David Hockney (1937-2026)

     I am writing this an hour or so since the announcement of the death of the British artist David Hockney, and I must that admit that in that time I have been feeling a bit emotional.  Oh, nothing that heavy - no tears, no wailing nor gnashing of teeth, just a sense of loss and the sense of a door closing upon a world.

     His was a very full life beyond the capabilities of most of us.  Not only an artist, in quite a range of media, but a printmaker, a designer for the stage, photographer and occasionally a writer. He leaves behind a large corpus of work for the art historians to mull over in the future; the embodiment of the Protestant Work Ethic.  He was after raised in a Methodist family.  Some of this work is perhaps not as good as other work; there was sometimes a risk of banality.  And I find a lot of the work done in the 80s harsh and rebarbative. And I'd rather pass over the stained glass window he designed for Westminster Abbey.  And yet, with such a voluminous body of work over so many years it could not be otherwise.

     For me his greatest periods (there were two) were, firstly the Late 60s and early 70s when he first discovered California, and his art took off in a new figurative direction, and then brought back to London, not only his then boyfriend & muse Peter Schlesinger, but what he had learned under that bright West Coast Sun and applied it to a slightly shabby, down-at-heel, but culturally dynamic London.  It was the time of Jack Hazan's film 'A Bigger Splash', and Schlesinger's book 'A Checkered Past'.  Of mixing with the Beau Monde.  A time of large canvases -  'Portrait of An Artist' and 'Mr & Mrs Clark and Percy', and at the other end of the scale of a series of ravishing pencil-crayon portraits of friends and lovers that are quite masterly.

    The second is marked, after a long sojourn in California, by his return to England in the 1990s, to the landscape of the East Riding and particularly the Yorkshire Wolds. It sparked a period of creativity that had lasted until his death; one that saw the most exceptional creativity and growth in him as an artist.  The creation of huge monumental artworks both painting and new media, as well as the most intimate, using an i-pod.  His ability to work on both scales was something, perhaps exceptional, as was his ability to find a subject matter everywhere and in everything, which suggest an almost inexhaustible curiosity.  He was also, I suspect, what one might call, an intellectual artist.  I suppose in this post I might have depicted him as an almost Romantic artist in his response to his environment; he was an artist who was always deeply aware of the history of art and the craft of art.

    A few minutes ago I was sitting drafting this post long-hand, sitting at the kitchen table, on which stands a most Hockney-ish object - a vase of tulips.

'Checkered Past: A Visual Diary of the '60s and '70s'

But I sat back and looking forward

My shoes were high and I had scored

I'd bolted through a closing door

I would never find myself feeling bored

     I've been neglecting the blog of late, certainly neglecting the visual side of things, not being that happy.  It's all become a bit wordy.  Then lunchtime, for some reason, I suddenly thought of Peter Schlesinger's wonderful book 'Checkered Past: A Visual Diary of the '60s and '70s', published 2003 by Vendome Press.  I discovered this book on Ben Pentreath's Inspiration Blog over a decade ago now, and it has been a firm favourite of mine ever since.  It is a book of a slightly melancholic beauty.  Schlesinger's photographs are ravishing, sometimes possessing an ethereal quality, the result I think of the use of film.

     'Checkered Past' documents the American artist's ten years, or so, living in London from the late '60s to the late '70s.  When David Hockney returned to Britain in 1968, Schlesinger - then his lover - followed.  They settled in the then slightly seedy Notting Hill in w London.  In those days those grand stucco houses were subdivided into flats and bedsits.  It was a life poised between the bohemian and the Beau Monde.  A life that included, amongst a cast of seemingly thousands, such 'Somethingofthechamelon' favourites Cecil Beaton, Patrick Proctor, David Hockney, Min Hogg, Gala Mitchell, and Celia Birtwell; the social, the arts, applied arts and the intellectual. Socialites and plutocrats.  A life partially covered in Jack Hazzan's 1973 film 'A Bigger Splash', which purportedly covers the aftermath of the end of Schlesinger's relationship with David Hockney, and the creation of one of Hockney's most well known paintings, 'Portrait of an Artist'.

     It is a world that is slowly slipping from our grasp.  It essentially ended in the mid-70s after the Oil crises.  I think it was Sir Roy Strong, who moved in the same circles, who said that it was the last social great period, or words to that effect.  Certainly a more colourful world both in terms of the visual but also the character of those depicted.  There was definitely more place for the eccentric and the intellectual.

Checkered Past: A Visual Dairy of the 60s & 70s  Peter Schlesinger, Vendome Press, 2003

A Bigger Splash

     After watching this film with the bf I was tempted to entitle this post "Significant people, huh!", a quote from Evelyn Waugh's masterpiece 'Brideshead Revisited'.  The narrator (the painter Charles Ryder) and Lady Julia Mottram are dining with a curious assortment of American grandees on a transatlantic liner. The dinner does not go well and the grandees are left with a poor impression of their English counterparts.  At one point one Senator Stuyvesant Oglander 'looked at his wife as if to say: 'Significant people, huh!''.    

     Which is really just a long winded way of saying the bf thought all the 'characters' in 'A Bigger Splash' were somewhat dull.  I couldn't help but be disappointed with his response, not only because the film is important to me as it reflects a little of that social sphere inhabited by David Hockney et al, wonderfully reflected in that fabulous book by Peter Schlesinger, 'A Checkered Past' that is a deep fascination for me, but because it was hard to refute his opinion. The bohemian lives depicted here seemed somewhat domestic and trivial, leaning perhaps a little too much to the boring. Perhaps it is the crippling self-consciousness that they all display before the camera's blank remorseless gaze that's to blame.  There is but one moment of transcendence when the artist, the charming Patrick Proctor forgets the presence of the camera, but really that is it. 

     We are given two all-too-brief scenes of a wider bohemian life: an Ossie Clarke fashion show (chaotic) where Hockney, in the front row with Peter Schlesinger and Celia Birtwell, appears to fall asleep , and 'The Alternative Miss World Competition' (more chaotic still).  Would there have been more of those scenes.  Fascinating too were the fashions and the interiors.
     Anyway I'm rather leaping ahead here.  'A Bigger Splash' dates from 1974 and is work of British cinematographer Jack Hazan.  His first full length film - a semi-fictionalized documentary with the 'stars' playing themselves.  It is named after a Hockney painting of 1967.  The result is visually beautiful, sometimes striking, but often confused in narrative structure. Since getting the dvd, way back in September, I've watched the film five or six times, being both attracted, as I've said, to the subject and slightly perplexed about the narrative.  There is a lot to sort out, to 'unpackage'.  The film ostensibly documents a three year period in Hockney's life in the early Seventies when he was living in London. The central event of the film is break-up of his relationship with Peter Schlesinger and the repercussions the break-up has for his art, particularly on the creation of the painting 'Portrait of an Artist'.  A painting, an earlier version of 'Portrait of an Artist' is destroyed in the process, which sounds quite dramatic, but without the overly melodramatic score by Patrick Gowers would be quite trivial an event.  It's not as though we actually see the canvas being destroyed, just the fragments (depicting Peter Schlesinger) lying on the darkened studio floor.  We see another canvas being destroyed earlier in the film.  They should not be confused. It isn't the same image falling under the knife.

   For the trouble with this film is really simple: its narrative has been constructed after the event, in the cutting room, with the available material.  The continuity between shots can be laughable, and some of the scenes were either too long and needed a swift editing, or were verging on the pointless.  However that is not to neglect or denigrate its importance in the depiction of gay guys like me living life that is normal as opposed to one that is problematic, or filled with sorrow beyond that of the ordinary.  A brave attempt then, and one I cannot totally dismiss.  Nor would I want to.

A Bigger Splash

1973

Producer:               Jack Hazzan, Mike Kaplan

Director:                 Jack Hazzan

Cinematographer: Jack Hazzan

A tale of two cities? David Hockney at Tate Britain

      To a hot and sweltering London on Wednesday, with my friend Penny, and the vast retrospective of the work of David Hockney at Tate Britain. An exhibition that, incidentally, illustrates 20th century British art's deep ambiguity with abstract Modernism, and the continuing vitality of the figurative and landscape traditions in the 21st. Such a vast, and humbling, exhibition in fact, and Hockney such a complex, changeful and intellectual artist, that I'm not sure quite how, or where, to begin.

     With a few biographical details, perhaps. Hockney was born in 1937 in the industrial city of Bradford, Yorkshire. In 1953 he attended Bradford School of Art. The work that Hockney did between his time at and the RCA is largely overlooked in this exhibition, the narrative of which commences with the work he made while at the Royal College of Art In London (1959-1961).  However it's perfectly easy to find it on line, and quite interesting it is. Perhaps very much in the style of the Euston Road School and the dying embers of Neo-Romanticism.  There is one work, a very early work in particular that presages themes that re-occur in Hockney's later work: the self portrait of 1954.  Firstly there is its almost hieratic style, secondly the slight sense of isolation of the subject, and lastly the love of pattern and detail.
     Hockney's move to the capital, like his later encounter with Los Angeles, was crucial to the development of his style as a painter and of his personal life.  Initially there was a massive change in his painting style as he temporarily forsook figuration for Abstract Expressionism, and secondly in his personal life he came out. This act, quite brave considering the times, would propel his return to figurative art; and that changefulness in Hockney's work is one the themes that emerges repeatedly in this exhibition. The influences at that stage of his career are clear enough: Francis Bacon, Dubuffet. There are elements too of Pop Art, such as in 'Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style' of 1961.  Indeed one always feels with Hockney that his influences are always readily apparent, and that perhaps makes him a pioneer Post-Modernist, (indeed Hockney has had a great effect on the visual language of Post Modernism), except, I suggest, he has always been open to the idea of the meta-narrative.  He is also suspicious, and rightly so, of the idea of the 'Avant Garde'. These early canvases are often darkly textured with paint, and scrawled with lettering (like graffiti) that enhances the often visceral quality of the image. The scale too is big, though not as big as the monumental canvases Hockey painted in the late 60s and early 70s. In these RCA works we also see the emergence of another theme: the figure in profile.

     On leaving the RCA Hockney quickly found representation with John Kasmin, 'Kasmin', whose eponymous West End gallery was supported by Lindy & Sheriden Dufferin. 

Hockney was now moving in aristocratic and bohemian circles in London. It is a period in Hockney's life that I find deeply and endlessly fascinating, and which is chronicled in one of my favourite books, 'Checkered Past' by Peter Schlesinger, Hockney's lover in the late Sixties and early Seventies. The art of this period returns in a manner to the art of those pre RCA years in that it begins to find inspiration in the life around him, though stylistically the art of both periods is radically different. In them Hockney's painting of the human form seems to coalesce and clarify, and it was a process that was speeded up by Hockney's momentous encounter (1967) with a second city - Los Angeles.  'Three times better than I thought it would be', or words to that effect. California sharpened up his style as it went through another momentous transformation; the areas of bare canvas that haunted his work post RCA retreated before smooth fields of acrylic paint; for the first time nature makes an appearance with vivid sky and vivid, manicured lawns and there is the water, transformed by Hockney's love of pattern.  Although realist all these pictures eschew Renaissance perspective for something essentially older, more (if you will) Medieval - the smart Modernist villas that inhabit the Los Angeles pictures are painted in the manner of slick architects' presentation drawings.  And as much a I liked them I felt an certain unease before them.  It's only a few days after my visit has this thought finally crystallised.  I'll see if I can explain.  In all these early works the figures seem to float free.  Decontextualised almost. Even in the double portraits, such as 'American Collectors', 1968, the relationship between subjects seem to be merely formal as though they were taking place in some sort of ritual, rather than everyday interaction - that same sense of the formal and hieractic that was present in that early self portrait of 1954.  There is a sense of atomisation, if not alienation.  The enuui of late Modernity.  Three paintings are the exception and they represent people he was particularly attached to: Mr and Mrs Clarke and Percy', 1970-71, 'Portrait of an Artist', 1972, and 'My Parents', 1977. One feels that throughout this period Hockney could, with some justification, be labelled an urban painter. History is never too far from Hockney; objects appear in the fore ground of many paintings such as 'Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968, just as they do in the Renaissance, but did they, I wonder, have any symbolic meaning?
     In contrast the next gallery concentrates on his drawings and prints. The crayon portraits are simply exquisite demonstrating his great technical abilities.  There are three portraits of a rare and wonderful lucidity and luminosity, Ozzie Clark, Celia Birtwell and Andy Warhol, that were quite inspirational. The contrast could not be greater with the next two galleries, which contain work from the Eighties and Nineties.  Again one encounters one of those rather breath-taking changes in style: the brush strokes more gestural 'painterly'; the style semi-abstract; the colours harsh, scalding. I didn't linger.

     And then suddenly, I found myself standing before one of Hockney's Yorkshire Wold paintings.  Pale English colours. Relief. These paintings dating from 2000s are vast and monumental and at times deeply moving. In a process that began in the 1980s, one suspects, the City has finally been abandoned.  One feels that a long journey has bee travelled since those dark abrasive pictures of Hockney's RCA days.