David Hockney

by Christopher Simon Sykes

  There was a thriving scene based in and around La Cienega Boulevard, where Felix Landau, given the title of the “Tastemaker of La Cienega” by the LA Times, had opened his gallery in 1951 to show established greats like Rico Lebrun and Jack Zajac; his was the first Los Angeles gallery to show Francis Bacon. Landau eschewed pop art, leaving that to galleries such as the Rolf Nelson, and the Ferus, the latter where Irving Blum had given Andy Warhol his first solo exhibition, and his first exhibition of the Soup Cans, and among whose leading representatives were Billy Al Bengston, Ed Kienholz and Larry Bell, the self-styled “Studs” who would saunter into Barney’s Beanery, a bar at the top of the street, as if they were members of some Hell’s Angels gang.

  The Beanery was the premier LA art-world hangout, as much for the fact that Barney was willing to carry a tab as for its prime location so close to all the galleries. It was dimly lit, the drinks were cheap, the bartenders friendly, and it adjoined an inexpensive diner where artists could afford to eat. It became so popular that in 1965 Ed Kienholz turned it into a work of art, a tableau called The Beanery, which, when you looked into it, gave you the odour of beer, and the sound of clinking glasses and bar-room chatter from an audiotape.

  La Cienega Boulevard was also the scene of an LA cultural imperative: the Monday Night Art Walk. This was a tradition that had begun in 1961 when two dealers decided to hold simultaneous openings in the hope of attracting bigger crowds. Other galleries soon joined them, until it became a regular occurrence. “Monday night on La Cienega,” wrote the correspondent for Time magazine in July 1963, “is quite possibly not only the best free show in town but also one of the most popular institutions in Los Angeles County … Last week the 22 exhibitions ran the gamut of modernism, from a show of Arp and Henry Moore sculpture at the distinguished Felix Landau Gallery to paintings by pop artist Billy Al Bengston at the Ferus Gallery.”16 There was op art at the Feingarten Gallery, kinetic art at the Esther Robles Gallery, and if it was the weird and wonderful you were after then you needed to go no further than Cecil Hedrick and Jerry Jerome’s Ceeje Gallery, which showed the work of the renegades and mavericks.

  “On a Monday I would go to La Cienega,” Hockney recalls, “and I would walk up and down and I would tell them I was a young artist from England, and like that I got to know artists quickly.”

  He soon added Ed Ruscha, one of Irving Blum’s young stars, to his list of new friends. Another friendship he struck up at this time was with Christopher Isherwood, the writer whose Berlin Stories had so intrigued him, and to whom the poet Stephen Spender had given him an introduction. Isherwood had emigrated to the United States at the outbreak of the Second World War, where he had lived happily in California, first with the photographer Bill Caskey, and latterly with the artist Don Bachardy. Bachardy was thirty years younger than Isherwood and had such youthful looks that when they set up home together in 1953, when Bachardy was eighteen, the rumour went round that Isherwood had taken up with a twelve-year-old. In many ways the success of their relationship lay in the father-and-son aspect of it, and Isherwood actively encouraged Bachardy to go to art school to study painting seriously, and was immensely proud when he became successful.

  Hockney had found out that the house in which Isherwood lived, 145 Adelaide Drive, was just up the hill from the Tumble Inn. “Stephen Spender had bought etchings off me in 1961,” Hockney remembers, “and he certainly had written to Christopher Isherwood, because he knew that I was coming to LA. So I phoned him up and he simply invited me over for dinner.”17 Bachardy was away so Isherwood, slightly panicked at the idea of having to entertain a complete stranger on his own, rang his close friend Jack Larson, a screenwriter, librettist and actor, and asked him and his lover, the writer and director Jim Bridges, to come over and join them. “David arrived on a bicycle,” Larson remembers, “with this portfolio of drawings from A Rake’s Progress. The work was extraordinary and unlike anything I’d ever seen, and I could see immediately how talented he was. Frank O’Hara used to take me around places and explain in a lucid and dynamic way why Jackson Pollock was extraordinary, or why Kline was extraordinary and it turned out that he was almost right about everything, whether it was poetry and literature or painting. I learned from him to look at something and trust my judgement, and right away I saw that these drawings of the Rake’s Progress were real, and that David was the real thing, original and interesting. They looked like something that could have been on the wall of a pharaoh.”18

  Christopher Isherwood (illustration credit 6.1)

  Isherwood hit it off with Hockney straight away, initially for the simple reason that he fell in love with the way he spoke. “Chris called me up,” Bachardy remembers, “and told me that he’d met this quite extraordinary young Englishman with bleached blond hair and glasses with a wonderful Yorkshire accent that he fell for immediately because it was the same accent that he would have had if he hadn’t been sent off to public school.”19 Isherwood had been born at Wyberslegh Hall, on the borders of Cheshire and Greater Manchester, where he spent much of his childhood, before being sent off to prep school in Surrey, and then to Repton in Derbyshire. Even after years of living in America, he still had strong feelings of nostalgia for his childhood: meeting Hockney brought back a whiff of home.

  A week later, Bachardy also met and immediately liked Hockney. “He was so easy to get to know,” he recalls, “and he and Chris had already established a friendship. And I saw straight away that he was inner-directed. He was a young man with a purpose.”20 Initially a little in awe of Isherwood, Hockney soon relaxed around him and found common ground in their love of reading and literature: it was the beginning of what was to be one of the key friendships of his life. As Isherwood was to tell him later on, “Oh David, we’ve so much in common: we love California, we love American boys, and we’re from the North of England.”21

  Scarcely had Hockney settled into his new life than Kasmin arrived from London, another Los Angeles virgin, now looking to his young client to show him the ropes. “David had found me a room in a place which he thought was very swanky called ‘Gene Autry’s Hotel Continental,’ ” Kasmin remembers. “It was on Sunset, very close to Schwab’s Coffee House, where girls used to go for coffee and hope to be picked up by casting directors. David lived in a rented room in Santa Monica, and he decided he would come and share the room with me. To his amazement I had no idea who Gene Autry was, and so it seemed to him a waste that I should be staying there.”22 One thing about the hotel that puzzled Hockney was the fact that the elevators were always filled with serious-looking men in dark suits, a mystery solved when they discovered that the hotel was the business headquarters for the local branch of the Mafia. Any qualms Hockney may have had about the discovery of this piece of information were, however, made up for by the swimming pool on the roof, where he spent many happy hours tanning himself.

  Ever since he had arrived in LA, Hockney had been planning to pay a visit to the offices of AMG, the Athletic Model Guild, the publisher of Physique Pictorial. He was intrigued by the fact that though many of the storylines were set indoors, in a bathroom for example, there was often the strong shadow of a palm tree across the bath, suggesting that the pictures were in fact shot outside. He both wanted to see where this happened and buy some of the photographs, so he took Kasmin to the studios, which were on downtown 11th Street in a house which the founder of the AMG, a photographer called Bob Mizer, shared with his mother. The city jail, situated close by, provided quite a few of the models for the magazine, in the way of drunken sailors and similar types who were in the can overnight, while the rest were usually young men who were killing time while searching for the Hollywood Dream. It was their way of earning a quick ten bucks.

  “We went down to a suburban backstreet,” Kasmin remembers, “to an innocent-looking house in nowhere-land, and pressed a bell on a door in a sort of privet hedge, and we were let in. David told them he’d come from England and that he was an admirer of the magazine. We found ourse
lves in a perfectly ordinary house, which had a lean-to in the back garden near a pool.”23

  Surrounding the “tacky” swimming pool were a series of Holly-wood ancient-Greek plaster statues, and the lean-to constituted the studio where they would create the shower, bathroom or living room which they needed for their shoots. There were notices everywhere warning people not to touch anything, because Mizer knew that as soon as they weren’t being watched, the models would steal every-thing and run off. “The studio only had two walls,” Kasmin recalls, “so they could move the camera around, and this was where his idea of paradise was created, where the boys stood taking their showers. We both thought it was hilarious and were amazed at the roughness of it all, and the fact that you could make glossy dreams out of such shabby bits of plywood, while they were astonished at the idea of anyone wanting to come to their offices.”24 Mizer’s answer to anyone who criticised the quality of the sets was to say, “Remember we are AMG, not MGM.”25

  The photographs which Hockney bought on that first visit to AMG were the inspiration for a series of voyeuristic paintings featuring showers, the first of which was Boy About to Take a Shower, based on a shot of a fourteen-year-old boy, Earl Deane, which had appeared in the April 1961 issue. Standing in a shower cubicle, he is handling the spray with water cascading down his back. The painting omits both his head, which is visible in the photograph, and the water, while emphasising the shower head and the lines of his naked body, creating an overtly sexual image. The shower paintings which followed this, Man in Shower in Beverly Hills and Man Taking Shower, both made much use of the water. “Americans take showers all the time,” Hockney says. “I knew that from experience and physique magazines … Beverly Hills houses seemed full of showers of all shapes and sizes—with clear glass doors, with frosted glass doors, with transparent curtains, with semi-transparent curtains … The idea of painting moving water in a very slow and careful manner was, and still is, very appealing to me.”26

  When Hockney returned to London at the end of the year and was asked by Richard Hamilton to give a lecture at the ICA, he chose the subject of gay imagery in America, basing his talk around Physique Pictorial. With enormous glee he regaled his audience with his account of visiting the AMG studio, showing slides from the magazine alongside clips from soft-porn movies with titles like Leave My Ball Alone, in which a Greek statue comes to life and indulges in a bout of nude wrestling with a young boy who has stolen his ball. While delivering a thought-provoking lecture, he also had the audience in stitches with his witty and mischievous comments on the contrived scenarios.

  The gay scene in LA may still have been underground, but to Hockney it certainly seemed more accessible. “Nowadays people are used to an organised gay scene,” he says, “but in those days things were very different, and it was only here that I found a scene that did not exist elsewhere. I suppose I was like a child in a sweet shop. The California beach was like heaven. The boys are very good-looking and they look after their bodies.”27 He admits to having been thoroughly promiscuous for the first and only time in his life. “I used to go to the bars in Los Angeles and pick up somebody. Half the time they didn’t turn you on, or you didn’t turn them on, or something like that. And the way people in Los Angeles went on about numbers!”28 One drawing from this period, Two Figures by Bed with Cushions, brilliantly evokes the urgency of such sexual liaisons, showing two men apparently hurriedly undressing in preparation for an encounter of which, after it was over, as Hockney later recalled, the only memory would be the appearance of the bed. Kasmin, a somewhat unwilling companion on these trips to gay bars, often had to be protected from unwanted attention by Hockney saying that he was his date and dragging him onto the dance floor. “Neither of us were very great dancers,” he recalls, “and Californians are all so big. On one occasion David took me to a bar, and they refused to give me a beer because I didn’t have my passport on me and they thought I was underage. I was David’s dealer aged twenty-eight, and David said, ‘Oh, don’t worry! Just give my young friend a glass of milk. He’ll be quite happy.’ ”29

  The true reason that Kasmin had come to LA was to further spread the word about Hockney among serious collectors. Meeting people was never a difficulty for Hockney, because they almost always loved him as soon as they met him. He was open and funny and, particularly to the Americans, he was exotic. They loved his clothes and his accent. Likewise, he thought Americans were hilarious, as well as being thrilled to meet actors he had admired since he was a boy, such as Vincent Price, who invited him and Kasmin for a drink at his home, where he had a library built into a disused swimming pool and served them cocktails from a coffin-shaped cabinet.

  Most important were collectors such as Betty Asher, the daughter of a wealthy pharmacist, who had been collecting contemporary art since the late fifties and owned important works by Rauschenberg, Warhol, Ruscha and Lichtenstein; and Betty Freeman, who had trained as a concert pianist and who collected abstract expressionist paintings and was a patron to many composers. It was Jack Larson who introduced them to Betty Freeman. “He told me he’d got this new friend,” Kasmin recalls, “who was avant-garde. ‘The stuff on her lawn looks like grass,’ he said, ‘but it’s more like watercress.’ ”30

  California Art Collector, which was based on these and other meetings, was the second painting completed by Hockney in LA, and included domestic imagery common to the type of collector he had visited. Since all the houses had big comfortable armchairs, the collector, a woman, is seated in one, on a big fluffy carpet, admiring a sculpture by the Scottish artist Bill Turnbull, then sculptor of choice to the nouveau riche. A striped painting, possibly by Morris Louis, hangs on a pink wall; there is a primitive stone head, while outside there are palm trees, a view of the Santa Monica Mountains—and, most significantly of all, a swimming pool, the first to appear in Hockney’s paintings.

  *

  Though Hockney had begun Man in Shower in Beverly Hills in Santa Monica, it was actually completed in Iowa City, where, in the summer of 1964, he was offered a six-week job teaching at the University of Iowa, in the heart of the Midwest. The invitation came from Byron Burford, the dean of the university art department, and a painter himself. Never having experienced the American interior, Hockney accepted the post eagerly, and a salary of $1,500. He took the painting off its stretcher, rolled it up, put it in the boot of his car and, deciding to go via Chicago, set off on Route 66. “I drove through Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, Missouri and Illinois,” he remembers, “picking up hitchhikers all the way. The freeway wasn’t done, so I took the old road. I drove on my own and I stayed in Chicago for five days and looked at the big museums and things, and then drove west to Iowa City.”31 All the while he was nervous about what was in store on his first major teaching post, not just because of what was expected of him, but because of his appearance. Somehow he didn’t feel he looked serious enough. Somewhere en route, he happened to pass an optician’s with a pair of heavy round horn-rimmed spectacles in the window, which he decided were just what was needed to give him a more professorial look. He ditched his National Health spectacles, and wearing his new “owl” pair, he drove confidently into Iowa City, and straight through it from one end to the other, in the mistaken belief that he was just passing through its suburbs.

  Iowa was a real culture shock for Hockney. He found it stiflingly dull. The landscape was boring and flat, with mile after mile of identical houses stretching into the distant skyline, and the only occasional excitement was to be found in the form of huge electrical storms and massive fast-moving cloud formations. The faculty was very conservative, and when he took his first drawing class he was shocked to find that most of those attending were doing so not out of a desire to learn to draw, but because they got paid more money as a teacher if they were known to have attended this particular class. “There were three nuns in the class,” he remembers, “and I thought that maybe they were in it for the drawing, but no, it was the same thing. They wanted to get money
from teaching.”32

  One advantage of the lack of a social life in this small city—there was one bar he liked, but it was as much a bohemian hangout as a gay bar—was that Hockney devoted almost all his spare time to painting. He completed Man in Shower in Beverly Hills, and four other pictures, The Actor, Arizona, Cubist Boy with Colourful Tree and Iowa, a landscape, depicting farm buildings beneath a dramatic cloudscape, to remind him of a place he had little intention of returning to. His routine was to paint at night, and then go swimming in the local pools, which didn’t close till two in the morning. “… perhaps it was three or four till I got to bed,” he told Cecil Beaton, “so I couldn’t get up at eight o’clock, so I’d go in at ten thirty and stay till one, but no one seemed to care.” Because none of the students could paint a sphere, he set his class to paint a door. “They all got canvases the size of a door and painted as realistically as possible, and we had an exhibition of all the doors down a corridor. It looked nice.”33 When Patrick Procktor came to teach in Iowa the following year, Hockney recalls, “he found out that they didn’t consider me as having been too respectable. He was much more willing to spend evenings with the art history faculty after hours. I didn’t really care. I think Patrick was a little more polite than me, and he did tell me later that they wouldn’t employ me there again.”34

  When the six weeks were over, Hockney had the paintings all shipped to Charles Alan’s gallery in New York, and set off to meet Ossie Clark in Chicago, the plan being that they would drive together to New Orleans. It turned out to be the beginning of an epic road trip. Clark had won a competition for shoe design and had used the £150 prize money to fly first to New York, where, on a night out on the tiles, he had met Brian Epstein, the manager of the Beatles. “Introduced to Eppie in a gay bar …” he wrote in his diary. “… going down in a lift with BE.” When Clark told him he was heading west to meet Hockney, Epstein had given him a note which he had promised would get them access to the Beatles’ upcoming concert at the Hollywood Bowl in LA. Later that evening, Clark was refused a beer at PJ Clarke’s, as the barman thought he was underage. “ ‘What’s a beer please?’ (I’D AVOID EYE CONTACT.) ‘Alright, you’ve caught me out, I’ll have milk,’ ” and someone took a dislike to his long hair. “ ‘Fucking long-haired faggot! Listen buddy, this is a tough town and if I were you I’d leave.’ ”35