David Hockney

by Christopher Simon Sykes

  Arriving in Cadaqués to find Boman in residence did little for Hockney’s state of mind. Nor did the fact that it was the height of the summer season and the town was crawling with tourists, including a large group of English gilded youth who were guests of the brewing heir Jonathan Guinness and his wife Sue who had a house up in the hills. The Guinnesses had invited Lancaster to bring his party to a picnic they were holding on top of a rock down the coast, to which they would all be travelling by boat. When Hockney heard about this, he went into a sulk. “I’m not going,” he said. “It’s too social and there are too many Hoorays.”59 Lancaster, Schlesinger and Boman paid no attention and went down to the harbour, followed by an increasingly agitated Hockney.

  “There was a screaming match at the dock,” Boman remembers, “when everyone was on the boat, and it was leaving for the lunch. Peter was on it and David was standing on the dock in tears. He was making an ultimatum, which was, ‘If you go on this picnic, you can’t come back.’ ” At that point, Schlesinger says, “Everyone was getting involved. Richard Hamilton was shouting and David was crying. He said, ‘I’m leaving. Come with me.’ And I said, ‘No, I’m staying here,’ and he shouted ‘Fuck off’ and left.”60

  Completely distraught, Hockney jumped into his car with the intention of driving back to Carennac alone, but got no further than the medieval town of Perpignan, just north of the Spanish border, where he decided to stay the night in the Grand Hotel. As much to his surprise as theirs, he encountered George Lawson and Wayne Sleep there, en route from Barcelona where they had been staying with the Spanish sculptor Xavier Corberó. “David was in a state and on his own,” Lawson remembers, “so we had to go and sit by his bed. Then as we were sitting there was an earthquake, and the chandelier began to shake, and the bell of the clock tower crashed to the ground. The next morning we said to him, ‘What a night! What a night!’ and he said, ‘What do you mean? I’m very upset.’ And we said, ‘David, there was an earthquake. The whole hotel was shaking,’ and he just said, ‘Oh, I’m very upset with Peter.’ He was having an internal earthquake, which had quite overwhelmed him.”61

  Arriving back at Carennac, Hockney burst into floods of tears at the sight of Clark and McDermott, totally disconsolate at what he had done. To top it all he got an unexpected and unwelcome surprise. In the excitement of the last few months he had completely forgotten about Jack Hazan, who was still anxiously pursuing him and, hearing that Hockney was going to be staying with Kasmin, had decided to drive down there on the off chance of getting some more film in the can. After arriving with his sound recordist to find no sign of David, he had decided to stick around anyway and film whatever was going on. “We concocted a scene together,” Jack recalls, “with Mo and Ossie playing around in the chateau. I was filming that, when who should arrive but David, and he came in and saw me. I turned the motor off and he looked at me and said, ‘Oh my God!’ and was really upset and left. I didn’t speak to him until that evening when we were having dinner and it was made quite clear to me that I couldn’t do any more and I had to leave the next day.”62

  Remorse now set in and Hockney began to regret his behaviour towards Schlesinger. “I thought, I’ve been really cruel to Peter, what a rotten thing I’ve done. So I said I must phone up and apologise, and say I didn’t mean to be bitchy if I was bitchy.”63 Since reaching him by telephone was complicated, and ultimately involved leaving messages, he decided to drive back to Cadaqués, speak to Schlesinger in person and then leave, hopefully on less of a sour note. As it happened, Clark was planning to drive to Nice the following day to stay with Mick Jagger at the Villa Nellcôte, where the Stones were recording their album Exile on Main Street, so he said he would take Hockney there. Maurice Payne and Mo McDermott decided to go along too. “I drove down there with Mo,” Payne remembers, “and David drove with Ossie in his huge Bentley. When you’re losing somebody you pull out all the stops and I think David was absolutely distraught.”64

  When Hockney reached Mark Lancaster’s, however, he was the last person Schlesinger wanted to see. “Peter said, ‘I don’t want you to stay here, get out of this town’…I said, ‘I’ve just driven back, I’m not going to leave now; I’m going to stay a day, I’m going to rest’…Richard Hamilton was quite amused by it all. He said, ‘The border police must know you very well, David.’ ”65 Hamilton offered to put them up and Hockney spent the time making a marvellous etching of him sitting in a chair holding a cheroot in his right hand. Not even the most profoundly emotional state could prevent him working. When he had finished, he returned to London, feeling a little better in the belief that he had made it up a bit with Peter. But it was the beginning of the end.

  After all the drama, Schlesinger and Boman had no desire to stay any longer in Cadaqués, so Clark offered to take them with him to Mick Jagger’s, an idea they jumped at. Schlesinger suggested that they should stop the night en route with Tony Richardson at Le Nid de Duc, but when they arrived there unannounced, Richardson, out of loyalty to Hockney, made it quite clear they were not welcome. So they drove straight on to the Villa Nellcôte, arriving in the early hours of the morning to find everyone asleep, and making themselves unpopular by eating an entire Paris-Brest pastry that had been intended for the next day’s lunch. The two boys crept into a maids’ room at the top of the house, and later that day, Clark drove them to the station where they boarded a train for Paris. It was standing room the whole way.

  “The end came,” Schlesinger says, “when I went to Greece with my parents right after all this, like a week later. We were in Athens first and then we went to stay with Mary North on Lindos. In Athens I got really mad at my father, and called him David. I never went back to David after that. When I got back to London, I told him that I was moving out.”66

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST

  David Hockney with Pentax (illustration credit 11.1)

  Hockney’s break-up with Schlesinger was the first really painful thing that had ever happened to him, and he took it very badly. He returned to London and his beautiful new flat, in which almost everything reminded him of his lost lover: the dining-room table and chairs, the leather sofa, the Lalique lamps, his paintings on the walls, and in the studio, on the easel, the almost completed Sur la Terrasse, a picture that exudes melancholy and nostalgia. They filled him with a deep sense of emptiness. He had no appetite for going out, or for staying in. “It was very traumatic for me,” he wrote, “I’d never been through anything like that. I was miserable, very, very unhappy. Occasionally I got on the verge of panic, that I was alone, and I started taking Valium … It was very lonely; I was incredibly lonely.”1 Things got worse when Schlesinger returned to London and was living just round the corner in his studio in Colville Terrace. “David never really accepted it,” Schlesinger recalls. “He was always asking me to a party or inviting me to dinner and asking me to do this and that, and there were tears and him asking me to move back in, pleading and pleading. And of course he was asking everybody for advice and they were giving it. Henry said, ‘Buy him a ring,’ and somebody else said he should buy a building with two studios so I could have a separate life. This all went on for some time.”2

  If it can ever be said that there was a silver lining to this dark cloud, it was that Hockney soon discovered that the solution to his unhappiness was to throw himself into work, initially for fourteen or fifteen hours a day, the result being that over the next year he was to produce an enormous volume of work. The ghost of Schlesinger haunts many of these paintings, not least Sur la Terrasse, a ravishing picture in blues and greens. It must have been hard for Hockney to put the finishing touches to it. There is an air of loneliness too about Pool and Steps, Le Nid de Duc, which shows a pair of Schlesinger’s sandals lying beside a swimming pool that is otherwise deserted. It is a painting that successfully makes use of a stain technique, favoured by American abstract artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, to depict the water, in which acrylic paint dil
uted with detergent and water is stained into the weave of the canvas. The fact that the picture was started in May 1971, while Hockney and Schlesinger were still living together, does not detract from the suggestion in the finished work of a relationship with somebody who is no longer there.

  A new painting, which Hockney began in September, was Still Life on a Glass Table, in which he revisited the favourite theme of painting transparency. In 1967, he had made an ink drawing, A Glass Table with Glass Objects, in which he tentatively explored this subject, but while that was a rather clumsily executed and naive sketch, the 1971 work is a masterpiece, “a virtuoso display,” wrote Marco Livingstone, “of Hockney’s recently acquired perceptual conviction in dealing with the refraction of light through glass, the reflections off it and the modifications of surface through it; yet through all this transparency he manages to endow the subject with a credible sense of weight and mass.”3 Though Hockney saw this as a fairly straightforward painting, various friends pointed out that all the objects on the table either belonged to or were particularly loved by Schlesinger, which led him to question whether unconsciously he might have chosen them to reflect his emotional state.

  The only painting he made at this time that can be said to have had no associations with Schlesinger was Rubber Ring Floating in a Swimming Pool, a very simple picture which on first sight could be taken for a Max Ernst abstract, and which was based entirely on a photograph taken in Cadaqués. “It’s almost copied from it,” wrote Hockney. “I was standing on the edge of the pool, the pool water was blue and there was this red ring, and I just looked down and pressed the shutter … At first glance it looks like an abstract painting, but when you read the title the abstraction disappears and it becomes something else.”4 To Henry Geldzahler, this painting was an indication of how Hockney was still interested in modernism, even if he had chosen to distance himself from it. “… he’s interested in modernism, he’s interested in goofing on it, he’s interested in learning from it, he’s interested in painting now, he’s interested in the whole panoply.”5

  The most important painting which he began work on at this time was a portrait of Schlesinger inspired by the accidental juxtaposition of two photographs lying on the studio floor. “One was of a figure,” he wrote, “swimming underwater and therefore quite distorted … and the other was of a boy gazing at something on the ground; yet because of the way the photographs were lying, it looked as though he was gazing at the distorted figure. The idea of once again painting two figures in different styles appealed so much that I began the painting immediately.”6 Schlesinger is the subject of Portrait of an Artist, dressed in a pink jacket and looking down into a pool with an underwater swimmer in it. He painted the swimmer first, using the same thin acrylic wash technique that he had employed on Pool and Steps, Le Nid de Duc in order to emphasise wetness. He then, however, coated the rest of the canvas with gesso, the traditional mixture of glue, chalk and pigment used to prepare surfaces, which prevented his altering either the position of the pool or the figure, and immediately got him into difficulties. “The figures never related to one another,” he recalled, “nor to the background. I changed the setting constantly from distant mountains to a claustrophobic wall and back again to mountains. I even tried a glass wall.”7

  He made occasional trips to Bradford and, though he never shared his unhappiness with his parents, was able to do things for them that took him temporarily out of himself. “David arrived at 11am,” wrote Laura on 5 October, “& we went to Leeds where we visited shops whilst David called at Leeds Art Gallery … then we went on to Harrogate. In Harrogate we bought gloves and a lovely suit for me (Ken’s choice) & some shirts and bow ties for Kenneth. What generosity & how I enjoyed shopping amongst beautiful things with no restraint—but most of all I love David’s kindness of heart—the pleasure he gets from giving I can understand as from what he gives me, I can now give to others.”8

  On their return home she recorded: “David took several photo-graphs of Ken & I for a picture he is going to paint.”9 This is the first mention of Hockney’s intention to paint a portrait of his parents, an idea conceived while Laura had been in hospital, but which was not to come to fruition for another three years. These photographs were the basis for drawings he completed early in 1972, notably The Artist’s Father, 1972, which shows Kenneth slumped in the corner of a sofa, wearing a three-piece suit, a bow tie, and with a different watch on each wrist, a habit he had fallen into in case one of them might be wrong. He looks crumpled and ill at ease, quite in keeping with his character, in contrast to the two drawings of Laura, both titled The Artist’s Mother, in which she looks completely relaxed, her attention entirely focused on her son. Of these two, one in ink and the other in coloured crayon, the latter was worked into a small oil painting, Mother in a Wicker Chair, which remained unfinished.

  When Mark Lancaster returned to London from Cadaqués in late October, he found Hockney deeply depressed. “David was completely heartbroken,” he recalls, “so I suggested to him that one way to deal with this was to do something he’d never done before, to go somewhere fabulous he’d never been and forget about everything. I said, ‘Why don’t you go to Japan?’ and he said, ‘That’s a good idea,’ and the next day he called me up and said, ‘Do you want to come with me?’ ” It is clear, however, from a postcard Hockney wrote to Henry Geldzahler a few days later that he was not yet ready to give up on Schlesinger. “I leave November 8 for Japan with Mark Lancaster. I think Peter and I will work it out by Christmas. I admire his stubbornness and love him very much so it [sic] must. I have been working very hard. Why don’t you come to London for Christmas … Give my regards to Broadway and all the boys on 42nd St.…”10

  Lancaster jumped at the prospect of a trip to Japan, and joined Hockney in California a fortnight later, where he had been visiting Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy and pouring his heart out to them. “Peter and David both confided in us about the break-up of their relationship,” Bachardy remembers, “and we did our best. But what more can you do than give your ears? Peter was very determined. I don’t think he really understood what real artists are like, that they are obsessed by their work. David just didn’t pay enough attention to Peter. That is the truth, and in the end Peter was independent enough to say it wasn’t good enough. We were so sympathetic towards David, who was hurting so much more than Peter.”11 But Hockney was also secretly angry with Isherwood for having advised him to give his younger lover his wings, anger which he expressed in late-night calls to Jack Larson and Jim Bridges. “At a certain point,” Larson recalls, “David started phoning Jim and me late at night just weeping that Schlesinger had left him and he blamed the advice that Isherwood had given him. Isherwood said you could only have a long-term relationship with a younger man if you left them free to have affairs with other people. Otherwise you just couldn’t keep them.”12

  “Mr. Whizz’s Tour” of Japan began in the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square, San Francisco, on 11 November, its first day commemorated with a pen-and-ink drawing of Lancaster asleep in his bed, a familiar subject for Hockney. He made hundreds of drawings of his friends sleeping, who often woke to the sound of the scratch of a pen nib on cartridge paper, or the whirr of the electric pencil sharpener. From San Francisco they flew to Honolulu for two days, staying in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki Beach, known as the Pink Palace, where the spirit of Peter Schlesinger caught up with them. “Mark had a shirt,” Hockney wrote, “exactly like one Peter had been wearing once when I’d drawn him; I didn’t know this until one morning I woke up and the shirt was lying on a chair, and I drew it, early in the morning.”13 This drawing later became the painting Chair and Shirt, another melancholy evocation of lost love.

  Hockney’s initial impressions of Japan were not good. “Kenneth Clark was really right about Tokyo,” he wrote to Henry Geldzahler, “it makes Los Angeles look like Paris. After the first day and the excitement wears off, I realise what a mess it really is. When it was reb
uilt after the war they forgot to plan parks in it, so apart from the Imperial Palace grounds, which no one can enter, there are no Parks in the centre of the city. The air is twice as bad as New York. People walk around wearing masks all the time. I’m assuming it’s to filter the air.”14 Nor was he impressed by the art he saw there, which he described as being like “Woody Alan’s [sic] versions of Japanese versions of Pop Art.”15

  Their next stop, however, was the ancient imperial city of Kyoto, whose status as an artistic and cultural centre had meant that it had largely escaped bombing raids in the war, and its superb temples, parks and buildings had mostly survived. Hockney loved it, and immediately missed Schlesinger. “It’s very beautiful here,” he wrote to Geldzahler, “and I think because of that I miss Peter enormously. It’s knowing he would love it so that makes me a little depressed he’s not here. Also I’d love to suck his cock.”16 In another letter written on the same day, he told Ron Kitaj, “Mark is an enjoyable and intelligent travelling companion who likes what I do and of course shares an interest in seeking out the night life, but its [sic] not like travelling with Peter and I know its unfair of me to expect it to be, but I can’t help it really. It sure is the real thing I’ve got and I suppose if Peter stays away I’ll suffer for quite a long time …”17

  In the Municipal Gallery of Kyoto, Hockney found some Japanese art that he really admired, in a show called Modern Painters in the Japanese Style, and was fascinated to find that all the artists were old men in their seventies. “There was a beautiful painting on silk,” he told Geldzahler, “called Osaka in the Rain, done in 1935. The nearest thing in my cogniscance [sic] was Dufy—but it was really a lot better than that.”18 As for the Japanese boys, “they are as exquisite as the Zen gardens. I have done a few drawings and taken eight hundred photographs … and really have been turned on so much that if I never left Powis Terrace for five years I’ve enough in my head to keep me going.”19