David Hockney

by Christopher Simon Sykes

  Gregory Evans and Nicholas Wilder, Appian Way, Hollywood, 1973 (illustration credit 11.2)

  At the turn of 1973, Wilder and Evans were living in a house in the Hollywood Hills on Appian Way, and Hockney executed a number of drawings and photographs of them there. “What attracted me in this Hollywood house,” he recalled, “was the window, like a big aquarium—it looks wonderfully exotic to an English person.”74 Sadly the painting was never realised, which at the time Hockney put down to the same problems with naturalism he had experienced with the portrait of George Lawson and Wayne Sleep. He did, however, create a “joiner” out of six photographic prints that gives an idea of what the double portrait might have been like, showing them in their living room, with Wilder seated and Evans standing by the picture window.

  To escape both from Schlesinger, whom he was still missing dreadfully, and from the dramas surrounding the Clarks, he came to the decision to spend some time in Paris. “I began to think of Peter,” he wrote to Kitaj on 1 April, “and so I have written to him telling him that the real reason I’m going to go to Paris is that I really don’t want to see him. I realize I must make an effort and try and get the last bit of that affair out of my head …”75 He also saw it as an opportunity to regroup. “I was in a state of confusion and I felt I had to get away from London … I had been struggling with the paintings, like the one of George Lawson and Wayne Sleep … There was something wrong in what I was doing and I had to find out what it was and I needed peace and quiet. It was always hard to get peace and quiet in London. There were always people asking, would you do this, would you talk on that, would you do a television programme, would you do the other?”76

  He left California a week later, on 8 April, a day that was to be etched into his memory for the rest of his life. En route to visit the famous French film director Jean Renoir, the news came on the car radio that Pablo Picasso had died. This came as a terrible shock to Hockney, who had thought of Picasso as invincible, the immensely powerful life force that he was. It was the first time Hockney had felt the loss of someone he deeply respected, but when he arrived at Renoir’s house and broke the news, the elderly Frenchman merely commented, “What an un-Picasso thing to do.”77 For Hockney, however, as his closest friend Henry Geldzahler noted, it represented “loss of innocence, the realization of death’s inevitability.”78

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CONTRE-JOUR IN THE FRENCH STYLE

  When Hockney visited Bradford on his return to England, his mother found him “rather quieter than usual somehow—tho’ I don’t know where or why.”1 He had got back to London to find that most of his friends were out of town, and he didn’t have Celia Birtwell to talk to as she had her parents staying. Only Mo McDermott was left, who had just moved into the renovated basement of Powis Terrace, but he immediately brought back memories of Peter. “The basement is almost finished,” Hockney told Henry Geldzahler, “and is quite beautiful. Mo is quite delighted, although he tells me Peter is very jealous. I must admit—rereading what happened to poor Emma Bovary made me think of him a little—or is that very unFreudian of me?”2 Hockney’s decision to escape to Paris made sense in light of the fact that, as he also told Geldzahler, “I do notice … a strange feeling, and I’m almost ready to reach for the Valium again.”3

  Before he left, he ran into Peter Schlesinger in London, a meeting that helped clarify his feelings. “I did see Peter for about an hour,” he wrote, “but there is so much bitterness between us still, that I think it’s best to forget him for a year or two.”4 In addition to seeing it as a convenient haven, Hockney had another good reason to visit Paris. For some time, the Berlin publisher Propyläen Verlag had been encouraging him to produce a print for a portfolio called Homage to Picasso, in which seventy artists had been asked for their own tribute to Picasso. Though it was never intended to be published posthumously, the artist’s death was the catalyst that finally persuaded Hockney to agree. The only person he wanted to work with was the man who had been Picasso’s etching printer for twenty years: Paris-based Aldo Crommelynck.

  Artist and Model, 1973–74 (illustration credit 12.1)

  Crommelynck was a mesmerising figure—tall and gaunt, with long spindly fingers usually stained with ink and nicotine. Apprenticed at seventeen to the French printmaker Roger Lacourière, he worked not only with Picasso, but with other great artists such as Léger, Miró and Matisse, and he soon emerged as the principal creative force in the studio. With his brother Piero, he opened his own atelier in Montparnasse in 1955, attracting major talent such as Le Corbusier, Giacometti and, notably, Braque, and when in 1963 he heard that Picasso needed a printmaker close to where he lived, he established a studio in a former bakery in Mougins and began a partnership that was to last until the artist’s death. During these ten years Picasso produced some 750 intaglio plates, including the notorious “Series 347,” an edition of largely erotic etchings showing Raphael and Rembrandt painting and coupling with their models, which, in 1968, the Art Institute of Chicago deemed “unfit for public consumption.” After Picasso’s death the brothers returned to Paris and opened a studio on the Left Bank, in the Rue de Grenelle.

  Hockney used to joke to his friends, “I can now afford a garret in Paris,”5 and, if it didn’t exactly fit the description, the apartment he moved into at the beginning of May, borrowed from an artist friend, was both tiny and uncomfortable: he described it as “pretty horrible—not even a chair to sit and read in.”6 To make himself feel at home, he began a small painting of his mother in oil paint. “Mo says he loves the smell,” he commented. “So do I.”7 He loved these first few months working with Crommelynck who, though they had never met, already knew about his work from Richard Hamilton, another of his clients. “It was thrilling,” Hockney recalls, “to meet somebody who’d had such direct contact with Picasso and worked with him such a lot. He taught me marvellous technical things about etching.”8 One of the things that Hockney so admired about Picasso, and could identify with, was the fact that he made all his own prints in the traditional way, working on the plates himself, scratching, cutting, chipping or whatever was required.

  He threw himself into his studies with the great printer, who taught him how to master two important techniques. The first was the “sugar lift,” an established process using a saturated sugar solution mixed with poster paint that allows the artist to paint what he wants to etch directly onto the plate, just as he would onto canvas. Once the sugar has dried, a very thin layer of acid-resistant varnish is painted over the plate. The plate is then put into a bath of warm water and, once in the bath, the sugar begins to dissolve, eventually pulling completely away from the plate to leave an open area that can be aquatinted, etched and printed. It was a technique that Hockney knew, but had struggled with. “Every time I’d tried it in London,” he wrote, “I’d had to chip the varnish away and the sugar didn’t come off. Or, if it came off, it lifted off lots of other varnish as well.”9 When he had finally mastered this process, he couldn’t wait to tell Maurice Payne, who already knew it well, and in his excitement he made a picture to demonstrate what he had learned, Showing Maurice the Sugar Lift. “Maurice at first was a bit offended by the title, because he said, ‘People’ll think I don’t know about sugar lift.’ I said, ‘Nobody knows what sugar lift is.’ And I explained, ‘Look, Maurice, it sounds like the name of a song: Showing Maurice the sugar lift, cha, cha, cha.’ ”10

  More important still was that Crommelynck taught him to do coloured etching, using a method that he had invented himself which allowed the artist to draw from life in colour on one plate, dispensing with different plates to register the colours. “This was very, very ingenious,” says Hockney. “Before this method, the trouble was that it was impossible to be spontaneous with etching if you were using colour. You had to plan things very carefully, but this allowed spontaneity. I was quite thrilled with it.”11 So excited was he when Crommelynck first told him about this technique that he immediately dropped the portrait of Gustav
e Flaubert he was working on, and insisted they try it out that very afternoon. The result was the Picassoesque Simplified Faces, a series of four heads created entirely from geometric elements. Other prints followed, including two of windows in the Louvre, and, later, a portrait of Gregory Evans in red checked shirt and blue jeans. This was done in London when he was hungover after a night out and was drawn straight from life. With his tousled hair and far-away look, it captured exactly how he must have been feeling. “People are always amazed when they see the prints,” Hockney commented, “and are very surprised they’re etchings; they think they’re lithographs and all kinds of things.”12 Picasso himself never actually tried out the technique, which was invented just before he died, making Hockney the first artist to make serious use of it, a source of pride for both him and Crommelynck. Hockney recalled, “He said to me after I’d been there a while and we got to know each other, ‘It’s a pity you didn’t come earlier, you’d have really liked Pablo … and he’d have really liked you.’ ”13

  After a few nights in his uncomfortable apartment, Hockney moved into the Hôtel Nice et Beaux Arts in the Rue des Beaux Arts, a short walk from Crommelynck’s studio. He wrote to Henry Gelzahler, “I’m sat in a small room looking at the roofs of Paris … I have started work on two etchings—homage à Picasso … The exhibition opens in Berlin on July 15, so as usual I should just get them done in time … Paris is lovely and peaceful, after London that is. It just gets so emotionally hectic for me there.”14 Picasso would surely have been charmed by these etchings had he lived to see them. The first, titled The Student—Homage to Picasso, shows an older, rather professorial version of Hockney carrying a large portfolio of his work, smartly dressed in jacket, spotted bow tie and broad-brimmed hat and seeking the approval of a much younger-looking Picasso, depicted as a head perched on top of a column, at the age he might have been when he was being lionised as the inventor of cubism. It is a throwback to Hockney’s earlier works that were drawn entirely from his imagination, and were the first sign of an attempt to move away from naturalism.

  The second etching, Artist and Model, even echoes Myself and My Heroes, the 1961 etching in which Hockney portrayed himself admiring Gandhi and Walt Whitman, in this case Picasso being the figure of hero worship. It is a touching image in which he sits naked before the maestro’s piercing gaze, his nudity defining him not as a fellow artist but as a model and innocent disciple who lays no claims to his greatness. “We are witness to a meeting of apprentice and master,” Geldzahler pointed out, “the innocent and uncorrupted showing his work to the great artist of the century.” He went on to comment that the special joy of the etching for him was “the intrusive palm tree that pridefully bursts forth on a line directly above the young man’s genitalia, masked as they are by the table.”15 Hockney pooh-poohed this as being another example of Henry’s obsession with Freud.

  For some time, Geldzahler had been toying with the idea of doing a book on Hockney, a project with which the artist was fully prepared to cooperate, and for the purpose of which he had rented Casa Santini, Mario Amaya’s Italian villa outside Lucca, for the summer. “Mario’s house is definitely OK for August,” Hockney wrote, “and I have been to see Phaidon about the book. I think you might be able to get some expenses for the summer immediately.”16 The idea was that they should hole up together for a few weeks and thrash out the form the book would take. It was suggested that Henry should fly to Paris, and they could then leisurely drive to Italy, stopping off for a few days at the Grand Hotel, Vittel, to get them healthy and in a working mood. He asked Geldzahler to find out from Mario “a. how to get to the house from Lucca. b. Is there a telephone. c. Is there a record player (I know they have real opera in Italy, but a bit of music would not be amiss, would it?) etc. etc. etc.”17 He ended the letter saying that Kasmin had broached the subject of royalties, adding, “I told him I didn’t care what my share was, as I don’t make my living from books, so I’m sure whatever you suggest will be O.K.”18

  They arrived in Italy at the beginning of August, and were soon settled into the villa, a lovely old Italian farmhouse with a large covered terrace, from where Hockney wrote to his parents on 3 August, “It’s beautiful here, but rather remote (45 minutes drive to the nearest town) therefore very good for work. Every morning Henry and I write notes for the book and then in the afternoons I draw or read … It’s wonderful having no telephone (in London it seems to ring about 60 times a day) and the slight inconvenience we soon get used to. It also encourages letter writing …”19 Inside there was a living room furnished with huge yellow 1930s sofas and chairs and a cast-iron stove. There was also a shower, where Hockney one day took photographs of a visiting American friend, a young photographer called Don Crib. “It was a simple room, tiled, with no curtain,” he recalled. “I love showers. A shower is more ideal than a bath for showing off the body. The sight was beautiful with the figure and the water flowing.”20

  Immersed in the peace and quiet, with not a hum to be heard, and only the occasional car horn to disturb the silence, Hockney felt the cares and tensions that had been assailing him slip away. “We write every morning on a terrace overlooking a pleasant valley,” he wrote to Kitaj, “a lady from the village comes and cleans (Henry) and makes us lunch, and the afternoons are spent drawing or reading. We usually go out in the evenings for dinner … Henry and I get on extremely well—no emotional hangups, which makes me feel calm and rested …”21 He enjoyed the writing, which he found easier than he had expected, telling his mother that it was “obviously a habit one can get into,”22 and completed a number of drawings. These included a charming study of his bedroom mirror, draped with scarves and bow ties, and a number of studies of Henry, usually engaged in his favourite pastimes of reading and smoking cigars.

  For two weeks the days drifted by until their idyll was rudely interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Kasmin, who had fled in a hail of pots, pans and glasses from his holiday home near Carennac, after driving his wife, Jane, from whom he had separated, incandescent with rage by telling her that he had fallen in love with his new girlfriend, Linda Adams. He arrived exhausted after driving at speed with only one overnight stop at Arles, accompanied by two white-faced passengers, the architect and designer of the new Clifford Street Gallery, John Prizeman, and the rather eccentric figure of Eugene Lambe.

  A striking-looking Irishman with a full red beard and more than a passing resemblance to Lytton Strachey, Lambe was the oldest of four brothers, the rest of whom were high-flyers in the British Army. He was the opposite, a vegan, who dressed entirely in canvas and cotton and wouldn’t wear leather in case it had come from a slaughtered animal. Immensely well read, he had abandoned a law degree to move in with George Lawson and Wayne Sleep, who were now living in Powis Gardens, in the capacity of both a friend and a gentleman’s gentleman. “He certainly used to do the laundry,” Lawson recalls, “and I would often find myself saying, ‘Lambe, Lambe, where are my shirts?’ Because he looked like a professor, we always called him Doctor Lambe, though the Doctor was a bit spurious. He had been at Trinity for ever and knew absolutely everybody and everybody knew him because he was so striking-looking.”23

  Hockney was immediately intrigued by him, and made a fine drawing of him in coloured crayon, sitting on the terrace wearing a cotton smock and a wide-brimmed hat. “I watched him doing the big, finished drawing,” said John Prizeman, “sitting in front of Eugene, staring at him intently. He started at the top of the blank page, slowly filling in Eugene’s hat, and working down the page, like unrolling a curtain.”24 With their work interrupted, Geldzahler and Hockney felt compelled to entertain their guests, one day taking them for a swim at the magnificent Renaissance palazzo, Villa Reale, the home of the Pecci-Blunt family, one of whom, Camilla, was married to an LA art dealer, Earl McGrath, and photographed Hockney among the statuary and the group dancing on the lawns. Then, after Kasmin and the others had left, Hockney and Geldzahler visited another great villa, La Pietra, outside F
lorence, celebrated for its beautiful gardens and statues and the great collection of art and books it housed. It was home to the legendary aesthete and man of letters Harold Acton, the model for the character of Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. John Pope-Hennessy, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, took them, and Hockney wrote to Ron Kitaj: “The house and garden are so beautiful and I thought he was charm itself, and quite genuine … just the four of us had lunch in that enormous dining room … We had a pasta to start with and Henry was served first. He just couldn’t get it out of the dish properly and as I began to laugh, Henry said he felt like Charlie Chaplin. J P-H and Harold Acton politely tried to ignore it which made me laugh all the more as it made Henry really look like Charlie Chaplin …”25

  By the end of the month, they were both ready to leave and get back to their normal lives, if with some trepidation. “The other evening we had been to Lucca for dinner,” Hockney told Kitaj, “and arrived back about 11:30. I made some tea and we sat ourselves on the porch in our regular seats. As Henry poured I fiddled with the radio to get the BBC World Service on the short wave. Henry then announced we had only six cigars left and I said we were like a couple of old rubber planters whose only worry was when the next shipment of tobacco would arrive. We laughed but it did seem true. I think Henry dreads the return to New York as much as I do to London.”26

  Henry Geldzahler and David Hockney (illustration credit 12.2)

  Hockney dreaded the old distractions, chief among which was the continuing soap opera of the lives of Clark and Birtwell. When Birtwell had returned to London in April, their relationship was at a low ebb, Clark’s recent behaviour having been less than satisfactory. “I flew back in Ahmet Ertegun’s private jet to New York,” Birtwell remembers, “and I got the most terrible, terrible backache in the plane. We arrived in New York and we stayed in a basement flat belonging to Henry Geldzahler, and Ossie immediately wanted to go off with Mick Jagger and Bianca and I was stuck in his basement flat with the babies … I was in terrible pain and I just couldn’t wait to get back to London. Ossie couldn’t care less and he whooshed off for three days to be with Mick and Bianca. By then I had had absolutely enough.”27