It was not the money that was at the heart of Hockney’s annoyance about the fate of this painting, but the fact that he had put the better part of six months of both his emotional and working life into it only to find it whisked away from under him. Though money took away the stress of having to churn out work in order to survive, it had never been that important to him, other than as a means of paying for materials, giving him freedom to travel anywhere and allowing him to go to a restaurant without worrying about how he was going to pay the bill. He called himself “restaurant rich.” “If you’re an artist,” he wrote, “the one thing you can do when you get money is use it to do what you want in art. That’s the only good thing you can ever do for yourself. As an artist, what do you need to live on? As long as you’ve got a studio and a place to work in, all you’re going to do is paint pictures all day long.”46
On his return to England after the Emmerich show, Hockney had two portraits in mind. The first was another double portrait, of his old friends George Lawson and Wayne Sleep. Since Sleep was a dancer and Lawson played the clavichord beautifully, it seemed obvious to give the painting a musical setting. After making a number of drawings and taking numerous photographs, he decided to pose them in George’s tiny mews house in Wigmore Place, with Lawson at the clavichord and Sleep standing in the doorway listening to him playing. “The pose was interesting,” Lawson recalls. “Wayne was looking at me at the keyboard, standing and listening. I think it was a nice conceit that he had a ballet dancer not moving just listening. I wanted the painting to be called ‘A Flat,’ because I was actually playing the note A flat.”47
From the very start, however, Hockney struggled with this painting, becoming increasingly obsessed with making it more and more naturalistic. “Six months I worked on it,” he wrote, “altering it, repainting it many times … I kept taking photographs, thinking it was finished myself, and then deciding it’s not right, no, that’s not right. I drove Mo mad. He thought it was wonderful at times, and then he’d think, oh my God, he’s at it again … Looking back now, I can see that the struggle was about naturalism …”48 At one point he made a cut-out of George which he took to his studio to help him decide the placement of the figure. “I would draw on it and cut it and move it about on the painting, then draw it back in.”49
To distract himself from these problems, he began to prepare for the other painting he was considering, a portrait of himself with his parents, which Henry Geldzahler had suggested. “I said that it would be very important for him to know how he felt in relation to his parents,” he wrote, “and how he felt they feel about each other. ‘Get all three of you into a painting,’ I said. ‘You are going to have to do some very hard thinking in visual terms.’ ”50 On 1 July he drove up to Bradford. “Today David is coming,” noted Laura, “& hopes to take photographs for a large picture he is going to paint.”51 Unfortunately he arrived home to find his father “writhing and groaning” on the floor, after an apparent diabetic fit. He was rushed into St. Luke’s Hospital, where the doctors thought it was possible he might have suffered some kind of stroke. When he eventually came round, dazed but able to recognise the family, Hockney took a photograph of his bedside table, complete with vase of flowers, water jug and tumbler, an invitation to the Emmerich exhibition, and a small plastic box bearing the legend “BEST DENTURES.”
Kenneth spent two weeks in St. Luke’s recovering from what turned out to be a condition related to his diabetes, so the preliminary work on the new portrait was postponed till Hockney returned to Bradford at the beginning of August, after two weeks with Henry Geldzahler in Corsica. “David arrived at 12 noon,” Laura wrote on 2 August. “I was showered with gifts … I had no flowers—so David went off to get some—(he wants some in the picture) & returned with two dozen carnations white & pink & 8 gladioli. Oh! They are so gorgeous—the roses in my garden (after the rain) would not have supplied such an array. We cleared up while he was out so room was ready. He preferred back room & took many photographs, and both of us sat for drawings.”52 Further sittings took place in London ten days later, when Laura noted: “I feel so tired when ‘sitting’ for David—he must find it difficult & I do not feel at my best.”53
In the latter half of 1972, Hockney had another concern: Kasmin was pressuring him to produce enough pictures for a show in December. Jack Hazan had filmed Kasmin for his documentary ringing Hockney from the gallery to complain that he had a queue of people wanting paintings and nothing to offer them. Though this scene was entirely invented, with Kasmin talking into thin air, it reflected the truth. The ongoing problem was that as Hockney had become more successful, there was less need for him to churn out pictures, and he had the luxury of being able to spend more time on individual pictures. “In the past the only reason I didn’t was that I couldn’t,” he wrote. “As an artist who was earning his living by painting I needed the money. The pictures were cheap. I had to do a few … just to keep going. There’s nothing wrong with deciding that, since the pictures cost so much, you only need to paint ten a year to keep yourself going … I work it out and think, I don’t need to paint more than this unless I want to.”54
The upcoming show was of particular importance to Kasmin and Sheridan Dufferin as it was to be the last show at their gallery. They had taken the decision to close for a variety of reasons, not least because the lease had only two more years to run and there were plans to redevelop the whole section of Bond Street in which it was situated. Deep recession was looming in America, the most severe since the end of the Second World War, and they were fearful of a global financial crisis. “At the same time,” Kasmin remembers, “Sheridan’s interests were beginning to move elsewhere. He was taking more of an interest in British sporting pictures, and Indian miniatures, and was buying pictures of India by Daniell and other English artists. I was also not having a happy time personally and I was running out of steam.”55 To tide them over they took out a lease on new premises in Clifford Street, further down Bond Street.
What made it even more important that Hockney should finish the double portrait of George Lawson and Wayne Sleep in time for this show was that he had relatively little other work to offer, apart from his Japanese paintings, and one or two from his travels in Europe. “We both thought the picture would be ready,” he recalled. “It looked as though it was finished in October … but I struggled on and on, and in the end I wouldn’t let him show it. I said, ‘No, I can’t, because it’s not right.’ ”56 This was disappointing, not just for Kasmin but for McDermott, who had been so encouraging, and for Sleep and Lawson, who had given up so much time to pose for it. “It didn’t get finished,” Lawson remembers, “and my belief is it was because Wayne and I were getting on terribly well, and Hockney had broken up with Peter, and I think his inability to complete the picture reflected what he was thinking, and that was, how annoying it was that he had, in his mind, introduced us, and there we were having a nice time and he wasn’t. He said there were problems with the vanishing point or something like that, but I think that the real reason was an emotional thing. It’s a pity because if he had been able to paint listening, I think it would have been wonderful.”57
Without George Lawson and Wayne Sleep, Kasmin’s final exhibition, which opened on 11 December, was a bit of a damp squib, with a smattering of small canvases, including the Japanese paintings, Mount Fuji and Japanese Rain on Canvas, which were outnumbered by drawings from his travels, together with various studies of Schlesinger, Birtwell and his parents. “By comparison with the one in New York,” Hockney commented, “this looked rather a wishy-washy show, really. I wouldn’t normally have shown small pictures like that, without showing a big painting as well.”58 The critics were largely unimpressed, Guy Brett’s review in The Times being typical. He referred to Hockney’s “refined technique,” which he, “to judge from his new exhibition at Kasmin, has been exercising … without much to say. In his new paintings he continues with his liking for commenting on the strategies and stage-craft of
other artists past and present, but they lack his customary edge. It is left to the drawings to fill us in with Hockney’s meandering itinerary from hotel to swimming-pool in the company of his friends.”59 Though the reviews were unmemorable, an unfitting end to a relationship with a remarkable gallery, the gallery itself went out with a bang. “After the gallery closed,” Kasmin recalls, “we all went to a great big dinner-dance at the Savoy, all the artists worldwide that Sheridan and I represented, the whole lot. It marked the closing of the gallery and made an event of it.”60
At the beginning of 1973, feeling tired and not a little depressed, Hockney decided to spend some time in California, where he was sure the sunshine and the boys would give him a much needed shot in the arm. He planned to create a new series of works on the theme of weather, which would reunite him with Ken Tyler and Sid Felsen at Gemini. He settled into the Chateau Marmont and was soon writing to Ron Kitaj, “California has been very pleasant so far. I should have come here 6 months ago. I’m sure it’s partly because I’m working in a new environment and a new medium but I’m enjoying it enormously … I haven’t taken Valium since I’ve been here and the temptations of grass have only occurred twice. I arrive at Gemini at 8:00 a.m. much to the surprise of the printers who tell me that the artists don’t usually show up till 11 … Ken is such a good printer. It’s terrific getting into complicated lithography again. There’s no one in London can print like him. Every little thing I put on a stone really appears. I’ve almost completed the first four. Rain, Mist, Sun and Lightening [sic], and hope to do four more—Snow, Frost, Wind and a Rainbow … I feel quite marvellous and in excellent health. Early bed is doing wonders for my energy.”61
At the beginning of February he rented a beach house in Malibu belonging to the actor Lee Marvin, and Celia Birtwell came out to visit him with her two boys, Albert, aged three and a half, who was nicknamed “Chappie,” and George, aged one and a half, and a nanny. “Living with two chicks and two brats is not what you’re used to,” she told him, “but don’t worry.”62 In the past six months, she had become very close to Hockney, partly because of her link to Schlesinger and partly by their mutual unhappiness. Clark was at the height of his fame, his clothes all the rage not just in London, but in Paris and New York. Celebrity had gone to his head, however, and his constant desire to party with the jet set, his affairs with both men and women, combined with his massive intake of drugs, had put enormous strain on his marriage. “We had some really nice times very early on,” Celia recalls, “but then as he became more famous he lost the plot. I think he felt he could get away with having his own life, and having me in the background, planted there as a homebody, keeping it all together. I was quite prepared to do that, but not on those terms. Sometimes he would come back for two days, bringing a friend so I couldn’t shout at him, probably some gorgeous woman who he knew I would like, and playing those sorts of games. It was a nightmare really.”63
Birtwell’s gentle feminine side strongly appealed to Hockney, and when he saw that she was hurting emotionally just as badly as him, he opened up to her, finding at last the perfect shoulder to cry on. “I think he found we spoke the same language about his unhappiness and his broken heart,” she says, “so he used me as his confidante.”64 As they licked each other’s wounds, he began to transfer all the feelings he had felt towards Schlesinger onto her. Having her with him in California made him begin to feel calm. “… I’m getting used to life here,” he told Kitaj. “At first it was very strange but Celia was so marvellous. She understood my moods and why I seemed so distant. She likes it here, although I think it’s mainly the change, and the fact that she hasn’t cried for a month … I think I’m better off staying out of England for a while. I think of Peter of course … and I have received a few letters from him, but I just don’t want to return to that lingering pain, and staying here with Celia is finally getting rid of it.”65
It was close to being a happy time for him. He immersed himself in the work, revelling in the technical difficulties involved in the creation of the weather lithographs, which were to be a follow-up to The Hollywood Collection he had previously produced for Gemini. These were entirely inspired by prints of the weather he had seen in Japan and were to prove a welcome break from the constraints of naturalism he had been experiencing in his portrait work. The resulting prints are both playful and clever. Of the six in the series, Snow is the one most obviously based on Japanese woodcuts, Rain the most abstract, memorably depicting the experience of rain by using highly diluted lithographic ink which literally runs off the page, while Wind has the wit, depicting four of the prints being blown through the air past a street sign for Melrose Avenue. One just knows that the artist had fun making them. Hockney also immortalised Ken Tyler in a full-length lithograph, which in tribute he titled The Master Printer of Los Angeles.
At the end of each day he drove the forty miles back to Malibu to enjoy a semblance of family life with Celia, Albert and George, whom he was teaching to walk. “That’s when I really got to know Celia,” Hockney remembers. “She is very, very sympathetic and she knows how to make me laugh. She plays with words, which I like, and she has a sense of the absurd. We got very close and I suppose I was in love with her.”66 It was a love that was never physically consummated. “He slept in the same bed as me a few times,” Birtwell says, “but it was just cuddling like friends. I think David was very frightened physically, and I don’t think it was easy for him to have a physical relationship. You can’t be closer than being in bed with somebody, but he was very shy with me like that, and nothing was ever said. Then Ossie came down like a bloody boomerang and ruined the whole thing.”67
Hockney too blamed it all on Clark. “I did consider having a physical relationship with her in California,” he says, “but then Ossie turned up with a massive amount of drugs and got her to go off to Palm Springs for a weekend with the children, and he told me to stay behind.”68 It is a version of events he shared with Ron Kitaj, writing that he was “snuggling up to Celia” and “Ossie must have judged the time this would take and arrived to break it up. At first I didn’t know what to do so I retreated and took up my usual position of observer, but living with them closely I see what Celia really has to put up with. The experience has made me much closer to Celia, and further away from Ossie. I confess I don’t really understand him, but he really is terrible to her …”69
Clark had been offered a free flight back to New York on board the private jet of Ahmet Ertegun, the president of Atlantic Records, and insisted that Birtwell and the children fly with him. Hockney turned down the opportunity to travel with them, and chose instead to leave Malibu for LA, where he spent some time with Nick Wilder, now his official dealer in California. In 1970 Nick had moved his gallery from La Cienega Boulevard to Santa Monica, into the then rather seamy area between La Cienega and North Robertson, which was known as Boys Town, because of the largely gay community that resided there. The move fitted the “bad boy” image he had cultivated in the late sixties when he had participated wildly in the sex and drugs scene after losing a handsome lover, a ranked tennis pro, to suicide. “I ran around a lot after that to fight off depression,” he recalled. “I went to the bars and the clubs … no orgies, just a different partner every couple of weeks or months. I was living such a fly-now-pay-later existence nobody wanted to be my boyfriend … I never thought of myself as promiscuous because all the while I was looking for Mister Right.”70
By the time Hockney was visiting in 1973, Wilder had long since found his “Mr. Right” in the person of Gregory Evans, a boy some twelve years his junior who had been born and brought up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and had run away from home in 1967, at the age of fifteen, to become a hippy in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. “I ran away from a typical middle-class American upbringing,” Evans remembers. “I was attracted to San Francisco—1967 was the Summer of Love, and I just knew that I belonged there. I fell into sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll and living in communes.”71
He went to LA three years later with some friends of his who were performing in the musical Hair, and eventually met Nick Wilder and began to hang out at his gallery. Within a month of their meeting they became lovers. “Nicholas was totally unique and passionate about art,” Evans says. “He liked to talk about it, to explain to you exactly what he did love about pictures and what he thought made pictures good. I liked that. And he made me feel liked. He was very engaging and he liked being with you and he made you feel that. He was also extremely funny with a sharp wit. He knew all the jokes, all the nasty jokes. I always had a sense of humour, and water seeks its own level.”72
Gregory Evans was already friends with Peter Schlesinger, whom he had met with Wilder in LA in the summer of 1970, and he had first met Hockney in 1971 when he and Wilder had been passing through London and had briefly stayed in Powis Terrace. Now he had the opportunity to get to know him better. “Nicholas had The Hollywood Collection of prints in storage in the gallery, and I remember him showing them to me and I knew they were unique. But that’s all I knew about David. I didn’t know any of the other work. He was very successful, but he was always friendly, and loved talking about himself and what he was doing and this is the enthusiasm he’s maintained for ever.”73 Hockney was likewise attracted to this handsome young boy with a wry sense of humour, and being intrigued by the relationship between him and Nick, considered painting their portrait.
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