David Hockney embraces the cool vistas of his youth

This David Hockney article is courtesy of Los Angeles Times, January 30, 2005.

DAVID HOCKNEY stands in the filtered gray daylight of the train station platform, a stork-like figure whose cane and upthrust chin set him apart as he’s scanning the arriving passengers. He’s wearing a stylish fedora, dark greatcoat and a suit that will prove to be cashmere, a sensible outfit for a December drive in the English countryside with the window halfway down. Hockney, who at 67 has let his onceperoxided hair go comfortably pewter, smiles at the visitor and extends his hand with an intriguing mixture of warmth and reserve. “Not many people go to Bridlington,” he almost immediately says with a conspiratorial savor. “If AVID HOCKNEY stands in the filtered gray daylight of the train station platform, a stork-like figure whose cane and upthrust chin set him apart as he’s scanning the arriving passengers. He’s wearing a
stylish fedora, dark greatcoat and a suit that will prove to be cashmere, a sensible outfit for a December drive in the English countryside with the window halfway down. Hockney, who at 67 has let his onceperoxided hair go comfortably pewter, smiles at the visitor and extends his hand with an intriguing mixture of warmth and reserve. “Not many people go to Bridlington,” he almost immediately says with a conspiratorial savor. “If AVID HOCKNEY stands in the filtered gray daylight of the train station platform, a stork-like figure whose cane and upthrust chin set him apart as he’s scanning the arriving passengers. He’s wearing a stylish fedora, dark greatcoat and a suit that will prove to be cashmere, a sensible outfit for a December drive in the English countryside with the window halfway down. Hockney, who at 67 has let his onceperoxided hair go comfortably pewter, smiles at the visitor and extends his hand with an intriguing mixture of warmth and reserve.
“Not many people go to Bridlington,” he almost immediately says with a conspiratorial savor. “If you tell someone in London you’ve been to Bridlington, they won’t know where it is.” York is only a two-hour train journey from London, and Bridlington is an hour’s drive beyond that, but it’s a drive into a seemingly unchanged world. Bridlington is still in part a fishing village, in part the seaside resort Hockney’s family visited in the ’40s and ’50s, where he bought and furnished a comfortable home overlooking the North Sea for his mother (who died in 1999 at age 99) and his sister, Margaret Hockney, who lives there still. “It was built by a Bridlington trawler owner for his ugly daughter,” says Hockney, who made a point of not removing the number plates that once guided patrons during the house’s latter days as a bed and breakfast. Hockney, strolling toward his car in a way that shows the cane to be more accessory than necessity, wants to know how the journey from London was. As a seasoned trencherman, he seems pleased that his visitor enjoyed a full English breakfast en route. Our mission today is to drive via back roads through East Yorkshire — not to be confused with the Yorkshire Dales, the more famously picturesque terrain to the west where Turner painted landscapes — and look at some of the locales that inspired the 55 watercolors in Hockney’s upcoming (Feb. 26 through April 2) show at LA Louver gallery in Venice, Calif. It’s titled “Hand Eye Heart,” after the Chinese formulation describing what painting draws upon. The show’s mostly roadside vistas share a roughhewn beauty that’s rich in mossy greens, lavender-gray skies and stark, winter-stripped trees and hedgerows. One grouping is of 36 smaller paintings, hung four scenes high by nine scenes long, composing a pastorale in lush green and rich yellow hues.
For all its pleasures, it’s a show that could induce in Los Angeles art lovers a feeling of suspense and even poignancy, for these works were inspired by and executed in Hockney’s native country and mark the culmination of three years largely spent away from his L.A. home and studio off Mulholland Drive. Although he won’t state outright that he’s away from America indefinitely — he’ll casually say things such as, “I’m a claustrophobe, that’s why I live in L.A.” — he also gives no timetable for his return.
Blame a great deal of his urge to roam on his newly discovered medium of watercolors. What began as a few portraits in the late ’90s flowered into a group of works done in Spain, then bravura Norwegian and Icelandic landscapes. Hockney learned the craft quickly and came to love loading up his brush for the kind of strokes that require real commitment. “A painting is an artist’s account of looking at the world,” he says on this day, a credo he’s stated before. The world he’s seen
recently is revealed (though sometimes barely, as with one fogshrouded
row of trees in the new show’s untitled signature work),
largely under northern light. His studio in the Bridlington home’s
converted attic lets in the same faint glow, and the L.A. show’s
“Bridlington. Garden and Rooftops III” invites you to make what
you will of the sedate view north from it.
Hockney’s friend, writer and cultural critic Lawrence Weschler,
has written an essay for LA Louver’s catalog, and he finds
“a return to origins” in Hockney’s autumn- and winterscapes:
“the sense of returning in winter, perhaps, to one’s own springtime.”
C O N T I N U I T Y , N O T C H A N G E HOCKNEY leads the way to his tan Lexus,
which he chose as the quietest ride this side
of a Bentley. He immediately rolls down his
window and lights a smoke, which he does at
a rate of slightly more than a pack a day when
he’s talking a lot. (He points out that Eisenhower
has been unjustly criticized for smoking
80 cigarettes on D-day — “I should think he would have
smoked 200.”) Between conscientious tour guide business —
glances at the remains of York’s ancient wall and the landmark
tower the York Minster — he continues to kvetch eloquently
about the antismoking forces in England and America. It’s
a theme he returns to often, but his summation relies on a
countryman’s words and is aimed straight at his sometime
home: “Tom Stoppard says people in L.A. think the choice is between smoking and immortality.”
As we motor through small villages and down verdant ravines
that, as Hockney points out, were carved by glaciers rather than
rivers, we pass occasional flocks of sheep and Highland cattle,
and fields that the government has decreed will be forever reserved
for cultivating oats, wheat and barley.
“It’s the food bin of England,” Peter Goulds, LA Louver founder
and director, says of Hockney’s native Yorkshire, noting that
the artist spent most of his childhood in the sooty city of Bradford
in West Yorkshire. Goulds, who first sold works by Hockney
in the late 1970s, sees more continuity than change in this hanging:
“It’s all part of what you could call David’s journey to light.”
Goulds helped Hockney mount a September 1998 show at the
gallery titled “looking at landscape/being in landscape” in which
massive studies of American sites (including “A Bigger Grand
Canyon,” which sold to the National Gallery of Australia for
$3 million) were hung near a series of Yorkshire scenes. The latter,
though done in oils, Hockney’s most familiar medium, covered
territory similar to the recent watercolors. Goulds sees the
watercolor spate as almost inevitable for the “intellectually curious
and technically proficient” painter. “It was a medium he’d
largely avoided; finally he had to take it on.”
The 1998 show derived much of its inspiration from drives
Hockney made between Bridlington and the town of Wetherby,
where his great friend Jonathan Silver lay dying of pancreatic AN L.A. PERSPECTIVE: Hockney in his studio in 1990
with an unfinished canvas of the Santa Monica Mountains. cancer. (The same disease had claimed his confrere, curator
Henry Geldzahler, in 1994.) “You might as well live,” was Hockney’s
way of summing up his determination not to despair despite
those deaths and a series of others — from AIDS, age and
other causes—among his oldest friends. Legendarily devoted to
his dachshunds, he was further dismayed by the death of his frequent
portrait subject Stanley (Hockney is a great fan of Laurel
and Hardy). That latter loss did create a kind of liberation — he
was no longer constrained by dog quarantine regulations that
had kept Stanley from joining him on visits to England. As the departure
of friends joined with his severe hearing loss to leave him
increasingly isolated in his canyon, the logic of spending time in
England grew.
L . A . I N S P I R A T I O N S MOST of Hockney’s London days, in the
three years since he’s been once again
based there, are spent in his apartment
and studio at the edge of Holland Park,
where he walks most mornings while
fetching the newspapers. (“I’m not really
a reader of the Guardian,” he’ll sniff,
showing little interest in their putting a loaned sketch of his on
the front page this very Saturday as part of a neighborhood campaign
to save what turns out to be his old post office.)
He has a brother living near Margaret in Bridlington and two
more in business in Australia, but he dotes on the chirpingly delightful
Margaret, a former nurse who has such an array of computers
supporting her digital photography (much of it linked to
her second career as a herbalist) that the BBC recently visited to
film her at work. As a young nurse, she went to Zambia for a year
but stayed three because the need was so great: “My sister has an
innocence about her,” he says lovingly. “She’s seen life much more
harsh than you or I. She’s never earned any money in her life.” He
pauses for a wry look: “You have to be a big crook to get money.”
The artist is able to be of and apart from the London arts community;
a 2002 arrangement to trade portraits, each of the other,
with Lucian Freud resulted in many walks across Holland Park
(where, significantly, “I saw my first Northern European springtime
in 22 years”). Hockney willingly sat for 129 hours; the older
artist gave him but three to capture the forbidding Freud visage.
Both men are “academicians,” as the elite members of the Royal
Academy of Arts are called, and are said to be privately unhappy
that an architect was selected to head that group rather than
Hockney’s longtime painter colleague (they were at the Royal College of Art with director Ridley Scott in the early ’60s), Allan
Jones.
Hockney was the toast of swinging London before he characteristically
removed himself from it. His arrival in Los Angeles in
the mid-1960s (after a brief spell testing the water in New York)
was vivifying: “I was so taken with the space, the beauty of it. It
was . . . January 1964. You could drive anywhere; it hardly seemed
to have a rush hour — you’d drive from Santa Monica to Pasadena
at 6 o’clock, and it’d take you half an hour . . . move around
the city with the greatest of ease in your private space.”
He had arrived bearing the proceeds from his first large show
in England: “I traveled with a letter of credit, took with me about
three or four thousand dollars. I felt I was rich, very rich.”
Hockney spent $900 on the Ford Falcon that would take him
through 50,000 miles of exploration. “One day a week I used to
drive around L.A., go anywhere, find out where I was from the
Thomas Guide and then drive back. It was amazing, actually. I’d
never felt freer, sexually free, everything.”
If his paintings were not the first proclamation that L.A.’s
swimming pools and palm trees were iconic, they were among the
more powerful. And though he doesn’t dwell on the impact of
globally familiar images such as the almost audibly evocative
snapshot-in-acrylics called “A Bigger Splash” (“I painted that in
Berkeley actually — probably from a photograph — while I was
teaching there for a semester.”), he was and is pleased to claim
his territory: “One of the great things about L.A. for me when I
first went there was nobody had painted it. Paris had been painted
by great artists, Italy, London — but in L.A., you didn’t even
know what famous building was there.”
Still, he refused to put down immobilizing roots, despite the
happiness he found there from 1964 through 1977. He was 28 and a
growingly famous La Cienega boulevardier (his usual uniform
was “a T-shirt”) when he met 18-year-old art student Peter Schlesinger.
The new love was enough to uproot Hockney, as he describes
in his easy, if telegraphic style: “A very L.A. person, very goodlooking
and very bright, full of curiosity. He actually made
me come back to Europe — he wanted to live in London. I moved
back to London just because of Peter, and when we broke up
I went to live in Paris. And after that I felt I’d rather be in
L.A., that’s the place, that’s where I can work. I had to get a green
card again, but I found L.A. a stimulant. I wasn’t quite tempted
to just lie on a beach; I might have painted a kind of hedonism,
but the artists themselves can’t be hedonists. Artists are workers.”

B A C K T O T H E L A N D YORK proper and its suburbs are soon behind
us as Hockney expertly pilots the sedan on the
old Roman road, which soon resembles a country
lane, rising 800 feet above sea level over the
chalk hills (“wolds”) between York and Bridlington.
We’re not far outside Stamford
Bridge, where a noted prelude to the Battle of
Hastings was fought, when he points out a pub that would look
perfectly at home in a film adaptation of a Thomas Hardy book.
As a 15-year-old schoolboy working an arduous summer job, “I’d
go down there and have drinks.” (This falls in line with his somewhat
defensive boast, “I never had a cigarette before I was 9.”) A
half-mile on we pass a farmhouse surrounded by cornfields,
where he’d stayed while he earned wages “stooking”: “You picked
up the sheaf of corn, tied it together with another and made it
into a stook, then stuck them in the stubble. It was a hard day’s
work actually — the only consolation was it was rather beautiful
looking out, on the shapes of the fields.”
It’s not the grandest manifesto an artist ever announced, but
as he spent more time in England over the last couple of years,
those fields called out to him. A number of the watercolors in the
upcoming show, notably “Woldgate With Flowers and Blossom,”
recapture those days, showing landscapes that, he notes, “haven’t
changed a bit in 50 years.” In addition to those and the almost
riotous flora in the “36-Part Work,” there are many wintry
scenes, such as “Trees & Puddles, East Yorkshire,” that use humble
means to pull your eye into something actually as complex as
one of Hockney’s beloved Mahler symphonies.
Although the show’s working title used the phrase “After the
Secret Knowledge,” these paintings clearly proceed beyond
Hockney’s recent studies of how the old masters used (and
achieved) perspective. Though he’s still involved in intellectual
scraps with scientists from Stanford and Scientific American,
the upshot of his research was a repudiation of photography’s
Cyclops eye, and a simple enough refutation of what the literal
rendering of nature can do: “It led me back to the land. I realized
you could [only] paint the landscape, because you can’t photograph
the landscape — you can’t get space in it.” So I thought,
‘Well my God, I should go paint Yorkshire again.’ ”
Our destination is Bridlington, where we’ll wander along the
strand and eat a hearty lunch, dinner and breakfast with his aide,
Gregory Evans, and the welcoming Margaret. (Hockney’s companion
of some years, John Fitzherbert, prepares a lunch, heavy
on pork, before taking to his bed to fight a cold.)

But on the chatty, ambling ride to Bridlington, Hockney
seems content to pull over in key spots for reconsideration. He
sits alertly in the driver’s seat, looking like he’d prefer the passenger
seat, where he spent much time doing smaller paintings with
a board across his knees to make an easel. Peering into the fields
where the sun glowers but never quite breaks through, he seems
again to be following the skein of memory that led him down
these back roads. He’s well aware that despite inveighing against
establishments artistic and political, he’s been under the covers
with fame and wealth for more than three decades now. There’s
probably no more celebrated world-class artist, and the accessibility
of his vibrant, involving canvases has somehow not hurt
his standing among critics and curators. In disregarding fashion
and trend, he’s remained relentlessly fashionable.
His friend, Norman Rosenthal, the Royal Academy of Arts curator,
notes that the acclaim for Hockney’s work would not have
come if the artist weren’t “an amazingly competent man” but
sees his long-running success as more a function of being “constantly
inventive” and also because of “a great moral authority
that comes through in his art.”
One of the more striking works in the LA Louver show is “The
Road to Rudston,” executed in March of last year. Its barren trees
and hedgerows are rendered with almost manic brushstrokes,
much resembling those in Van Gogh’s Provence sketchbooks, under
darkly swelling rain clouds. The painting is also to be found in
a new hardcover collection called “Hockney’s Pictures: The Definitive
Retrospective,” where it sits above one of his epigrammatic
quotes. “I have always believed that art should be a deep
pleasure,” it reads, “ . . . the very fact that the art is made seems to
contradict despair.”
Rosenthal says Hockney “believes in life, and he believes in
freedom, and all those things he’s stood for all his life — and
whether that was as a young man or now as an older man, he
somehow hasn’t changed. He doesn’t dye his hair blond anymore
but that’s all the difference there is.”
Hockney will admit that recent world events can induce moments
of doubt, and that “one of my selfish thoughts was, ‘Well,
maybe you should be glad you’re not too young.’ ” He gazes across
the lane at the farmhouse where five decades ago he would sleep
rough, one of six laborers to a room. “When you’re young, the
world excites you no matter what. It’s when you’re old you actually
want the silk underwear.”
He reflects a moment. “You know what the Chinese say about
painting?” This he follows with a shrug that can only be described
as philosophical: “It is an old man’s art.”

David Hockney – Portraits – Portrait Paintings of David Hockney

The Art Set – An Artist Who Needs People – Charlie Scheips

Yesterday was the public opening of David Hockney: Portraits, a retrospective spanning over 50 years of the master Englishman’s work at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The show is an absolute pleasure to behold—the innovation and imagination that Hockney has brought to the genre ranges from the early fine-lined ink and pencil portraits from the late 1950s through the large-scale acrylic double-portraits of the 1960s (for which part of his early fame was based) to the cubist and photo-collage innovations of the 1980s right-up to the present large-scale water color and oil portraits he has made during the past several years.

Throughout Hockney’s artistic journey he has returned over and over again to subjects closest too him. His first major double portrait in the show is of his parents Kenneth and Laura Hockney—and although Kenneth died in 1978 he continued to paint his mother until her death at 99 seven years ago. Other regular subjects besides many members of his family included his early muse and friend designer Celia Birtwell (whose children and now grandchildren, are featured in the exhibition); Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood; art world personality Henry Geldzahler, as well as Hockney intimates, John Fitzherbert, Ann and David Graves, Elsa Duarte and family, Richard Schmidt, and Jean Pierre Goncalves de Lima; and Gregory Evans. Evans, who was a major force in the organization of this remarkable show worked on behalf of Hockney’s interests with the triumverate of curators Barbara Stern Shapiro (MFA), Stephanie Barron (LA County Museum) and Sarah Howgate (National Portrait Gallery, London.)

David Hockney: Portraits at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts

Along the way, Hockney managed to have a virtual who’s who of the literary and artistic circles of his time sit for him including many featured in the show: W.H. Auden, ballet critic Richard Buckle, Francesco Clemente, Divine, Lucien Freud, Richard Hamilton, R.B Kitaj, restaurateur Peter Langan, Jack Larson, heart-throb 1970s model Joe McDonald; J. B Priestly, Patrick Proctor, curator Norman Rosenthal, Peter Schlesinger, Stephen Spender, Andy Warhol, collectors Fred and Marcia Weisman, Lawrence Weschler, Billy Wilder and dealers such as the legendary Nick Wilder and Hockney’s dealer in Los Angeles, Peter Goulds, as well as this writer.

It is extraordinary that it has taken this long for an institution to mount an exhibition of Hockney’s portrait work. But perhaps it’s a blessing that we can have such a wide range of time and media to see with un-jaded eyes. Walking around the exhibition during the final installation I was struck by the feeling of intimacy that was almost palpable in the galleries. Hockney has only very rarely done anything close to a “commissioned” portrait choosing instead familiar faces and personalities whom he knows so that he doesn’t “worry about resemblance”—the dread of all portrait artists.

As readers of previous Art Set pieces know, I have had an almost quarter century’s involvement with Hockney. In fact, the exhibition features three recent oil portraits Hockney made of me last year. During the press conference at the Museum last week, many of the reporters asked me what we talked about during the various sittings. Besides the occasional “lets take a break” or “cup of tea and a cigarette” we generally did not speak at all. This is another reason for Hockney’s choice of close friends as sitters—there is none of the nervousness or self-consciousness that a stranger might bring to the occasion.

Since we are so accustomed to the photographic or photo-based portrait in our own time, Hockney’s portraits sometime elicit a response from casual viewers about the sitter looking either morose or bored. I frankly don’t think people look long enough at them to realize the subtle ways Hockney uses to conjure up his sitter’s persona from the blank page or canvas, And after all, a portrait is about two people—the one portrayed and the artist. Perhaps the artist’s own relationship plays into the creative dance which is portraiture.

The fact is that most of these things are made in a far longer time than the flash of a camera. Even Hockney’s photo-collages take longer as they are first shot and then assembled in his inimitable yet oft-copied fashion. No one can keep a smile for several minutes much less the several hours that most of the portraits have taken. Hockney has frequently railed against the dominance of photography in our world and these portraits stand as testament to his call for the return of art to the “eye, hand, and heart.” Or, in other words, they have depth, something very few photos ever have.

The first of us all arrived on Valentine’s Day to Boston’s Lenox Hotel that increasingly became a veritable Camp Hockney as the week progressed and more and more friends arrived—taking up about three floors of the hotel. Hockney was in the Judy Garland Suite which he laughed had no sign of her having stayed there. The wood paneled suite did feature two bad reproductions of 18th-century American portraits which Hockney renamed Fannie Abigail Garland and her husband Horatio. Thanks to a color copy of the real Judy Garland brought by Bing McGilvray, we managed to collage it atop of Fannie’s face. Judy lives!

The first night we had dinner in the hotel’s Azure restaurant with Gregory Evans, Peter Goulds, Sarah Howgate, Thomas Graf, Jean Pierre Goncalves de Lima, and Barbara and her husband Bernard Shapiro celebrating their 53rd wedding anniversary. After years in Boston, the Shapiro’s have re-located to Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

The next night we arranged for a private dining room at the Atlantic Fish Company a block down on Boylston street which included the above mentioned guests and NPG director Sandy Nairne, sitting next to Hockney, Bing McGilvray, Sidney and Joni Felsen, Stephanie Barron, Elsa and David Duarte, George Mulder, Arthur Lambert.

By Friday, the day of the official press conference, lenders and sitters’ lunch and evening opening, the arrival of Hockney’s inner-circle reached critical mass. There were so many of Hockney’s sitters there that someone got the bright idea to have the sitters autograph pages of the catalog a la a high school yearbook—it caught on like wild fire, as they say.

And speaking of fire, one of the nicer things in Boston was the smoking lounge the museum installed in Hockney’s honor for the opening—complete with heating, ventilation and seating. If you didn’t want to be there—you didn’t have to. Bravo.

The exhibition remains at the MFA until May 14. It travels to the Los Angeles County Museum June 11-September 4 and then to London’s National Portrait Gallery 0ctober 12 until January 21, 2007. One of the reasons to also make it to the LA show is that Hockney’s fabulous Beverly Hills Housewife of the music patron and photographer Betty Freeman will be on view there. The London venue is a cornerstone of the NPG’s 150th anniversary. Alas, the show is not coming to smoke-free New York.

Meanwhile, Hockney has moved to other pastures—namely the landscape of East Yorkshire where he is spending the better part of the year doing plein aire large-scale landscapes of the changing seasons. During the hanging of the show in Boston, Hockney remarked to me, “if I don’t say so myself, the beginning and the ending are both good,” He also mentioned later that seeing the work together made him think he “hadn’t been wasting his time.”

There is an excellent catalog for the exhibition with essays by Mark Glazebrook, Edmund White, and Marco Livingston. For more information on the exhibition and to order your catalog go to: www.mfa.org.

David Hockney: Portraits at National Portrait Gallery

Article taken from Artdaily.com – LONDON, ENGLAND.- The National Portrait Gallery presents David Hockney: Portraits, on view through January 21, 2007. David Hockney Portraits is the most comprehensive survey of Hockney’s portraits ever created. Following hugely successful showings in Boston an Los Angeles, this exceptional exhibition opens at the National Portrait Gallery on October 12. Offering the opportunity to see many works together for the first time, David Hockney Portraits is a fascinating visual diary of the life, love and friendship of one of the greatest and most admired British artists of his generation.
The portraits provide insights into the artist’s intense observations of the people he has
charted over many years. These include his parents, fabric designer Celia Birtwell, art
dealer John Kasmin and some of the leading cultural figures of the twentieth century such
as Andy Warhol, Man Ray and W H Auden.
Hockney’s most personal and powerful works are included in the exhibition, starting with
the artist’s very early self portraits and studies of his father created during his student years at Bradford School of Art. Also brought together are the celebrated, almost life-size double
portraits of Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott (1969), American Collectors (Mr and
Mrs Weisman) (1968) My Parents (1977) and the much-loved Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy
(1970-71) which returns to the National Portrait Gallery, where it was first exhibited in
1971.
Showcasing major examples of his work from his time in Britain and California – including
Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool (1966) and Divine (1979) – David Hockney Portraits
concludes with the artist’s new work, marking his return to large-scale painted portraits. As
with his earlier paintings, Hockney reconsiders the conversation piece and the heroic,
single-standing figure, but this time he paints them directly from life.
The exhibition is remarkable in celebrating David Hockney’s many innovations in the art of
portraiture from his Cubist-influenced photographic collages of the 1980s to his recent
camera lucida drawings.
Sandy Nairne, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, says: “David Hockney’s
portraits offer the best view of his work and life – it is a great privilege to be able to bring so
many together in London.”
PUBLICATION
The definitive exhibition catalogue, fully illustrated with over 300 illustrations, by curators
Sarah Howgate and Barbara Stern Shapiro, with essays by Mark Glazebrook, Marco
Livingstone and Edmund White is published by the National Portrait Gallery price £35
hardback
The exhibition is organised by the National Portrait Gallery, London and Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston and in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
David Hockney Portraits coincides with David Hockney – A Year in Yorkshire: New
Paintings at Annely Juda Fine Art (15 September-28 October) and the revised paperback
edition of David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the
Old Masters published by Thames and Hudson (September 18).

Hockney is top of the pops

Hockney is top of the pops – Virginia Blackburn on bagging works at a bargain – THE TIMES – October 07, 2006.

It is rare, in this country, to find a highly successful living artist who is also greatly loved. Damien Hirst may be raking it in, but spontaneous outbursts of affection when his name is mentioned tend to be few and far between. The exception, however, is David Hockney.

Works from the earliest days of the Yorkshireman’s career until the present are currently on sale at the Andipa Gallery in London, some at prices that even quite modest collectors will be able to afford. Limited edition prints and lithographs are in the sale, along with drawings and oils, at prices starting from as little as £1,500.

“The earliest work on display is very rare: an oil painting on board of Mount Street, Bradford, at £42,000,” says Acoris Andipa, the gallery director. “From there, the next body of work dates from 1969; a series of black-and-white etchings to illustrate Grimm’s fairy tales, starting at £1,500. After that comes the iconic swimming pool lithographs.”

Andipa is the first gallery to show all 12 swimming pool pictures together, providing a wonderful insight into Hockney’s creative processes as the works progressed. “You can see him defining the idea,” Mr Andipa says. “It starts with a single blue line on paper, and moves on through blue washes. He is fascinated by the reflection of light on water as the day progresses.”

The £25,000 swimming pool lithographs are selling out quickly but there are two more facets to the sale, each extremely attractive and indicative of another Hockney phase. The first is a series of lithographs of the Mexican Hotel Acatlán.

Hockney is an adventurous type of artist and was barely supporting himself through his art when he chose to go to America. In February 1984 he was travelling in Mexico when his car broke down. He took it to the local garage, which was unable to get the necessary parts for two weeks. Undaunted, Hockney booked into the nearest hotel, where he spent two weeks admiring the local colour. As soon as he returned home, he produced large, hot-coloured images of Mexican courtyards, now priced between £25,000 and £40,000.

Finally, there is a series of interiors, the most noteworthy of which is the Van Gogh Chair. The etching was first released in 1998 as a series of 35, but it is believed that Hockney had a change of heart about the print and only a few of the pre-sold images were ever released. The price is £22,000.

Those are the highlights, but there is more: a little portrait of a male sitter, at £12,000; a drawing of the 1971 Glyndebourne production of The Rake’s Progress, at £20,000; and a set design for the Metropolitan Opera’s 1981 production of L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, also at £22,000.

They are not cheap by most people’s standards, but it is Hockney. And even if you are not buying, the Andipa website has a beautiful selection of his pictures to admire.

Up there, Stravinsky

Up there, Stravinsky – Will David Hockney’s sets and W.H. Auden’s libretto lure the punters to The Rake’s Progress? John Bailey talks to Melbourne-born tenor John Heuzenroeder about Opera Australia’s forthcoming production. – THE AGE – April 2, 2006

If singing were sport, opera would be the bodybuilding of vocal expression. We mortals have long been dumbstruck by the heavyweight titans of song, the muscular flex of a diva’s diaphragm or eye-bulging strain of a note held longer than would seem possible.

But unlike Australia’s obsession for all things sporting, opera is the least attended art form in the country. And though we might be able to name-drop celebrity pop-op stars such as Il Divo or Andrea Bocelli, we’re far more likely to recognise classic opera tunes as “the song from that pasta ad”.

But like an old warhorse, opera has fought relentlessly to maintain a local presence. Legal disputes and heated debate over the renewed need for a specifically Victorian opera company saw an inquiry into the state of the art last year, which resulted in a $7.6 million pledge from the Victorian Government to be put towards “grassroots” opera in the next half-decade.

Will this support be matched by a corresponding increase in audiences willing to listen? And what can opera offer contemporary audiences for whom the height of vocal talent is decided by Australian Idol?

John Heuzenroeder plays the lead in the latest Opera Australia outing, The Rake’s Progress, and sees the work’s humour and quickfire pace (as well as its English lyrics) as an accessible introduction for opera neophytes. At the same time, he is cautious of suggesting that The Rake’s Progress should be seen as an archetypal kind of experience, an “Opera for Dummies”.

“It isn’t a typical opera,” he insists, “but then what is? There’s Italian, there’s French, it’s such a varied world and then for every opera, there’s how many productions of it? It’s really like saying ’should I eat?’ Eat pasta and you don’t know what rice tastes like.”

The Rake’s Progress, inspired by William Hogarth’s engravings of 18th-century degeneracy, traces the pact between gullible everyman Tom Rakewell and Lucifer-like Nick Shadow. For a year, country boy Rakewell enjoys the seedy thrills of the city offered up by Shadow, but soon finds himself in the hell that is debauchery’s reward.

While the music is that of celebrated 20th-century composer Igor Stravinsky, the libretto was penned by English poet W. H. Auden and works on multiple levels to address its audience: “It’s interesting ideas at play, and people that are well-read find all kinds of references in it, but at the same time at a base level it’s a presentable story,” says Heuzenroeder.

This is the first time Heuzenroeder has played Rakewell, a surprise considering his level of experience. After graduating from Melbourne’s VCA, he received a Masters degree from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and has gone on to work with companies from London to Japan. Much of the past five years have been spent yoyo-ing between Australia and his new home of Berlin, working with a range of companies in each country.

Where Australian audiences may be hesitant towards opera, it’s a different story in Germany: “It hasn’t got this elitist tag at all, at least in my experience. I’ve got a step-daughter who’s German, and when she goes to the opera, she calls it a theatre piece. She did this the other day, she heard an ABC broadcast on the internet over there and she said she loved the ‘theatre piece’, that’s what she called it. And a lot of German towns will have a theatre in them, so it’s something that children, particularly, see as quite normal, to go to the theatre, and the opera is just part of that.”

It only took a quick scan of the names involved in The Rake’s Progress to lure Heuzenroeder back to our shores, however: this production was originally presented in 1975 under the direction of opera legend John Cox, with a set designed by British artist David Hockney. Hockney’s sets, based on Hogarth’s etchings, have been preserved in their meticulous detail and Cox himself has travelled Down Under to oversee this latest production.

For Heuzenroeder, working with Cox was illuminating; after three decades of touring the piece, the director was still amenable to improvements. Building on the strengths of individual performers and local tastes, many details were altered for the Australian tour. At the same time, Cox’s experience meant that “he knew what worked”, insists Heuzenroeder.

“There’s one scene where I sing completely with my back to the audience and I was hesitant, but he was like: ‘Well, I’ve done it like this all over the world, so this is what it’s going to be.’ Some things he knew would work out.”

And work out they have, the just-completed Sydney leg of the tour attracting enviable reviews. With Cox, Hockney and Heuzenroeder, Opera Australia has brought out the heavyweights to prove that opera can be every bit as riveting as a widescreen simulcast sporting spectacular. All eyes will be monitoring their Progress closely.

An Isolde with ample soul and voice

An Isolde with ample soul and voice – SOPRANO BREWER GIVES DEFINITIVE PERFORMANCE AS S.F. OPERA MAKES WAGNER CLASSIC HYPNOTIC – By RICHARD SCHEININ -Mercury News – October 07, 2006

Stretched out on a royal bed aboard a storybook sailing ship, Christine Brewer sang out her first words as Isolde, the Irish princess, in San Francisco Opera’s gleaming production of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” Whoosh! Her words took off like gusts of flushed fury, cutting through the storm of the orchestra at cavernous War Memorial Auditorium and pinning at least a few folks to the rear wall.

It was Brewer’s night, and the audience — which, weirdly for such a major opera event, didn’t even fill the hall — knew that a bit of history was in the offing at Thursday’s opening. For years, the soprano has worked toward the role, a killer, yet this was her first time singing it in a staged production. She was nothing but awesome, her potency unflagging during the nearly four-hour performance. A column of her breath would have kept half a dozen basketballs aloft.

This is an exceptional “Tristan,” with splendorous wonderland sets by David Hockney, drunken with color, just as princess Isolde and Tristan, her warrior-lover from Cornwall, are drunk with love, so much so that they mean to seal it in the “divine oblivion” of death.

The cast is mostly steely good, and the orchestra, conducted by Donald Runnicles, seemed only a little short of supernaturally inspired at Thursday’s opening. (The next performance is Tuesday and the production, on loan from Los Angeles Opera, runs through Oct. 27).

Say what you will about “Tristan”: It’s mere mytho-melodrama; it’s an exercise in controlled hysteria, unfolding in a narcotic haze; its characters don’t do much of anything, except ruminate and rehash and sing (in German) about the “vast realm of universal life.” And of course, it’s way too long.

But then there is the music: those opiated, blood-boiling themes; the hair-raising ascents, climaxing with the great Liebestod, the love-death aria, sung at the end by Isolde. It’s the music that keeps drawing us back. And during the very best moments Thursday, the voices and orchestra came together as a sheer pulsing membrane, ready to dissolve and vanish into the lovers’ divine nothingness.

Thor Steingraber, who has previously worked on Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at Lyric Opera of Chicago, directs this “Tristan” with a painstaking eye. When, after drinking their love potion, Tristan and Isolde gaze into each other’s eyes, that gaze and the ensuing embrace unfold in a sort of slow motion choreography. It is transfixing, this bit of acting, like the gaze itself.

The role of Tristan is sung by American tenor Thomas Moser, who last year performed opposite Brewer in Beethoven’s “Fidelio” at San Francisco Opera. They are so much more convincing as a couple in “Tristan.” The way they touch, grasp and coo at one another is so real, although Moser, in the end, is the least satisfying member of the core cast.

His opalescent voice has oceans of calm inside it, but it doesn’t change enough as the drama closes in on itself, as the stress levels keep rising. On Thursday, Moser just kept singing with a remote, almost cool, uniform beauty. And he lacked the heroic power necessary to survive on stage; often, he was swamped, made almost inaudible, by the orchestra.

This was the case during the first half of his long Act II love duet with Isolde. Yet when the orchestra quieted, when the mood shifted and the lovers sang of “rapture’s glorious weaving,” Moser and Brewer breathed inside Wagner’s exquisite, post-coital-like reveries.

An astonishing member of the cast is Icelandic bass Kristinn Sigmundsson as King Marke, who intends to marry Isolde until Tristan, his most loyal knight, betrays him. Sigmundsson’s portrayal of the emotionally broken king was heart-rending; it supplied the most purely human moments of the evening. And then there was his voice: lullaby-soft, yet birch-strong and supple.

As Brangane, Isolde’s lady-in-waiting, British mezzo-soprano Jane Irwin made her San Francisco opera debut and was worth the wait. Her voice sailed with a steady clarion beauty. In a similar debut, Israeli baritone Boaz Daniel, as Kurvenal, Tristan’s sidekick, out-popped Moser, his “boss”; Daniel is a ripping, exuberant singer.

So is tenor Sean Panikkar, a product of SFO’s Merola Opera Program, who sang the role of the shepherd, so loyal to Tristan, and yet, like everyone else in this excruciating story, unable to protect the knight from his chosen death.

David Hockney’s Portraits Come to Boston’s MFA

David Hockney’s Portraits Come to Boston’s MFA – By BILL VAN SICLEN – Journal Arts Writer – February 26, 2006

BOSTON — Say the name “David Hockney” and most art lovers immediately picture a swimming pool. And not just any swimming pool, but one of those perfect southern California pools — the ones with the glistening blue-green water edged with white concrete and framed by tall, swaying palms.
Though born and raised in England, Hockney has lived in Los Angeles since the late 1960s. Over the years, he’s depicted California’s plush, pool-centered lifestyle so often and so well that the words “Hockney” and “pool” are practically synonymous. He is, without too much exaggeration, the Picasso of pools.
But Hockney has other interests, too. He is, for example, a talented painter of landscapes and still lifes, as well as an accomplished portraitist.
How accomplished? That’s the question posed by a “David Hockney: Portraits,” a major survey of Hockney’s portrait-making efforts opening today at the Museum of Fine Arts.
Organized by the MFA and London’s National Portrait Gallery, with help from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the show features more than 150 prints, paintings, drawings and other works.
Among them are some of Hockney’s best-known paintings, including his now-iconic portrait of British fashion designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell posing with their cat, Percy. (Last year, when the BBC held a contest to pick the “10 Greatest” paintings in England, Hockney’s Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy was the only work by a living artist to make the list.)
Other highlights include A Rake’s Progress, a series of etchings inspired by Hockney’s first trip to New York City in 1961, and My Parents, a sensitive 1977 portrait of his mother and father. (Question: When was the last time a contemporary artist did a sensitive painting of his or her parents?)
The show, which fills the MFA’s spacious Gund Gallery, also offers a soup-to-nuts overview of Hockney’s artistic development.
The show’s earliest canvas, a small dark-toned portrait of his father, was painted in 1955. At the time, Hockney was 18 and still living at home in Bradford, an industrial city in the northwest of England. The show’s most recent works, including a series of portraits of Hockney’s “posse” of West Coast friends and collectors, were completed last year.
In between, the show follows Hockney as he works his way through often-idiosyncratic permutations of Pop Art, Cubism and even Old Master portraiture. There are also sections devoted to Hockney’s use of photography, including his now-famous Polaroid grids and collages.
There’s even a “pool painting” — 1966’s Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool — in which a hunky male nude stands thigh-deep in one of Hockney’s trademark swimming pools. Besides being a terrific painting, it’s a reminder that the 68-year-old Hockney was one of the first artists to openly express his homosexuality through his art.
Timeless compositions
So how do Hockney’s portraits stack up?
Pretty well, actually. The paintings, especially some of the larger double portraits, have a classical poise and balance that belies their contemporary subject matter. The clothes, houses and people may be modern, but the compositions themselves feel timeless.
(After Boston, the show will travel to Los Angeles and then on to London’s National Portrait Gallery, home to the likes of Rembrandt, Rubens, Reynolds and Gainsborough. My guess is that Hockey’s portraits will look right at home alongside these Old Masters.)
Hockney is also an outstanding draftsman, a skill underscored by the show’s large selection of drawings in pencil, charcoal and pen and ink. His colored pencil drawings of the elfin-faced Birtwell, a longtime friend and muse, are worth the price of admission on their own.
If Hockney has a weakness, it’s a tendency to flog certain pet ideas and enthusiasms long after they’ve gone stale.
Hockney’s fascination with Picasso and Cubism, for example, has inspired some of his best work, including Artist and Model, a wonderful 1973 etching in which a naked Hockney and clothed Picasso face off over a kitchen table. At once playful and admiring, it captures the tangle of emotions — dread, worship, envy — that young artists often feel toward their artistic elders.
Less successful are some of Hockney’s later forays into Cubist territory.
A group of 1984 drawings, including a portrait of British writer Christopher Isherwood, are so thoroughly disjointed that they border on the grotesque. Hockney’s widely publicized experiments with the camera obscura, a kind of Renaissance-era Etch-A-Sketch, have also had mixed results.
Decent, honest, hard-working
Fortunately, it’s almost impossible to dislike Hockney. Indeed, he comes across as a fundamentally decent, honest, hard-working artist, someone who clearly enjoys the trappings of success but hasn’t been spoiled by them.
What’s more, Hockney seems genuinely fond of the people in his life. In fact, he rarely accepts private commissions, preferring instead to work with a close-knit group of family, friends, lovers and fellow artists.
As a result, “David Hockney: Portraits” often feels like a family affair, with many of the same faces popping up over and over again.
The show’s curators — Sarah Howgate of the National Gallery and Barbara Stern Shapiro of the MFA — highlight this aspect of Hockney’s work right at the start. As visitors enter the exhibit, they’re surrounded by images of Hockney’s real-life family, including portraits of his father, mother and brother.
Many of these works date from the mid-1950s, when Hockney was enrolled at the local Bradford School of Art. They reveal a young artist who, even in his teens, displayed a precocious talent for both drawing and portraiture.
Surprisingly, Hockney continued to paint and sketch his parents long after he’d become an art-world celebrity. The presence of works such as Mother, Bradford, 19 Feb. 1978, a small ink drawing done on the day of his father’s funeral, and My Parents, a loving, if gently humorous double portrait from 1977, gives his work a poignancy rare in contemporary art.
Extended ‘family’
Though family portraits continue to crop up from time to time, the balance of the show is devoted to Hockney’s extended “family” of friends, lovers, art dealers and collectors.
The show’s centerpiece, both literally and symbolically, is a section dominated by three large double portraits, each depicting people who’ve played important roles in Hockney’s life.
The earliest — painted in 1968, shortly after Hockney’s move to California — shows Los Angeles collectors Fred and Marcia Weisman surrounded by objects from their collection. As in many of Hockney’s double portraits, the figures are placed far apart, though whether this is meant as a comment on their relationship or merely a compositional device is hard to tell.
In any case, the young Hockney can’t resist poking fun at the Weismans, giving Fred Weisman a clenched fist and tautly static pose that echo a nearby stone sculpture. Marcia Weisman’s toothy smile, meanwhile, is repeated in the faces on a Northwest Indian totem pole in the background.
Another Hockney favorite is former Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler. An early supporter of Hockney’s, Geldzahler, who died in 1994, appears in a number of works, including a 1969 portrait with his then-partner Christopher Scott, as well as several drawings.
Though large-scale paintings such as Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott and Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy are clearly the stars of the show, viewers shouldn’t overlook Hockney’s smaller works. Indeed, while his larger paintings can sometimes seem a bit stiff and schematic, his prints and drawings radiate a lively, engaging intelligence.
Among these more intimate works, look for Hockney’s affectionate portraits of Pop artist Andy Warhol (looking uncharacteristically pensive in a colored-pencil drawing from 1974), actor Dennis Hopper (who appears in a series of small Cubist-inspired photographs) and poet W.H. Auden (whose famously grizzled visage suggests a kind of human-size Shar-Pei).
In these smaller works, as much as his larger paintings, Hockney demonstrates the full range of skills — a keen eye for detail, psychological acumen, artistic talent — that all great portraitists must possess. Clearly, he does more than just pools.
“David Hockney: Portraits” continues through May 14 at the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave., Boston. Exhibition hours: Mon.-Tues. and Sat.-Sun. 10 a.m.-4:45 p.m. and Wed.-Fri. 10 a.m.-9:45 p.m.

The Art of Absorption – David Hockney Art

The Art of Absorption – The subjects of David Hockney’s portraits have been totally absorbed into his art and autobiography – By PETER WALSH
WBUR – Boston’s NPR – March 21, 2006.

The biggest crowds at the MFA’s “David Hockney Portraits” hover near a wall of large-format etchings titled “A Rake’s Progress” (1961-63). Based on a famous set of 18th-century satirical images of the same name by William Hogarth, Hockney’s “Rake” etchings are one of the finest achievements of his young career — and probably in the history of English printmaking. Strictly speaking, though, these prints do not even belong in this show.

Despite their autobiographical content, the “Rake” images are not portraits. They make up the first in the three brilliant series of etchings Hockney did in the ’60s, which also include ” Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from C. P. Cavafy ” (1966), and “Illustrations for Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm” (1969). But they are not true illustrations, either.

In Hogarth’s originals, a young English prodigal squanders his youth, money, and ultimately his sanity in reckless dissipation. Steeped in Hockney’s own, off-center humor, with his peculiar shapes and oddly abbreviated, doll-like figures, the remake depicts Hockney’s own first trip to New York City , his adventures amid the terrors and temptations of American culture, his first taste of artistic success, and his first contacts with the New York gay scene. Hockney has entirely transformed Hogarth’s narrative — to the point of partly reversing its meaning — by making it into his own memories.

Something quite like this is also going on in the “portraits” in the MFA exhibition. The people in the show — family, friends, lovers, heroes, celebrities, important patrons, as well as near strangers — have been totally absorbed into Hockney’s art and autobiography. These pictures, for the most part, are not about them. They are about him.

To be sure, similar struggles for dominance happen with nearly every powerful portraitist (John Singer Sargent comes to mind). But Hockney’s favorite models appear so often, and are so thoroughly integrated into his life, that they often seem to have no independent existence. Still, Hockney’s personal charm, talents, and skills are all so prodigious that no one seems to mind.

Take the wonderful “Portrait Surrounded by Artistic Devices” (1965), one of the strongest formal sittings in the show. Hockney’s father — a dapper and eccentric accountant from provincial Bedford , in Yorkshire — sits next to a pile of cubist blocks borrowed from a Leger canvas. The vaguely phallic shapes lined up above his head are, we’re told in a label, brushstrokes borrowed from Abstract Expressionist paintings.
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The senior Hockney’s Cezanne-like face wears an indulgent expression, despite being hemmed in by his son’s work tools. He is, in fact, one of only a handful of the painter’s models who resolutely keep their own identities while being wrapped in Hockney’s art. In “Artist and Model” (1973-74), by contrast, Hockney even manages to upstage his greatest hero, Picasso — making the Master old, wrinkled, and fully clothed, while he portrays himself as young, beautiful, and nude.

Much of cocky energy in these early works comes from Hockney’s mischievous mixing of soda and vinegar — abstract shapes and expressionist splotches with classical realism, deliberate crudeness with breathtaking technical virtuosity, childlike simplicity with bawdy Music Hall humor and homoeroticism. Later on, things calm down quite a bit. The huge talent remains but the chemistry changes. And the explosions happen a lot less often.

Hockey’s large, mid-career portraits in oil never have quite the charm and erotic charge of his drawings and prints, or the early paintings. In key works like “Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott” (1969), Hockey develops a standard set of elements for his double portraits — near photographic style, stark, fashionably modern setting, one casually seated, frontal figure contrasted with another standing stiffly and awkwardly in profile. These paintings are filled with an intriguing, suggestive stillness, but promise psychological depths they never quite deliver.

In the late ’60s, Hockney’s homoerotic work, a hallmark of his entire career, turns to true portraiture. By then, Hockney was living partly in Los Angeles. There he met Peter Schlesinger, a classic Californian in Hockney’s eyes, who became the artist’s lover and favorite model.

Daring and even revolutionary at the time, Hockney’s images of Schlesinger and other beautiful young men seem far less edgy now that erotic male images sell almost as many commercial products as female ones. But their basic point — that the male body, too, could be a sex object — helped bring about just this change in mainstream culture.

For many of his male nudes, Hockney uses traditional techniques, his breathtaking line, and classical references — voluptuous Boucher girls with exposed, upturned buttocks or languorous Ingres odalisques — reversing the gender while leaving in all the original erotic tricks. As beautiful and touching as these images often are, they suffer a bit from the artist’s heavy breathing. More convincing are the equally ravishing paintings and drawings of his friends, Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark, stronger for their air of aesthetic detachment.

“A Bigger Splash,” Jack Hazan’s film about Hockney and the breakup of his relationship with Schlesinger, was released in 1974. The movie — a surprise hit in some of America’s more decadent cities — featured many of the same people and paintings in the MFA exhibition. It more or less completed the total fusion of Hockney’s career, life, and relationships with his status as an icon of gay pop culture.

About this time, Hockney’s art begins to stiffen. The brilliant flashes of abstraction, the mind games, the silly shapes, the thrilling, deadly accurate jokes, slowly drain out of the work. As the trajectory of his fame and success move ever upwards in the ’70s and ’80s, Hockney adopts a realist style of icy, almost frightening precision. The brilliant draftsmanship caresses expensive clothes, fashionable furnishings, wealthy faces. Some of these scenes (“Portrait of Sir David Webster,” 1971) are so cold and empty you can hear the rush of the air conditioning.

Sadly, things go mostly down hill from here. There are a few — too few, really — of Hockney’s fascinating, neo-Cubist photo collages from the ’80s. But the visitors thin out in the last galleries and even the sitters start to look bored. The subjects are trendier and older: there are lifeless repetitions of the earlier double portraits, painted in a self-consciously awkward style that — from one so deeply talented — seems pure affectation. There is a wall of dreadful, garishly painted heads — visitors to Hockney’s LA studio. They resemble nothing more vividly than those framed cartoons of patrons in once-trendy restaurants, whose famous subjects have long since moved on.

“David Hockney Portraits” is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA through May 14, 2006. Afterwards, the exhibition will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (June 11 — September 4, 2006) and then to the National Portrait Gallery, London (October 12, 2006 — January 21, 2007).

Found: the self-portrait David Hockney gave his first girlfriend almost 50 years ago

Found: the self-portrait David Hockney gave his first girlfriend almost 50 years ago

The newly-rediscovered painting is now on show in Boston – By MARTIN BAILEY – The Art Newspaper – May 30, 2006

LONDON. This rediscovered self-portrait of David Hockney dates from 1954, when the artist was a 17-year-old student at Bradford School of Art. Abandoned in a garage and then an attic, it has recently been reunited with its owner, the artist’s first girlfriend, after nearly half a century.

The Art Newspaper has traced the astonishing saga of Hockney’s earliest self-portrait, giving an unexpected insight into his teenage years. The picture has just gone on display in an an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (until 14 May), although the real story behind the work is not revealed in the catalogue. The show then travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in London.

The 1955 Christmas “insect ball” at the Bradford Art School. David Hockney is at the back, with Terry Kirkbride in a kilt on the right. The students made papier mâché insects to decorate the room. Ms Kirkbride believes that the mural was painted by Hockney, which would make it a previously unpublished work
In 1957 Hockney was in his final year at Bradford School of Art. Abstract Expressionist Alan Davie (born 1920) was coming to visit for a few days’ tutoring, and the young Hockney helped out a fellow student who had no hardboard for painting. He gave the impecunious girl two panels which he had used earlier.

We can identify the fellow student as 16-year-old Terry Kirkbride. During Davie’s teaching sessions, she painted over the larger board, on which Hockney had originally done a landscape. Terry never used the panel with the self-portrait, leaving it in her “studio”, a dilapidated wooden garage adjacent to her landlady’s house. Shortly afterwards, she left Bradford in rushed circumstances, and although taking most of her possessions, the self-portrait was abandoned.

Discovery

The landlady, Josie Smith, later moved to Sheffield, and the self-portrait was rescued from the garage and moved to the attic of her new home. In 1999, when she was clearing her attic, she came across the picture, remembering that it had belonged to her lodger in the 1950s. She recalled that Terry had studied with Hockney, and wondered whether it might be a self-portrait.

The problem was how to trace her lodger. Until the 1960s Ms Smith had kept in touch with Terry’s cousin. Although they had not met for decades, Ms Smith wrote to the cousin, who had remained at the same address, enclosing a letter for forwarding to Terry. By good fortune, it eventually reached the recipient.

Ms Smith wrote: “I’ve now rediscovered a painting among the clutter of half a century… much damaged from many years in garages. We think this is probably an unwanted student exercise by David Hockney.” Ms Kirkbride had completely forgotten about the picture, and in April 2000 she finally collected the work.

The 18 x 14 inch board was very battered. Four years later Ms Kirkbride contacted the NPG, asking whether the work was of interest and for advice on how it could be conserved. Her letter could not have come at a better moment, since the gallery was preparing the “David Hockney Portraits” exhibition. A photograph of the picture was shown to Hockney, who remembered the work, and the painting was conserved for display.

NPG curator Sarah Howgate was delighted to be able to include the self-portrait as the first work in the show. She dates it to around 1954, three years before it was given to Ms Kirkbride. Ms Howgate believes it was painted at the Hockney family home in Hutton Terrace, in the Bradford suburb of Eccleshill. The scene in the background could well be the view from the window. She says the painting “bears the hallmarks of Hockney’s later work, such as the colouring.” The intense scrutiny and concentration are typical of his self-portraits.

Romance

Last month we tracked down Terry Kirkbride, who is still an artist. She told us the story of the self-portrait and explained the fate of the other painting, which she took with her when she hurriedly left Bradford. “Once Hockney became famous, I looked at the second board he had given me, on which I had painted an abstract work. I got advice on whether the overpaint could be removed, but was told this would be very difficult. When I split up with my husband in 1979, I left the picture behind. I have no idea what happened to it.”

There is another twist to the story. Although she has never before spoken out about it, Terry was Hockney’s first girlfriend. They went out with each other for just over a year, in 1956-7, often going to the cinema, with David walking her home. This was before Hockney became open about being gay, in the early 1960s.

The only passing reference to Hockney’s early romances is in Peter Webb’s biography, in which he wrote that “David’s sexuality was rather a mystery” to his fellow Bradford students. Webb added one more sentence, saying that Hockney was “very friendly with two college girls, Barbara and Terri [sic].” The last time that Terry Kirkbride saw Hockney was when she came down to London for a dance at the Royal College of Art in 1959. Although by this time they had split up, she vividly remembers the occasion: “I had never seen anything like it before—wild people, the clothing, the dancing.”

Ms Kirkbride might meet Hockney again, at the opening of the NPG exhibition in October. This would be their first encounter for 47 years. “David had been such a good friend and an important part of my early life,” she told us. And why did she never paint over the self-portrait, when she was short of board? “Sentimental reasons,” she says.

A letter from David Hockney

A letter from David Hockney, published in the Guardian Website, Saturday 25 February 2006.

I can tell you don’t seem to get it. I don’t think the MPs know what they are actually doing. I do not have a high opinion of them. The case against the medical evidence about smoking is this. They have got all their statistics I have read them. I have read what they shout on the uglified cigarette packets, but I will make this observation.

In the Labour party – let’s get a lot more human in our observations – the 80-year-old Mr Benn is a happy pipe smoker; Mr Robin Cook took up “healthy” fell walking, it killed him; same with Mr Smith; Tony Banks another non-smoking vegetarian health fiend falls over with a stroke at the age of 61.

What does one deduce from this? That fate plays part in life, that mysterious forces are at work on life, it is not all “material”. The medical statistician cannot grasp this, but almost everyone else does. This is why people will always ignore the prude and prig.

Gorrdon Brrrown is a prig P.R.I.G., a dreary atheistic Calvinistic prig, who I’m sure will never be elected in England. He goes along with a “health lobby” whose view of life itself I detest.

I have utter contempt for it. I feel I am entitled to my opinion. I don’t mind prigs but when they want to take my little corner as well, I have a right to argue against their dreary view of life contaminating mine.

I don’t think the press know their readers anymore. I am spending time in provincial England. There is an anger you don’t seem to know.

This utterly over the top legislation is tyrannical (mine Host gone for a Burton) and is spreading a dreadful intolerance.

New Labour has become the most bossy prober into lives. It comes across as very anti-English. The first thing they did was set up a parliament for the Welsh and one for the Scots. England is Britain according to them.

Mr Blair would not give a holiday for children for the Queen Mother’s funeral; he did not want them to see the symbolism. The BBC didn’t even see it.

Watching it I pointed out Van Eyck, Massacio Veronese, all the European grand tradition of pictures was there. To hell with it they say. Yet people were moved by it. The Daily Mirror thought no one would be interested. They haven’t a clue.

You ask me: “What didn’t we report?”. You didn’t report that you could smoke in hospitals and prisons but not pubs. It’s barmy and just where bossiness leads. I repeat you should be ashamed of yourselves what you are supporting. There are plenty of no-smoking places, leave things to their natural path.

It’s not just your job to give us an opinion but actually to report on things. You missed the ridiculous side of this. Wake up.

David Hockney, London