Once again he approached the principal and asked to be transferred. “They told me that I would have to train to be a teacher, as that was the only living to be got out of painting. I thought to myself that if the only way to get into the painting department was to trick them, then that’s exactly what I would do. So I said, ‘Fine, yes, I really would like to be a teacher.’ ” Agreeing to this meant that so long as he had the required number of GCEs, he could now study painting in order to get a certificate to become a teacher of art. “I sorted this out very quickly,” he says, “because I was a very determined person. I was determined to have a proper art school education, to learn drawing and painting, and I got it, even though it had meant lying to get there.”28
Thus it was that at the beginning of 1954, the sixteen-year-old Hockney joined the painting department of Bradford College of Art. It was tiny, with a core group of five other students: Dave Oxtoby, Norman Stevens, David Fawcett, Rod Taylor and Bernard Woodward. “Dave Oxtoby was a Teddy boy,” Hockney remembers, “who wore a bottle-green suit, so I took one look at him and thought that he was probably one of the ones who didn’t do much work.”29 Because the class was so small, he soon got to know them all well, and his first real friend among them was Norman Stevens. “He came up to me and said, ‘I’ve heard of you. I know you come from the Bradford Grammar School.”30 Stevens’s disability—he had been badly crippled by polio as a child—had given him a determination to succeed at all costs, and this, combined with a wry sense of humour, endeared him to Hockney. They soon became inseparable.
They joked about everything, even Stevens’s limp. One evening, they were out at night in the company of two friends who, along with Hockney, were imitating Norman’s awkward way of walking. Suddenly they saw another genuinely disabled man limping towards them. When they were close enough to him, Hockney said loudly, “All right, Norman, pack it in!” The three friends immediately started walking normally, but of course Norman couldn’t, and as the man passed them he shouted at him, “Cheeky bastard!” This cracked Hockney up.31 The close friendship with Stevens caused a rift at home, in the relationship between Hockney and his younger brother. “I became angry,” John says, “not with David but with Norman, because for the first time ever, David was not mine any more. It was a petty jealousy but I do remember it having a great effect on me. I idolised David. We were buddies, I admired his confidence and openness and we had shared school holidays. We had done so much together. Of course I was the youngest, very immature, and losing him at that time was very difficult.”32 But Hockney was moving ahead, throwing himself into student life, and from now on home and family life were to come second.
Provincial art colleges in the 1950s were for the most part pretty poverty-stricken: drawing from classical casts was still one of the primary modes of instruction, and heraldry was still on the curriculum in many of them. Prime influences were the Euston Road School, formed by William Coldstream, Victor Pasmore and Graham Bell in 1937 to promote naturalism and realism, and Walter Sickert, who had brought the French influence into English art schools. Bradford was little different and the teachers there were struggling to drag it into the modern world. Yet the four-year course that Hockney signed up to, the National Diploma in Design, which was a completely academic training, is now viewed by him as vital to all his later work.
For two years he was to study painting, together with a subsidiary subject, lithography. Then for the last two years, he would concentrate solely on painting and drawing. Two days a week were devoted to life painting, two days to figure composition, again mostly from life, and one day a week to drawing; and during the first two years, one day a week was devoted to either perspective or anatomy. “It meant that for four years,” he later wrote, “all you did was draw and paint, mostly from life.”33
There were two tutors in the painting department whom David found particularly stimulating. Fred Lyle, the senior tutor, was bald, with one eye and a beard, which gave him the appearance of Sinbad the Sailor, but it was the younger of the two who turned out to be the real inspiration. Derek Stafford was twenty-six and a fellow Yorkshireman from Doncaster, though there was no trace of his origins in his accent, as a result of his having attended Stowe School, from where he had been awarded a scholarship to the Royal College of Art. His studies had been interrupted by the war, and in November 1944, with a reasonable knowledge of anatomy from his drawing classes, he was placed in the Royal Army Medical Corps. After eight weeks’ training he ended up in Belgium, just after the Battle of the Bulge, and from there travelled with the medics wherever they went. This included being among the first people into the concentration camp at Belsen, a horrific experience for the eighteen-year-old boy. “For years I never spoke about it to anybody,” he says, “and I still sometimes wake up at night with the smell of it in my nose.”34
Stafford took up his place at the Royal College in 1948, one of a generation of artists cut off from the mainstream of modern art by the experience of war at the crucial stage of their developing careers. The government actively encouraged them to take a patriotic approach to their art, and engage with the English landscape and its monuments, the result being the rebirth of a British Romantic movement. Leading lights among these self-styled neo-Romantics included John Minton, Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, Keith Vaughan, Eric Ravilious and John Craxton, who were simultaneously forward-thinking and aware of their debt to nineteenth-century artists such as Samuel Palmer and William Blake. Some found a further outlet for their work in another patriotic project, “Recording Britain,” the brainchild of Sir Kenneth Clark, which commissioned artists to paint watercolours that would celebrate the country’s natural beauty and architectural heritage. The nostalgic feel to much British painting in the 1940s was exemplified in the work of artists such as John Piper, Edward Bawden, Kenneth Rowntree and Stanley Spencer.
By the early 1950s, this veneration of the Englishness of English life was being eroded by a new movement celebrating, in the words of one of its leading exponents, the young painter John Bratby, “the colour and mood of ration books, the general feeling of sackcloth and ashes.” “The painting of my decade,” he commented, “was an expression of its Zeitgeist—introvert, grim, khaki in colour, opposed to prettiness, and dedicated to portraying a stark, raw, ugly reality. The word angst prevailed in art talk.”35 In December 1954, in the journal Encounter, the art critic David Sylvester gave the name to this movement which, he wrote, “takes us back from the studio to the kitchen” and featured paintings which included “Everything but the kitchen sink? The kitchen sink too.”36 The Kitchen-Sink movement, which reached its zenith in 1956 when its main practitioners—John Bratby, Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith—represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, echoed the strength of social realism in art at the time, and this was reflected in the work Hockney saw from his tutors, mostly gritty Bradford street scenes in muted colours.
Derek Stafford had joined the staff of Bradford College of Art in 1953, the year before Hockney arrived, fighting off eighty other applicants after a “soul-destroying” year working in a furniture store in Doncaster. He had very quickly found a house and studio only four minutes away from the college. “When I started the job,” he remembers, “I was determined to teach the students my way and not anybody else’s way, and my way was to teach them to think. Drawing is a cerebral process. It is not just imitating what you see, it is understanding what you see. That is what I wanted to put over.”37
From the beginning he fell out constantly with the bureaucratic Fred Coleclough. “I was trying to encourage thinking,” says Stafford, “and getting the students to do things their way, to come into a life class full of energy, to sit down, to examine, to walk up to the model to look, to walk round the model, to see what was taking place outside of their vision, to make them realise that the edge is only the last part you see before it moves out of your vision. This excited them.”38 In his life class, the students would start drawing as soon as they
came in, for about half an hour. Then the model would take a rest and Stafford would look at the work individually, sometimes making a comment, sometimes just sitting with them and making them watch him draw. “What I was quick to notice,” Hockney recalls, “was that the teachers were seeing more than I was seeing. I hadn’t looked hard enough, and I quickly saw that, and so I began to look harder myself. And if you are strict with yourself, after a few weeks you begin to get better and better.”39
To begin with, Hockney didn’t show himself as any more or less talented than the other students. What he was good at was drawing Desperate Dan from the Dandy, playing the fool, joking and disrupting the class. “He’d be throwing rubbers about in life drawing,” Stafford remembers, “and then before you got to him he’d turn his life drawing upside down so you’d have to strain your neck to look at it. I had to take him aside and tell him, ‘David, you’ve got to take this seriously.’ He soon showed himself to be the most industrious of students. He was tenacious in his approach and would always stay late, and if we weren’t talking during the lunch hour, then he’d be drawing.”40
Because most of the group’s understanding of art was limited to what they’d seen in newspapers or comic books, Stafford encouraged them to scrimp and save up to travel occasionally to London. David made his first trip on 26 February 1954. “We went to the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum and the Tate Gallery, all the obvious places, simply because I’d never been to London before.”41 John Loker, a student who arrived at the college in 1955, recalls how they used to leave school on a Friday night, get themselves down to the Great North Road, the A1, and then hitchhike. When they arrived, in the early hours of the morning, they would buy a ticket on the Circle Line and then sleep on the train until the time the galleries began to open, at which point they would trudge round as many exhibitions as they could fit in.
“The amazing thing is,” says John, “that we would do these trips with virtually no money—we might have half a crown to last us the whole trip. We used to go to the Lyons Corner House café just off Trafalgar Square where they used to have a salad counter at which you could eat as much as you could fit on the plate. We used to get a plate and pile it up so high you had to hold both the top and the bottom of the plate to keep the salad from falling off. We’d stuff all this down us and very little else.” Hitchhiking back on Saturday nights, there were very few cars on the road, mostly just lorries, and they often ended up sleeping in a barn in the middle of nowhere, finally getting home on the Sunday evening. “It was a great thing to do and we always used to have a lot of fun doing silly studenty things. I remember one time in the Tate Gallery Norman Stevens fell asleep on one of the benches, and David took out a page from one of his notebooks, wrote ‘DO NOT DISTURB’ on it in block capitals and propped it up on him, and we just left him there.”42
Derek Stafford considered these trips a vital part of the students’ education. “I encouraged them to go to the National Gallery and look first at the old masters, and then go and look at the new masters, and they would see there was an evolution from one to the other, each demonstrating in their own way something of their own period. That is what they were going to be doing whether they liked it or not. I told them that they could not live outside their own period. I told them that the influences upon them were going to be the influences that were there just before them, and that they should not ignore them. If they rejected what was new, then they were going to become bad artists. They had to look, they had to absorb, and then evolution would take place which is a natural process of life.”43
It was on one of these trips to London that David first saw the work of Picasso, an artist about whom a high degree of philistinism prevailed. This ranged from Sir Alfred Munnings’s comment at a Royal Academy dinner that Picasso deserved to be kicked down the steps of Burlington House to the student at Bradford College nicknamed “Picasso,” because he couldn’t draw. “I was horrified,” says David, “because I knew that Picasso drew beautifully and I just thought to myself, ‘They haven’t been looking at Picasso properly.’ Well, I had, and I thought that whatever you didn’t know about abstraction, you should know that Picasso had done some marvellous paintings. I remember being very struck by Picasso’s painting of the Massacre in Korea which he painted in 1951 and which I saw when I was still at Bradford Grammar School. It was reproduced in all the newspapers and I remember at the time how it was dismissed as being nothing but communist propaganda. I thought to myself that whatever they said, Picasso was better than that.”44
That Hockney absorbed Stafford’s advice is clearly shown in some of his best early work, a series of self-portraits he painted at home. He did a fair amount of work at Hutton Terrace, which was far too small for a studio. “Our front bedroom is in a terrible state,” wrote Laura on 5 April. “What it is to have an artist son!! David thought he should be allowed to use the little bedroom for a studio (just decorated and all) but I positively refused. I need the room, and if David had it he would ruin it. We all appreciate his work, but he is getting to expect all and give nothing in return—his own room was dreadfully untidy. We compromised and as our front bedroom has to be decorated, I said David could finish his portrait in there. He is doing a full-length portrait of himself and has the wardrobe mirror dismantled and propped up where he can see it—a table littered with paints—brushes—etc—but he dropped paint on the carpet just where he hadn’t covered it with newspapers. Kenneth thinks I should let David use the little room, but I still think he should respect other people’s work as well as his own. He is a happy go lucky fellow, a real anarchist—but it just won’t do.”45
Self Portrait, 1954 (illustration credit 2.5)
The portrait Laura was referring to is one of three self-portraits Hockney painted in 1954, the earliest of which shows him three-quarters on, staring intensely into a mirror with a look of both concentration and hesitancy on his face, his hair flopping against his forehead, and a background of the rooftops of Hutton Terrace. It is a remarkably assured portrait of a young man on the threshold of life, a little shy and a little uncertain. While this painting owes much to the traditional academic approach of the Euston Road School, the next self-portrait, painted against a backdrop of newspaper clippings and boldly using blocks of colour to depict his distinctive clothes—a bright yellow tie and long red scarf—takes a much more modern approach. Finally, the third picture—a striking lithograph in five colours, in which he is seated in a chair before a background of yellow wallpaper, the black and white lines in his pudding-basin haircut echoing the stripes of his tie and trousers—is, to quote Mark Glazebrook, “positively prophetic in its fluent line, its bright colour, its technical experimentation and in its direct, confident, quirky self-presentation.”46 Here was the evolution at work that Derek Stafford felt was so important.
By the end of 1954 Hockney was living and breathing the life of an art student, and showing the determination and devotion to work that would characterise his life. “He had this overriding passion for his work and nothing else,” Dave Oxtoby remembers, “and that was a tremendous influence on everybody.”47 Through him they suddenly saw that painting was the centre of their world, and it bound them together closely as a group. “I loved it all,” wrote Hockney, “and I used to spend twelve hours a day in the art school. There were classes from nine-thirty to twelve-thirty, from two to four-thirty; and from five to seven. Then there were night classes from seven to nine, for older people coming in from the outside. If you were a full-time student, you could stay for those as well; they always had a model, so I just stayed and drew all the time right through to nine o’clock.”48
But Hockney also threw himself into the extracurricular activities of the painting department, though he was never without a sketch pad. There were card games in the common room during the lunch hour, where he was likely to be discussing with Stafford subjects varying from vegetarianism and the perils of smoking to the theory of art. In the evenings
they would go down to one of several pubs to play darts, sessions that would invariably end up with Hockney singing his favourite song, “Bye Bye Blackbird,” at the piano, or bringing the house down by pulling his face so that he looked exactly like Orson Welles. The games of darts eventually led to them forming a darts team to take on Leeds School of Art at a pub near Leeds Town Hall. During one of these visits, Hockney was introduced to an elderly artist, Jacob Kramer, a former Vorticist and associate of Wyndham Lewis and William Roberts, who had enjoyed a measure of fame in the 1920s but had since fallen on hard times. Often mistaken for a tramp by those who didn’t know of his distinguished past, he was reduced to propping up the bar and telling stories in return for drinks. Nevertheless, he made a powerful impression on the young Hockney. “I had seen some of his work because he had two or three paintings in Leeds City Art Gallery. He had lived and worked in Paris and was living proof to me that it was possible to make a living as an artist. And I thought to myself, ‘This is a real artist, not just a teacher. He may have met Picasso or Braque or any of those people. He’s a real link with bohemian Paris.’ I was a bold little kid and I thought this was really exciting.”49
While Dave Oxtoby, Norman Stevens and John Loker had a skiffle group and played at the occasional college dance—Oxtoby on tea-chest bass, Loker on washboard and Stevens on vocals, alongside three guitarists and a banjo player—skiffle was of little interest to Hockney. He only loved classical music, which he used to play very loudly at home. “When we used to go to the Hockneys’ house,” Philip Naylor remembers, “the lounge was really tiny and David used to like to tuck himself away in there and listen to his music. One day he decided that we were uncultured little oiks, and made us sit in there and he played us his Mozart records on the Deutsche Grammophon label and conducted for us using a pencil as a baton.”50 At weekends, Hockney would go down to St. George’s Hall, where he had secured himself and his fellow students jobs selling programmes in return for free seats to hear the world-renowned resident orchestra, the Hallé, conducted by Sir John Barbirolli. “I had my free seat all the way through my time at college,” he recalls, “and I would just sit and listen and draw. It was lovely.” Pages of drawings in his sketchbooks reflect this, annotated with titles such as “Second Bassoon, Hallé, Saturday 29th,” “Beethoven’s Symphoney [sic] No. 1” and “Listening to Sibelius.” He also designed the occasional poster to advertise a concert.
David Hockney Page 5