slowly setting behind the Sussex hills, he felt only love and gratitude for a world that offered such a beautiful sight.

  THE CHILD WITHIN

  Holding on to David’s arm, his mother walked through the Hayward Gallery looking around at the abstract, dark, minimalist paintings. A thick rope placed on the ground caught her attention, probably because she could identify it. She stopped and read the name of the artist: Barry Flanagan.

  “Did he make the rope?” she asked naively.

  In the little group which, besides his parents, included his friend Henry, his assistant, and Gregory, his new partner, no one laughed. David explained to his mother, as informatively as he could, that it was conceptual art. Laura nodded her head like a good student.

  “I prefer what you do,” she said, sounding relieved when they entered the room where her son’s works were hanging.

  Their bright colors and figurative subjects contrasted with the works in the preceding rooms. His father stood in front of the painting of him and his wife and nodded his head, looking satisfied.

  “That’s really me, always busy. You can thank me, David. If I hadn’t been hard on you this painting wouldn’t exist!”

  Henry chuckled, David rolled his eyes.

  “Ken, you were quite right to shake your lazy son!”

  “It is lovely,” said Laura, “but I also liked the first version, with your reflection in the mirror. The only thing I regret,” she added, “is that I’m not doing something, too. I would seem more interesting.”

  “Laura, you’re fantastic. The queen mot
her,” Henry said, affectionately putting his arm around the shoulders of the old lady, tiny and birdlike next to him.

  “Thank you, dear. But where did you get that dress?” she continued, turning to her son. “I don’t have one like that!”

  “That blue looks really good on you, Mum, doesn’t it?”

  My Parents: it was difficult to believe that the work existed. No other painting had given him more trouble, not even Portrait of an Artist. Henry was right, as usual, when he had told him that painting his parents would be like psychoanalysis. After a year and a half of relentless work, David had given up: the more he worked on his father’s face the more he looked like a mummy. “It’s the effect of all that hasn’t been said between you,” Henry had told him. Perhaps, but it couldn’t be now, when the old man was completely deaf, that they would start talking. He had called his mother to tell her of his failure. “My poor dear,” she had said with her usual kindness, sensing his frustration. An hour later the phone had rung. It was his father, furious: “What, you’re giving up? After all that time you made us pose in Bradford, London, and Paris, even when we were tired or ill? You dare do that to your mother, the woman who fed you, who raised you, who has always been there for you? Don’t you know what it means to her to be painted by you next to me? She was so proud!” He shouted as if his son was a naughty eight-year-old who had just done something really bad. David had had trouble containing himself. In a dark mood after he hung up, he had gone out to have a drink. At thirty-nine years old, it was time to take things in hand and solve his oedipal issues. But the next morning, he called his mother: “Mum, could you come to London? I’m starting over.”

  In the new version he got rid of the artificial triangle he had drawn between the figures, as well as the reflection of himself in the mirror placed on the table. All of that had distracted the viewer from the true subject, his parents. And above all he allowed his agitated father to pose the way he wanted. He painted him bending over a thick exhibition catalog that Ken had spontaneously opened on his lap as soon as he sat in David’s studio, absorbed in his reading, his heels sticking up, almost moving, and his father suddenly came to life. His mother, sitting facing the viewer in the same pose as in the first version, her arthritic hands on her lap, has a softer expression, no longer crosses her feet, and wears a dress of that bright blue that David liked a lot, that blue toward which one wants to run. The painting, luminous, emits a sense of melancholy that fortunately his parents didn’t seem to notice. The two old people are chained together, but separated, each enclosed in his or her solitude. When he completed his work, David realized that they presented a model he didn’t want to adopt: to grow old as a couple, while still being alone.

  It would be the last of his double portraits painted in a realist vein. The two other canvases hanging in the room, which his parents were now contemplating, and whose genesis Henry and Gregory were explaining, were very different. Self-portrait with Blue Guitar shows David drawing a blue guitar. That painting is incorporated into the one next to it: Model with Unfinished Self Portrait, where in the foreground a man (Gregory) in a blue robe is sleeping on a bed. These works also had their history. The summer before, when he had just started the new version of the portrait of his parents, David had accompanied Henry to Fire Island, two hours from New York City, which had a large gay community. One afternoon, while they were sitting on lounge chairs wearing white linen three-piece suits that contrasted with the nudity of the beautiful boys diving into the pool in front of them, Henry had read to him a poem by Wallace Stevens inspired by a Picasso painting. The poem was very long, made up of thirty-three stanzas that, when read in Henry’s deep voice, mesmerized David and transported him very far from the island of pleasure and the sound of diving boys. The first stanza had been particularly striking:

  They said, “You have a blue guitar,

  You do not play things as they are.”

  The man replied, “Things as they are

  Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

  Other verses caught his attention:

  I cannot bring a world quite round,

  Although I patch it as I can.

  Or:

  The color like a thought that grows

  Out of a mood…

  And the end was very beautiful:

  We shall forget by day, except

  The moments when we choose to play

  The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

  While he was listening to Henry, David had the impression that he was being handed the key to himself. He understood exactly what Stevens meant—about Picasso or about any painter. The blue guitar symbolized the talent of the artist, who couldn’t play “things as they are” because they didn’t exist in reality, only in representation. The blue guitar was exactly what his parents didn’t have, and its absence made their lives dull. David had received a blue guitar—the power to imagine and to “patch together” the world—when he was born. He should thank his parents, nature, life, God. His gift was infinitely priceless.

  Model with Unfinished Self Portrait is highly symbolic. David appears in the painting, but not on the same plane as the figure sleeping on the bed; he is in the background, painted on a canvas. As an artist he is apart, separated from Gregory or his parents, in another space. He had understood that his life would not be the same as that of most people. He wouldn’t have a stable romantic life, because he was married to his art. Unlike Peter, Gregory was fine with David being entirely absorbed by his work; for his part, David was fine with Gregory having flings. They had an open relationship, which simplified everything. There was no frustration, no jealousy, no crises. Their arrangement had brought David so much peace that he could even see Peter again, and he paid him for doing little jobs. His former lover had posed for him when Gregory had to go on a trip. The feet of the person sleeping are Peter’s. David saw them now without emotion; time had done its work. Granted, he wouldn’t have minded making love to Peter again, but Peter didn’t want to, and David resigned himself. At forty he had accepted what he was and what he wasn’t, what life gave him and what it didn’t.

  Life was more than generous. He enjoyed extraordinary freedom. He had left Paris, where he was becoming too well known, and moved back to London. He had sold the apartment where he had lived with Peter—Ossie, then Mo and a group of druggies had lived in it while he was gone, and had left it in terrible condition—and bought another apartment on the top floor of the same building. The year before, he had spent a month at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles and rediscovered the pleasure of living in California. He was getting ready to spend the entire autumn in New York. He went on vacation on Fire Island, in France and Italy, and he traveled even farther, to Tahiti, on the way to Australia, where two of his brothers lived, to New Zealand, and to India with Kasmin—he hadn’t liked that trip; he was shocked by the caste system and the terrible inequality between rich and poor…He would soon return to Egypt. Almost every year he had solo or group exhibitions in London, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Berlin, or in other countries. He took a plane the way you take a taxi.

  But above all, he had friends. A close-knit community on two continents, true friends whom he’d known for years or even decades, friends he adored who visited him every day or traveled with him. He used his fame to defend the gay community, particularly in London. He had fought against the customs bureau, which had confiscated his copies of Physique Pictorial and other similar magazines when he was returning from Los Angeles, under the pretext that they were pornographic. (He was very proud that he had put up a fight. By calling every day, by having discussions with increasingly important employees, discussions worthy of Ubu Roi, and by threatening to sue them, he had recovered his magazines and had won against Her Majesty’s customs office!) More recently he had allowed a gay magazine to publish nude photos of him, and he had spoken up publicly in defense of a gay bookstore threatened b
y the police.

  And he was having a lot of fun. It would have been hard to have had more fun. Vacations on Fire Island were fantastic. The party began with tea at 5 p.m. and lasted all night. Sex, poppers, cocaine, and Quaaludes…People went crazy, completely liberated, the poor mixed with millionaires, all equal when they were dancing, partying, doing crazy things—not exactly equal, since the true aristocracy was one of beauty. All that beauty on view was a real joy for a voyeur like him. In New York he would accompany his friend Joe McDonald, a model who knew everyone, to Studio 54, to the Ramrod, or to the gay baths, and his greatest pleasure was watching Joe, the most gorgeous man he had ever seen, pick up men right in front of him, as if theater and reality were intimately blended. Life had truly reserved a front-row seat for him. He wouldn’t have changed places with anyone else in the world.

  He felt so good that month of July 1977 when he turned forty that he dared to be himself all the way. After having taken a position as a gay man, he claimed his status as a figurative artist. The year before, there had been a huge controversy that had pitted the London art milieu against the general public, when the Tate acquired a work by the artist Carl Andre, 120 bricks forming a long rectangle and titled Equivalent VIII. Articles were written, accusing the museum of having wasted taxpayers’ money in paying thousands of pounds sterling for that pile of bricks. In its defense, the museum’s director had cited the example of cubism, which hadn’t been understood and was ripped to shreds in its time. On the occasion of the annual exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, the Scottish journalist Fyfe Robertson devoted one of the episodes of Robbie, a popular TV program aired on the BBC, to contemporary art in England, and invited David to be a guest on the show. Fyfe Robertson detested minimalist and abstract art, which in his opinion was thumbing its nose at its audience. Playing on the homophony with the word “fart,” he had even created the term “phart,” for “phony art.” Going into the room where David’s paintings were exhibited, he had had the impression of living again: it was an oasis of light, of life, and of humanity.