David Hockney

by Christopher Simon Sykes

  In December, Andy Warhol, over in Paris to discuss an upcoming show of his Mao portraits at the Musée Galleria, visited Hockney at the Cour de Rohan. “David took a couple of Polaroids of him,” Celia Birtwell recalls. “David was talking about all these portraits he was doing, and he had all these palettes all over the floor covered with different-coloured paints and I remember Andy Warhol saying, ‘Oh, I really like those palettes,’ and I thought, ‘Trust you to look at the palettes rather than the picture he was painting.’ Then we all got into a cab with some Frenchwoman, and she started talking in French to someone else, and Warhol said sharply, ‘Stop speaking in that language. Speak in English.’ That was typical of him. He had real command and wanted everything done his way.”61 The Polaroids were later used as the basis for a coloured crayon drawing of Warhol.

  Among a number of handsome young men in Hockney’s drawings from this period were Randy Hunt, a friend of Henry Geldzahler’s; Carlos, whom he met through Lila de Nobili; Mark Lippscombe, a friend from LA; and the exotically named Jacques de Bascher de Beaumarchais, a lover of Karl Lagerfeld, and nicknamed by Hockney “Jacques de Quelque Chose.” A French aristocrat, who claimed to be descended from the author of the Figaro plays, he was slim and good-looking, with a pencil moustache. Hockney made several drawings of him, including one of him wearing a sailor’s suit. “He was extremely stylish,” he recalls, “and obviously based himself on a kind of Proustian figure. I remember one of his parties. He would have all these unbelievable French soldiers, big butch soldiers, lining up to fuck him. There were some marvellous orgies organised in Paris. They were really well done because the French pay tremendous attention to detail.”62

  Among all the young men, however, there was only one serious lover. Writing to Henry Geldzahler in January 1974 about a proposed trip to New York, Hockney announced, “Yves-Marie has entered my life. I asked him to come to New York with me, although it’s a bit difficult with his mother and school etc., so I don’t know if he’ll come, but don’t be surprised if he arrives with me.”63 Yves-Marie Hervé, always referred to as “Yves-Marie de Paris,” was a young student at the École du Louvre to whom Hockney was attempting to teach some English. “He was a very pretty boy with masses of dark hair falling forward,” Kasmin remembers. “He was a gay man’s dream boy, nice-natured, willing, not at all camp; he looked like someone who needed to be loved. It was impossible not to like him. He was desirable even if you weren’t gay.”64 To Celia Birtwell he was “super French, and he had this wonderful draped hair. I can see why David liked him; he looked marvellous, he was a wonderful poser and he knew how to dress. He was petite, like a toy.”65

  Just as with Peter Schlesinger, their relationship was that of teacher and pupil, and Hockney spent many hours introducing him to his favourite museums and exploring the little back rooms at the Louvre, where the supposedly less interesting pictures were hung. At the Museé d’Art Moderne, he took him to Brancusi’s studio. “I loved that room,” he wrote, “with the dust on it, the pieces in it and that marvellous atmosphere. Next door was that other terrific room with the González sculptures, which have always affected me. He was a wonderful sculptor. So I was, in a way, looking at art of the long past, and at early modern art, which of course was made in Paris …”66

  Naturally Hockney also wanted to introduce Hervé to the work of Picasso, which involved a trip down to Avignon, where the late works were being shown in the Musée du Petit Palais. Hockney arranged for them to stay just outside Uzès with Douglas Cooper, whose great collection of cubist art, built up since the 1930s, included the work of Braque, Léger and Juan Gris, as well as Picasso. Hockney found Cooper enthralling company, if infuriating. “He was quite a fascinating person,” he says, “but he had the emotional age of somebody of about seven. There was a mad side to him which I rather liked.”67 Cooper’s twenty-year friendship with his great hero and neighbour, Picasso, had ended on the fateful day in 1970 when he dared to tell the artist that it was time he recognised his illegitimate children, Paloma and Claude. Losing his temper at this reminder of his mortality, Picasso threw Cooper out of his studio. “There was a steep flight of stairs leading down from Picasso’s villa to the front gate,” his partner John Richardson later recalled, “and poor Douglas paused on every step, kneeling and weeping and grovelling and begging to be forgiven! It did him no good at all.”68

  In spite of the fact that Cooper had made it quite clear that he thought the late Picassos were “terrible,” when Hockney and Hervé went to Avignon he insisted on accompanying them. “We arrived there,” Hockney recalls, “and he goes in and starts telling me immediately how dreadful they are. So I said to him, ‘Can I just have a short time looking at them by myself?’ Then I did say to him, ‘Well, I can see one thing anyway, which is that they are about being an old man. Perhaps you’ve not seen that.’ I started taking a few digs at him, because he was trying to give me the impression that from the moment he was banned from Picasso’s studio, all his paintings went to rack and ruin.”69

  Yves-Marie, New York, 1974 (illustration credit 12.4)

  On their trips away together and in Paris, Hervé became the subject of numerous drawings—lying on a sofa in the Paris studio reading Jean Cocteau, curled up seductively in Henry Geldzahler’s New York apartment, sitting on a chair reading in the garden of Le Nid de Duc. Spending so much time in Hockney’s company meant that his English came on in leaps and bounds. Not so Hockney’s French, partly because he put very little effort into his lessons, and secretly rather played on speaking the language with a thick Yorkshire accent. “I’ve been a bit slack with mon francais,” he wrote to Geldzahler on 17 January, “as I’ve been working hard painting and looking after my parents here for a few days. I drew them, but we also saw a lot of Paris, they said they had a marvellous time so I feel quite good.”70

  Even though it was only for a few days, for Kenneth and Laura their trip to Paris was a welcome break from the hardships back home, where Edward Heath’s government had brought in a three-day week to combat the problems of rising fuel prices. “In England,” Hockney told Geldzahler, exaggerating just a little, “there is no electricity gasoline trains or TV, but Celia says everybody is having a good time (Isn’t it lovely, just like the war). I do think people love to suffer collectively, don’t you?”71 Among the drawings Hockney executed of his parents during their four-day trip was a touching study of Kenneth in coloured crayon, sitting in a chair with his arms folded.

  As well as showing his parents the sights, another distraction from his French lessons was dealing with a visit from Clark, who was on best behaviour with his new landlord. “Ossie came for the weekend last week. He was charm itself. Making the tea, sweeping the floor, entertaining visitors for tea etc. but he did want something from me. He has now moved into my studio to make his dresses (Mo is converting the large sitting room back to a studio) and I’m told I wouldn’t recognize the place. I now tend to read actions in your Freudian way and see it as a way to keep me away from London and Celia, for underneath all his activity here I did detect a fear.”72

  Hockney was working on three oil paintings that were intended for a show which the British Council was putting on in Paris in October at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. The first was the double portrait Shirley Goldfarb and Gregory Masurovsky, while the other two came about directly from his endless expeditions to the Louvre. Contre-jour in the French Style—Against the Day dans le Style Français—a typical playful Hockney title—was inspired by a window in the Pavillon de Flore, at the south-west corner of the Louvre, which was showing an exhibition of French drawings from the Metropolitan Museum. “The first time I went,” he wrote, “I saw this window with the blind pulled down and the formal garden beyond. And I thought, oh it’s marvellous! marvellous! This is a picture in itself … So I took some photographs of it, made a drawing, and started painting.”73 Consciously drawing on a traditionally French style, the pointillist technique of the neo-Impressionists, helped him to loosen hi
s brushwork again, and from the start the painting went well. The result beautifully depicts the light passing through the translucent blind and its reflection in the parquet floor. The picture that followed this, Two Vases in the Louvre, echoed the print of Jean Léger’s apartment, Rue de Seine, with the window looking out onto a view across the courtyard to the Rue de Rivoli.

  However much Hockney loved his Paris life, there were times when he found the French quite exasperating. He wrote to Henry Geldzahler in February still fuming about “a story of Paris and French rudeness,” which had occured two days previously when he had taken Shirley Goldfarb and her husband to dinner at Maxim’s to celebrate their twenty-first wedding anniversary. “Shirley comes in a dress and Gregory in his leather jacket and tie. As the Maitre D is showing us to our table he says—feeling Gregory’s jacket—that it’s not pretty (joli) enough for Maxims. I couldn’t believe my ears and assumed I’d heard it wrong. The place of course was full of businessmen in hideous suits (that didn’t fit them).”74 They went on to Régine’s nightclub, for which Hockney had been sent an entry card, where a “gestapo-like” waiter told Hervé to put on his jacket when he got up to dance. “He was the smartest person in the place … Anyway when we were leaving they told me to put on my jacket in a most unpleasant manner. I said … it was everybody’s privilege who was leaving to do it how they wished. I tore up the card (it was plastic so it took some time, rather spoiling the effect) and gave it back to them.”75 He later exclaimed to Ossie Clark, “Paris would be beautiful if only the English lived there.”76

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE RAKE’S PROGRESS

  Gregory, Palatine, Roma, December 1974 (illustration credit 13.1)

  In late March 1974, the calm of Hockney’s Paris life was shattered. He had a call from Jack Hazan telling him that the film he had been working on for the last three years was completed, and inviting him to come over to London to view it. The trip was a disaster from the moment he arrived. “I went with Yves-Marie on the train on Sunday,” he recounted to Henry Geldzahler, “and when we arrived at Powis Terrace, it was as though we weren’t expected. Ossie has taken over the whole place, and we were just shoved into the back bedroom. Anyway it was so depressing with all of Ossie’s models running around that we immediately went out to dinner with George and Wayne.”1 Worse still was the fact that Clark had ripped out the beautiful fireplace in the studio, which had been lovingly chosen by Peter Schlesinger, leaving nothing but a large black hole. Nor had the sheets been washed. “They crackled with the filth,”2 Hockney told Melissa North. He was beside himself with anger. To compound it all, Clark let the bath run over, in doing so destroying one of Hockney’s favourite jackets. “David confused, uptight, silly, spiteful, ratty,” was Clark’s comment in his diary. “First time no clean sheets on his bed—I’ve really upset him on top of overflowing the bath, wrecking his trendy jacket and flooding Mo’s basement.”3

  The following morning Hockney set off for a screening room off Curzon Street to watch Jack’s film, A Bigger Splash, which turned out to be, not the documentary about an artist that he had been expecting, but a semi-fictional account of the break-up of his relationship with Peter Schlesinger. It brought back too many painful memories. “He sat through the movie,” says Hazan, “and at the end of it I have never seen a more distraught person. He just said to me, ‘Jack, it’s too heavy. It’s too heavy.’ ”4 Hockney poured out his heart to Henry Geldzahler. “It shattered me. I didn’t know what to think or how to react. Its main story is about my brake [sic] with Peter, and then painting that picture of him looking into the swimming pool. My first reaction was that it was a schmaltzy [sic] view of an artist and homosexuality. I couldn’t understand Peter’s reactions to it, and realised he had almost collaborated with Jack on it. I had a conversation with him on the telephone, finally asking him why, when he had been living with me he had hated Jack and hated taking part in the movie … and why afterwards he had been such an eager actor and collaborator. He replied he did it for the money, which if it is true (which I doubt) seems too cheap. I hung up on him eventually …”5

  Hockney attempted to cheer himself up by going to watch Wayne Sleep as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Covent Garden, before heading off to the King’s Road Theatre to see Clark’s latest fashion show, a glamorous event bankrolled by Mick Jagger, and attended by numerous stars including Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Rod Stewart, Marianne Faithfull, Bryan Ferry and Britt Ekland. It was an evening that further blackened his mood. “Our reserved seats had been taken,” he wrote to Geldzahler, “by some drugged-up hooray layabouts, so we sat at the back. Ossie then says he had asked a ‘few people back for a drink at Powis Terrace’—which of course turned out to be 200 drugged-up boring hoorays and hangers on,—including Peter, so Yves-Marie and myself just left and went down to Mo’s basement. I left the next day after having a small row with Ossie.”6

  As a result of both the film and the whole weekend, Hockney decided, once and for all, to get rid of Powis Terrace. “I don’t think I ever want to go back and work there,” he told Geldzahler, “so I’m definitely going to sell it and buy some small house or flat in central London.”7 Since Henry featured in A Bigger Splash, both in a scene at Powis Terrace and another at the Emmerich Gallery in New York, Hockney advised him to see it. “You are very good in it, but the portrait of Mo is too cruel, and I just think that it gives a wrong picture of me. There’s a scene of Peter making love to some boy—again he must have done it for money. I dread its release, yet as my first reaction had been that anyway it was far too long and boring it didn’t really matter, but Anthony Page saw it … and said he thought it had commercial potential—it’s like a real ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday,’ he said. This made me worry about it, but luckily I have some Valium.”8

  Hockney was right in believing that Peter was paid to appear in the film. It had been the only way that Hazan had been able to persuade him to cooperate. “He kept asking me to take part and be in it,” recalls Schlesinger, “and I always said no. But after he’d been doing it for about two years, he took me to lunch in Soho—I remember Pearl Bailey was sitting at the next table—and I was movie mad, so I said I’d do it on the condition that it was treated like a job and I got paid for it. ‘If you hire me, then I’ll do it,’ I told him.”9 Hazan then paid him £170 as a fee, followed later on by two payments of £25 and £20 for doing the love scene. But whatever reason people had for appearing, Hockney felt betrayed. “… deep down I think I’ve been exploited,” he told Geldzahler, “not just by Jack—in some ways I sympathise with his position as an artist at taking material in front of him—but almost more by close friends, especially Peter, as I did think he should know better than Mo.”10 This preyed on his mind and when he returned to Paris, he could think of nothing but the film. His first reaction was to get it stopped at all costs. “I didn’t hear from David for two or three weeks,” Hazan remembers, “and then I got a message through Kasmin saying that they wanted to stop the movie going out, and they were prepared to pay £20,000 to have it destroyed, which happened to be the cost of the movie. There was stalemate there.”11

  Hockney therefore decided to seek a second opinion, and sent Shirley Goldfarb, a keen movie buff, to London to see it. “She sat through the film,” Hazan recalls, “and when she came out she said to me, ‘Jack, this is the greatest film on art that has ever been made,’ and then she returned to Paris to relay her opinion to David.”12 The next person to see it was Ossie who said it was “truer than the truth.”13 Now that it had been validated by two of his closest friends, Hockney decided to take another look himself. “David came over, and I showed it to him again at the Trident Preview Theatre in St. Anne’s Court, which had these large glass cylindrical ashtrays and he managed to knock down two and smashed them. He kept going to the toilet all the time because he just couldn’t bear it, because although it wasn’t authentic, it seemed authentic, and showed his terrible distress at the loss of his love, Peter. He was totall
y distraught, and I should have felt guilty, but I just didn’t. I thought I was producing art.”14

  A Bigger Splash was selected for the critics’ week at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, and received generally excellent reviews, not least from the Times critic David Robinson, who wrote that it quite outclassed the British films showing in the main competition, which included Ken Russell’s Mahler. It achieved more than a straight documentary about a painter, he wrote, because “the images become in a mysterious way an extension of Hockney’s own vision. The colours and compositions are those of the paintings. Here is the world of the painter, his friends, his models, and the quiet rooms in which time seems arrested … the film moves in and out of the pictures.” He finished his review: “A first film of so much fulfilled ambition and so much originality disarms criticism.”15 Hockney resigned himself to the film, concluding that it would be wrong of him to try to suppress the work of another artist, after Hazan had made a visit to his Paris studio. “ ‘I’m painting this picture of Gregory and Shirley,’ ” Hockney recalled saying to Hazan, “ ‘and it’s nearly finished.’ Jack looks at it, quite fascinated, and says, ‘You see, David, that’s what you do all the time; look at what you’re doing to them.’ And I said, ‘I know, I see your point; if Shirley and Gregory say We don’t like that picture, I’m not going to destroy it, if I like it.’ ”16