Among the guests was the director of the Bradford City Art Gallery, Peter Bird, who wrote to Kasmin on 9 December, “I think there is a possibility of our being able to acquire something for the gallery here, and I mentioned this to David Hockney when I last saw him in Bradford.”57
The reviews for the show were mixed. Edwin Mullins, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, considered it “a considerable achievement: to be able to use figurative imagery today in a manner that is neither a painstaking alternative to the photograph nor the excuse for some striking patterns of light and movement. But to use them in fact as dramatic material. Bacon has done it, but very few others besides.”58 John Russell said the show “had given foreign visitors something to bite on when they ask what is happening in British art,”59 while Hugh Gordon Porteous, in the Listener, wrote that when he had worked all the “perilous adolescent stuff out of his system, Hockney … promises to develop into that kind of artist—and here we may think of the imperfections of Blake as well as of the rare perfections of Hogarth or Goya—who is indeed a rather special kind of man.”60 Neville Wallis, writing in the Spectator, took a more measured view. “The importance of being Hockney,” he wrote, “is not to be ignored at this moment when the reputation of the golden youth from the Royal College is ballooning …” but, he continued, “in his large and lightly brushed paintings at the Kasmin Gallery … his natural sense of the bizarre can degenerate into frivolous exhibitionism … Oriental tags and shreds of what-nots are all pressed into the service of this self-consciously naive imagery. It exhibits a magpie alertness. But overshadowed by Bacon’s dreadful power and the intense subjectivity of Larry Rivers and Kitaj, their attitudinizing junior is cut down to his size.” On the other hand, he continued, “his darty, needly drawing is another matter,”61 and to a man the critics all raved about A Rake’s Progress, showing simultaneously at the Print Centre.
Much to the annoyance of his father, who had been looking forward to spending a long weekend in London, Hockney did not invite his parents to the private view, but fixed up instead for them to make a day trip to see the show on 10 December, an arrangement that Ken took “very badly.”62 “David met us at Kings Cross,” wrote Laura, “where first we had coffee. Then went to the Kasmin Gallery. I was pleasantly surprised with the exhibition and had David to interpret what I did not understand.”63 After lunch at a vegetarian restaurant in Kensington, he took them to look at the prints. “My parents didn’t really comment on my pictures,” says Hockney. “As far as my mother was concerned, if they were by me then she liked them. That’s what mothers do. I don’t think they were that interested in pictures and I don’t think they would have known the good ones from the bad ones.”64
Among the many members of London’s artistic elite who attended the show was Hockney’s early patron, Cecil Beaton. “… on to crowded David Hockney exhibition,” he wrote in his diary on 11 December. “He is undoubtedly an original, and his engravings for Rake’s Progress are beautiful. This Bradford boy with the yellow glasses, yellow dyed hair and exaggerated north-country accent was accosted at vernissage by an irate lady. In a loud voice she challenged him for drawing his nude women in such a distorted manner. ‘Can you really imagine that is the way the arm comes out of the socket? Look at their bosoms—they’re nowhere near where they should be. Have you ever seen a naked woman?’ ‘A dorn’t knogh ars ah harve!’ ”65
Before leaving for America, he went home for Christmas. “David had brought gifts for everyone,” wrote Laura, “but said Dad’s & mine would follow later. However he could not contain himself & said we may as well have them—but they would not be in effect till January 8/64. I think he was as thrilled to give as we were to receive a cheque for £50 each. It is wonderful & I am so glad he is giving us some of the benefit of his good fortune.”66 Three days later he left Bradford on the 7 a.m. train to London on the first leg of what was to be a great adventure. “… a thought for David,” mused Laura, “a thankfulness that his work which is also his pleasure has brought him success & thankful that he has shared his financial gains in all our lovely gifts. Only I pray will he keep good & use his gifts for the world’s good.”67
On 30 December, Hockney left London for New York, secure in the knowledge that he had enough money to allow him to spend a year in America. The Kasmin show had also been a sell-out, netting him a couple of hundred pounds. “I knew I had a star on my hands straight away,” Kasmin recalls, “though David did not have a big head. He was neither a boaster nor did he expect things. He took it all with great ease and grace. It didn’t go to his head. It’s not as if he stayed at home and lapped it all up. Instead he went off to work in a foreign city where he wasn’t known at all, where he wasn’t treated as a star, and where he didn’t know the ropes.”68
CHAPTER SIX
A HOLLYWOOD COLLECTION
In the autumn of 1963, Hockney had begun an affair with Ossie Clark, Mo McDermott’s friend from Manchester, that was to have huge significance in his life. Extroverted and charismatic, Clark exuded confidence. He was just into his second year and starting to blossom under the tutelage of the brilliant professor Janey Ironside, head of fashion design at the Royal College of Art. Clark had been a precocious stylist even back in Manchester, which in those days was provincial compared to London. “He wore flares he’d made himself and 13-inch winklepickers, a trilby hat and a long black ex-army coat; his hair was dyed black, meticulously cut short in the fashion of the day,” remembers Jane Normanton, a fellow student at the time, who recalls thinking, “ ‘Wow, you can do that in London, but not here! He was determined to go places.’ ”1
Though he was quite openly gay, Clark was in a relationship with Celia Birtwell, who had followed McDermott down from Manchester and was working as a waitress in the Hades coffee bar. Theirs was a friendship which, stimulated by a shared interest in fashion and design, as well as by a certain physical attraction, had drifted into an affair, and they were living together in Notting Hill, in a tiny flat above a bicycle shop on Westbourne Grove. When Clark met Hockney, however, the combination of his sexuality, charm and seeming innocence, not to mention his star being in the ascendant, was too much, and Clark was immediately seduced.
“Taken up seriously by DH,” Clark noted in his diary for 1963. “He was giddy, effeminate, mad and exaggerated,” Hockney recalls, “and I liked the personality immediately. He didn’t have a northern accent because he’d taken elocution lessons.” They were young, free from their parents, ambitious and keen to try out new experiences. “Mo used to organise sexy evenings at Powis Terrace. We enjoyed playing around, we enjoyed sex. When it came to sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll, everybody was at it, though I was never into rock ’n’ roll. Sex and drugs certainly. It was a potent combination.”2
When Hockney embarked on the longed-for U.S. trip at the end of December, flying first to New York, Clark agreed that he would visit during the college holidays. Hockney stayed with Mark Berger and visited the Pratt Institute where he completed and sold two etchings, Edward Lear and Jungle Boy, the latter, which portrays a very hairy man under a palm tree staring at a large snake, being inspired by Mark who was extremely hirsute and kept snakes as pets. These earned him a princely sum, $2,000, good pocket money for his trip to LA. He also visited the New York dealer Charles Alan, who had seen Hockney’s work at the Kasmin Gallery, and was keen to give him a show at his gallery on Madison Avenue. It was agreed that Hockney would exhibit pictures from his California trip in the autumn.
As they discussed the next stage of the trip, Alan discovered how limited Hockney’s knowledge of Los Angeles was. In fact, he was so worried when he found out that not only did Hockney not know a soul in LA, but that he couldn’t drive either, that he tried to persuade him to go to San Francisco instead. But Hockney was adamant he was going to LA. Part of its glamorous appeal was sex, or the perceived availability of it, not just the perfect bodies he had yearned after through the pages of Physique Pictorial, but the sleazy, homoerotic side
as portrayed in John Rechy’s City of Night, his novel of hustlers in New York, Los Angeles and New Orleans. It is easy to understand from the vivid LA section how exciting it must have made the city seem to a relatively innocent young man eager to widen his experiences. “This is clip street, hustle street—frenzied-nightactivity street: the moving back and forth against the walls; smoking, peering anxiously to spot the bulls before they spot you; the rushing in and out of Wally’s and Harry’s: long crowded malehustling bars.”3
As Hockney was leaving the gallery, Alan said, “But if you don’t drive, how on earth are you going to get into the city?” When Hockney replied, “I’ll just catch a bus,” Alan realised how clueless he was about the place, with its hundreds of square miles of suburbs, and contacted one of his artists, an LA-based sculptor called Oliver Andrews, to ask if he would meet Hockney at the airport.
Approaching Los Angeles airport Hockney became more and more excited. “I remember flying in on an afternoon, and as we flew in over Los Angeles I looked down to see blue swimming pools all over, and I realised that a swimming pool in England would have been a luxury, whereas here they are not, because of the climate. Because you can use it all the year round, even cheap apartment blocks have pools.”4 Oliver Andrews was waiting for him in his Ford pickup truck, and drove him to the Tumble Inn, a small motel at the bottom of Santa Monica Canyon. “David immediately sent a telegram back to Charles Alan,” Andrews later wrote, “telling him he had safely arrived, and said ‘Venice California more beautiful than Venice Italy.’ ”5
Hockney was even more thrilled arriving in LA than he had been on his first trip to New York. “I was so excited,” he wrote. “I think it was partly a sexual fascination and attraction … I checked into this motel and walked on the beach and I was looking for the town; couldn’t see it. And I saw some lights and I thought, that must be it. I walked two miles and when I got there all it was was a big gas station, so brightly lit I’d thought it was the city. So I walked back and thought, what am I going to do?”6 The solution came to him in a flash—a bicycle—so when Andrews came round the next day to check on him, they went off to a cycle store.
Since the only knowledge Hockney had of Los Angeles was derived from City of Night, he decided to visit Pershing Square to try and experience first hand the sleazy, sexy, hot nightlife so evocatively described by Rechy, the world of “the nervous fugitives from Times Square, Market Street SF, the French Quarter—masculine hustlers looking for lonely fruits to score from … the scattered junkies, the small-time pushers, the queens, the sad panhandlers, the lonely exiled nymphs haunting the entrance to the men’s head, the fruits with the hungry eyes and jingling coins; the tough teenage chicks—‘dittybops’—making it with the lost hustlers … all amid the incongruous piped music and the flowers-twin fountains gushing rainbow colored: the world of Lonely America squeezed into Pershing Square …”7 Checking on a map, Hockney saw that Wilshire Boulevard ran from close to the Tumble Inn, ending a few blocks from Pershing Square, so he jumped on his new bike. There were two things, however, he had failed to take into account. The first was the distance, which was nearly seventeen miles, and the second was the fact that the real Pershing Square might be different from that described in the novel.
“I started cycling,” he later wrote. “I got to Pershing Square and it was deserted; about nine in the evening, just got dark, not a soul there. I thought, where is everybody? I had a glass of beer and thought, it’s going to take me an hour or more to get back; so I just cycled back and I thought, this just won’t do, this bicycle is useless.”8 When Oliver came round the following morning, religiously keeping up his promise to keep an eye on Alan’s protégé, he was lost for words when Hockney told him he had cycled to Pershing Square. Nobody ever went to downtown LA, he told him, and suggested to Hockney that they should go out and buy him a car. The fact that he couldn’t drive would not be a barrier, he promised, as he would give him some lessons. As for the licence, obtaining one in California was easy.
Over the next few days Oliver gave Hockney some instruction in his pickup truck, before taking him off to get a licence. This procedure consisted of filling in a form and answering a simple written test, with questions like “What is the speed limit in California?” whose multiple-choice answers required little more than common sense to answer correctly. In the driving test, when they asked him where his car was, he pointed to the truck. The instructor, who by now thought he was quite mad, drove around with him for an hour or so, failed him on four points, but awarded him a provisional licence anyway. “How easily I got it terrified me actually,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘So this is all they do here to get one?’ I mean, in England they deliberately fail a lot of people. In the end I just thought, ‘Well, that’s the kind of place it is.’ ”9 With plenty of money in his pocket, Oliver then took him to buy a car, and for $1,000 dollars Hockney became the owner of a white Ford Falcon with a bright red stripe down the sides.
He now set out to practise on the local roads, heeding Oliver’s one piece of advice, which was “Avoid the freeways.” Needless to say, on his second day behind the wheel he found himself on a freeway by mistake, an experience that both thrilled and frightened him. “Once I got on,” he remembers, “I didn’t know how to get off it, so I just kept going, and the sign said San Bernadino, and then Las Vegas, another 250 miles, and I thought I might as well just drive through the desert. It would be good practice and it would give me confidence. So I drove to Las Vegas. I even went to the casino there and won some money, about $80, on my first trip to a casino.” Travelling back on the old road through the desert, he passed through the Mojave Desert city of Barstow, and when he stopped for gas they gave him canvas bags full of water in case the car overheated. “Of course I loved all that,” he recalls. “I felt it was like the Sahara I was crossing.”10
Finding a studio and somewhere to live in LA was not difficult in those days. Taking the advice of Oliver Andrews and of Bill Brice, another artist Charles Alan introduced him to, he just drove around looking at “For Rent” signs, and soon found rooms for $90 a month in a Santa Monica apartment house which looked like the superstructure of a 1930s ocean liner, as well as a studio on Main Street in Venice, overlooking the ocean, for $80. Within spitting distance he also discovered a small shop that sold some imported foods, including Marmite and his favourite cereal, Weetabix. When he asked for bloater paste, however, he was told they did not import it since it was not considered fit for human consumption. “Within a week of arriving … in this strange big city, not knowing a soul,” he noted, “I’d passed the driving test, bought a car, driven to Las Vegas and won some money, got myself a studio, started painting all in a week. And I thought: it’s just how I imagined it would be.”11
One day a week, usually on a Monday, he would take out his car and cruise the big wide boulevards of LA, just to look at what was around him. He was endlessly thrilled by what he saw and took inspiration from everything—palm trees, banks, squares and avenues, office blocks, not to mention the weird and wonderful variety of domestic architecture, the Spanish haciendas, the mock-Tudor villas, the castellated mansions, the Swiss chalets, all sitting alongside futuristic buildings like John Lautner’s Garcia House on Mulholland Drive, or his Chemosphere on Torreyson. “Los Angeles is the only place in the world,” he says, “where the buildings actually make you smile when you drive around.”12
“There were no paintings of Los Angeles,” he told Melvyn Bragg, in an interview in the Listener in 1975. “People then didn’t even know what it looked like. And when I was there they were still finishing some of the big freeways. I remember seeing, within the first week, a ramp of a freeway going up into the air, and at first it looked like a ruin and I suddenly thought, ‘My God, this place needs its Piranesi; Los Angeles could have a Piranesi, so here I am!’ ”13 So, rather than his own ideas or things he’d seen in a book, Hockney began to paint the things he saw around him.
The first picture Hockney paint
ed in Los Angeles, Plastic Trees Plus City Hall, shows a large palm tree in front of a cloudy sky with the City Hall skyscraper in the background. It was also the first painting in which he successfully used acrylic paint. This was a medium he had tried once before, back in London, but had abandoned because the textures and colours of the paints he could get hold of were not very good. Finding only American equipment in an LA art store, however, he discovered that their acrylic paints were vastly superior and started to use them. “It was what a lot of the American artists were using,” he remembers. “It is different from oil paint because it dries very quickly, and you have to paint in certain ways with it.”14 Other characteristics of acrylic, such as its regular consistency, allowing it to be applied thinly while retaining its full brilliance of colour, go a long way to explaining the changes in Hockney’s painting style during this period. His paintings became flatter and much more about image and colour than about texture. “When you use simple and bold colours,” he later wrote, “acrylic is a fine medium; the colours are very intense and they stay intense …”15
Until arriving in LA, Hockney had been quite ignorant about the existence of a Californian art scene. Yet he had happened on a golden age in LA, a period when art was all about art and artists, not institutions and money.
David Hockney Page 16