David Hockney takes two crumpled cigarette butts from his pocket and locations them on the lunch desk. “You’re disgusting,” says his lifelong pal Celia Birtwell, who has featured in a lot of his work. “Horrible! Horrible!” Nonetheless, the noxious objects he has positioned subsequent to our sandwiches aren’t what they appear. “They’re not actual,” says Hockney. “They’re sculptured. They’re from a gallery in Berlin.” He beams.
Hockney, on a quick go to to Britain from his beloved newish house in Normandy, has popped in to see an exhibition of his work on the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Hockney’s Eye: The Artwork and Expertise of Depiction is open for him on an in any other case closed day, with choose curators and mates awaiting his arrival. The temper is one in every of ready for a royal viewers, and everybody gathers spherical in delicate awe when he lastly makes his entrance, in a wheelchair pushed by his accomplice, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, often called JP.
The artist, now 84, is wearing usually trendy apparel: blue and yellow examine swimsuit, gentle blue socks, white footwear, purple tie, flat cap and large spherical gold-framed spectacles. As we go to have a look at portraits in a low-lit gallery, the temper is low-key. However the whole lot adjustments when Birtwell arrives, unmistakably the identical girl who stands in opposition to greenish blinds, her gold hair catching the daylight, in Hockney’s 1970-71 masterpiece Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy.
On the time, Birtwell was married to Ossie Clark. She is a famous textile designer and her husband was a style guru. He’s depicted sprawling in a chair with Percy the white cat on his lap, whereas Birtwell stands, participating Hockney’s eye in darkish blue and purple. Hockney later drew and painted Celia alone, many occasions, in several garments and within the nude. She kisses him in his wheelchair. She is white-haired, radiant and tiny – I realise Hockney made her appear a lot larger by having Clark seated.
Birtwell appears at Le Parc des Sources, Vichy, the very best portray on this present, an expansive, eerily lovely view of grass and bushes. She asks Hockney when he painted it. “Simply earlier than I painted you!” he says, grinning up at her. “This was in my 1970 retrospective on the Whitechapel [Gallery]. And Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy wasn’t as a result of I used to be nonetheless doing that.”
The portray exhibits two males sitting in metallic chairs painted an enamel olive. They’re two rows of tall bushes in a cool, misty morning gentle. “That’s Ossie Clark and Peter Schlesinger,” says Hockney. “Peter was carrying a snakeskin jacket.” Like so a lot of Hockney’s unforgettable work from the early Seventies, this work is fraught with rigidity and thriller. Schlesinger was Hockney’s lover. There’s a third, empty chair on the left. Was that Hockney’s? Was it symbolic?
“Yeah, it was,” he says. “I had obtained as much as do the portray.” The empty seat has a haunting presence, like Van Gogh’s chair. As Hockney observes, chairs can symbolize folks: “They’ve legs and arms.” Hockney factors to a divide within the portray, the place the garden meets the brown foreground. “It’s like an image right down to there, isn’t it?” he says. “Then there’s some seats in entrance.” So it’s as if the 2 males are sitting an enormous portray of a park. “It’s a photos inside photos form of a factor,” says Hockney.
Within the subsequent gallery, the artist’s iPad photos of flowers morph into one another on a display screen that sits among the many museum’s Seventeenth-century Dutch work of blooms. “The primary yr I used to be on the Royal Faculty of Artwork,” he recollects, “I went to plenty of small museums in London as a result of I believed I needed to catch up, as they didn’t have them in Bradford or Leeds. Each toddler in London I’ve been in. Do you assume we may simply exit for a cigarette?”
Outdoors, Hockney lights a Davidoff. “They’re solely bought in Germany and Switzerland, possibly the Netherlands,” says JP, who’s carrying a fawn swimsuit and blue patterned shirt, his brown hair a bit wild and his beard evenly dappled with gray. “I get them despatched by Hans in Germany,” says Hockney. “He sends me 20 cartons at a time – 2,000 cigarettes – and I preserve them in drawers.” Is it an habit? “No, I take pleasure in it. Smoking is a really pleasurable factor. Why go in opposition to it? A great deal of folks get lung most cancers who don’t smoke.”
Smoking, for Hockney, is an emblem of the liberty of the Sixties. He was a pioneer on this period of liberation, maybe the primary artist to painting male homosexual life with out apology or melodrama, simply the way in which he and his mates occurred to stay. His portrait of Patrick Procktor exhibits his fellow artist smoking in an nearly Wildean pose.
Hockney traces the equation of cigarettes and bohemia to Nineteenth-century Paris: “In Boston, they’ve that marvellous portray by Renoir of a pair dancing. Should you look fastidiously, there are many cigarette butts on the ground. They smoked whereas they danced. They had fun – they did!” He laughs.
Hockney is eager for JP to hitch him for a second cigarette. Smoking is why he lives in France: what he sees as a fundamental freedom is now restricted in Britain and the US. The 2 have solely been this aspect of the Channel for a few days and already they’ve discovered guidelines to rage in opposition to. They’d dinner with the grasp of Downing Faculty and had been advised that smoking is banned on College of Cambridge grounds. The exhibition posters which can be everywhere in the metropolis use an image that was cropped to take away the cigarette in his hand. His period, says Hockney, “was the freest time, most likely ever. I now realise it’s over, so I’ve locked myself away in a pleasant home in Normandy the place I can smoke and do what I would like. And that’s the place I’m going to remain. Shall we’ve some lunch?”
The museum restaurant is closed on Mondays, so lunch is from Marks & Spencer. Hockney is lacking French meals: he tells me how a lot he loves andouillette (tripe sausage). I ask about his house city of Bradford being named the subsequent UK metropolis of tradition. He didn’t know and isn’t too enthusiastic about it. “Effectively, I haven’t lived in Bradford because the 50s,” he says. “The one time I am going is to see Saltaire.”
He’s referring to Salts Mill, a Victorian industrial constructing within the village of Saltaire reclaimed by his late pal Jonathan Silver. Its artwork gallery reliably has Hockneys on view and is now displaying his photos of the Normandy spring, organised right into a strip just like the Bayeux tapestry. So Hockney does make a cultural contribution to Bradford and will even have helped its bid. “It have to be the primary exhibition they’ve had direct from the Orangerie in Paris,” says the artist.
As he quaffs rhubarb juice, the dialog amongst him and his mates heads to Normandy after which to Yorkshire, the place he and JP are planning to go to Hockney’s sister Margaret.
“She’s 87 however she’s nonetheless driving,” he says. “She will park.”
“As a result of she’s obtained a disabled parking sticker,” provides Birtwell. “They’re very helpful.”
Margaret Hockney is deaf and lip-reads, it transpires. Her brother’s deafness is maybe one purpose why he turns into quiet throughout our chatty lunch and begins his newest works on his paint-spattered iPad. “Deafness is a handicap that’s nonetheless not correctly appreciated,” JP tells me.
The photographs on Hockney’s iPad embrace {a photograph} of a portrait he has simply accomplished of Harry Kinds. Throughout the pandemic, the artist depicted nature – spring’s arrival in Normandy and flowers blooming – in glowing iPad work that had been an inspirational pick-me-up at a time of disaster. However in November, he returned to portraiture, and to grease paint on canvas.
In actual fact, he says, as we have a look at his Kinds portrait, these works are accomplished purely with paint. There is no such thing as a drawing, no preliminary define. He simply creates folks in color. The pop star, he provides, was a brand new problem, since he prefers to color mates. “I feel if you realize a face – it’s important to know a face a bit – I don’t know his face that properly. All people’s face is a bit totally different.” He pauses to collect his ideas and at last says: “I’m nonetheless unsure what folks appear to be.”
It’s a stunning comment, stuffed with doubt, from somebody who has spent his life making an attempt to seize a likeness, an essence. It helps to elucidate why he has portrayed a pal reminiscent of Birtwell so many occasions, as if he’s nonetheless making an attempt to get on the reality. It’s additionally why he’s suspicious of images: it tells us what folks or landscapes or objects appear to be, as if that had been a easy, fastened reality. In contrast, the trendy artist Hockney most adores is Picasso, whose cubism is a rejection of easy photographic photos, a seek for what issues are actually like.
The primary Picasso he noticed was a copy of Weeping Lady when he was 12. He places his arms in opposition to his face to mimic her holding a handkerchief to her scrunched options. When curator Jane Munro brings Hockney a Picasso drawing from the Fitzwilliam’s shops, he holds it reverently. It’s a portrait of dancer Lydia Lopokova, accomplished within the Spaniard’s neoclassical fashion. It’s good – however Picasso quickly began distorting faces once more. “He was simply drawn to one thing else,” says Hockney. “He had one thing else to do.”
Is that this additionally true of Hockney, who in his mid-80s has returned from landscapes to freehand portraits? “I’m at all times doing one thing else,” he says. “Yeah. They will argue all they need in regards to the previous, however I simply get on to one thing else.”
