SMOKING GUN

You don’t have to be gay to interview David Hockney but it helps if you smoke.  For his triumphant retrospective of portraits that opened in Boston late last month, the staff of the Museum of Fine Arts did all they could to make the guest they honour and adore feel at home — not only did they name a Hot Toddy after him (spiced rum, whiskey, hot cider and cinnamon, since you ask), less useful now that he doesn’t drink, but they also specially built an air-conditioned tent on an internal courtyard balcony, so that DH could smoke during the first night party without having to 'steal away so guilty-like' to an outside doorway.

In this enclave those in the know could catch him at his best and most relaxed, at an event with a sort of celebrity gladiatorial aspect not quite to his taste now that his deafness makes of crowds a piercing torture.  By his resigned disdain he does of course disarm and woo the press and has in his time used celebrity cannily enough, but now? — now he quotes Billy Wilder, source of so many of his quips: 'I need publicity like a moose needs a hat-stand.'

There he is, then, puffing and laughing away.  On the trot through one topic or another, at the subject of smoking bans he breaks into a gallop.  'It’s outrageous, how dare they, it turns ordinary people into criminals.  There’s a balanced way of doing this, giving people a choice.  That’s a freedom we have fought for over centuries and these dreary self-righteous hypocritical prigs are selling it off.  A pub isn’t a bluddy health club.  People will stay at home and do drugs.  They already do.  The bluddy politicians don’t have a clue.'  Note that, suiting the robust gruff-minded Englishman he is, his conversation at such times shows what was said of Wellington, a vigorous command of the vernacular...  

 To my remark that the smokiest corridor I had visited in recent years was in the House of Commons, came the next canter.  'To hell with Gordon bluddy Brown, he’s a prig and a bossiboots.  Dreary Presbyterian.  You bluddy Scots are running my England, I’ve been disenfranchised, I’m angry and I’m going to speak out about it.  It’s outrageous.  To hell with Gorrdon Brroon.'  He enjoys making his Peter Sellers-ish Scots accent, complete with crazed grimace — a key to much of his great goon-logic sense of humour lies in music hall and his has always been a song-&-dance routine — as we reflect that funny accents too will surely soon be banned. 

 I venture that banning such things — let alone having new laws about the words we may use and thus the thoughts we are allowed — simply shows that we are not beginning to educate people...  'Oah, I know, I know that,' he replies, sadness moving anger into the minor key as dismal human folly swims into his ken.  'What happened to Merrie England?  They’ve killed it off.  Newspapers are a disgrace, no wonder they are losing circulation, they talk away but they don’t lift a finger.  Where is my bohemia?  I have a right to my bohemia.'

Hockney’s subject has always been the human.  True, one whimsical questioner at the the press conference asked if, given their frequency in the pictures, he thought of himself as a tulip; but flowers as well as fields have always been for him the local habitation of human emotion.  In the late 1980s, perhaps the saddest of eras as the mortal extent of aids became apparent, he would not paint cut flowers, which are dying, but only potted plants that are living.  As he was often to say during these fast few happy Boston days, prised as they were from the latest stint painting in Yorkshire, ‘Nature is my teacher...’ — a line from his beloved Rake’s Progress.  The exhibition gives us the whole panoply of his devoted attention to the human face (and two dogs) over fifty years.  It comes to London in the autumn, via Los Angeles, an apt choice of cities: Boston a symbol of the English rebel, LA the symbol of Hockney’s hedonism and London the base camp of his career...

London is also the mother of parliaments and Hockney’s venom, often enough despatched in the direction of pub opening hours, photography and art historians, has recently taken on a more directly political tone, perhaps since he spends more time in England nowadays than he used to.  'I’m gonna tell you: every political decision has commerce behind it.  Lobbies and commerce drive the process.  The drink lobby is very powerful, they want the pubs open longer because pubs are having to shut down.  People stay at home.  But drink is worse for you than marijuana: I’ve had friends die of the effects of alcohol and you get drunken mobs but have you ever heard of a violent mob of people who are just stoned?  It’s all completely dishonest, our liberties are being taken away and we just sit back and accept it.  Well, I won’t, I won’t.  This is our civilisation, this is our culture, it’s ours, we have fought for it, we have to stand up for it.'  When I tried to draw him on the divide-or-not between East and West, he offered a quip that puts the planet in perspective: 'Well, I know that my ancestors were cave-artists.'

At the time of the Countryside March in 2002 he had badges made that first said ‘Stop Bossiness Now’ — but on reflection he found this too bossy and had them reprinted with ‘End Bossiness Soon’.  Hearing that the Dallas Symphony Orchestra had refused to allow the Hyperion recording of Rachmaninov’s piano concertos to be issued with a cover photograph of the composer at the piano with a cigarette elegantly at his lips in a cigarette holder, he was despairing.  'Oh that’s ridiculous.  Where’s our sense of proportion gone?  I mean,' — here, eyes popping, he mimed a pistol-toting maniac — 'if they’d had a picture of him shooting his mother, that would have been alright, oah yes.  We propagate violence and we ban smoking.  It’s mad, completely mad.  Do they think it’s a choice of smoking or immortality?'   Hyperion over-ruled the orchestra and the serene, noble image of the composer is on the cover.  'Well at least someone had the balls to stand up to this crap.  I mean when I was young it was illegal to be gay, now it’s illegal to smoke.  I’ve always been on the outside.'

Wryly he adds, with a loving smile, 'But I don’t mind that.'

 Whatever his vernacular — and oddly enough he is reckoned to be the first to use the c-word on British television, even more quaintly doing so in its technical sense, referring to the pudenda glorified in a Picasso nude — Hockney is a man of words and ideas.  (And his own items listed in the Bibliography show a possibly unhealthy controlling stake of 33 out of 49 entries.)  Ever a chain-reader if not quite a chain-smoker, he has not needed deafness to drive him to read books.  He thinks and he cares.  His notorious antagonism to photography, for example, is a moral campaign if nothing else against a certain sort of tyranny of falsehood...  When he deplores he uses a word like ‘shabby’ which, in his Yorkshire voice, sounds like the victim’s head reaching the guillotine basket.  And he teaches: his television programme on Chinese scrolls was a defining education for many of us and his recent obsession with the history of optics is driven by the perceptive curiosity of the practitioner and a deep need to share — two qualities he finds absent in the teaching of history of art.

 He is on about something every minute.  The gathering of friends at the museum for this fondest of exhibitions offered us all sorts of occasions at which stories and anecdotes were happily swapped, old tales of his incredulous eye-rolling or fist-waving exasperation at whatever was the topic of topics at the time.  I know that the great theatre director John Dexter was one of the few tough enough — and sufficiently respected — to be able to tell him to put a sock in it.  Do not be fooled, however, for all the soap-box gestures in some of the letters he sends to newspapers, on or off the rails, seldom has so much intellectual vitality and moral flair walked so slopingly in carpet slippers.

'Was it Raphael who said, “You don’t think when you paint...”?  No, you don’t, I don’t always know what I’m doing when I do it.'  He never talks when he paints or draws, it’s as if he works to stop thinking, to control it, to distill it.  But it’s there all the same; his passion for people to be themselves — and to have a right to be — triumphs in the exhibition, for a start, as does his intellectual as well as sensual fascination with time and space. 

'I’m deeply interested in space.  It is not what we think it is.  We had lost touch with the moon in our civilisation; when that happened, we had to go there.  And when we started to see the world from space, from the moon, we realised how small we are.  How insignificant.  It is changing many things.  But the really important, really interesting space isn’t outer space, it’s the space right up here, close to us, at our faces.'  Here he massages the light an inch from his face and thus gives the simplest key to the way these portraits so often fix upon the face alone, as hearth of the soul. 

Thus the show is stalked by Picasso as surely as Hamlet by his father’s ghost.  Long a champion of the last decade of Picasso’s work, still so under-estimated, he has been bewitched by the way in which those pictures of sexual women and smoking musketeers are close-ups even when you look at them from across a big room.  'There is always this closeness.  You cannot get that with photographic peep-hole perspective.  I assume Picasso discovered something but nobody else has got into that territory, it’s too hard, too difficult to know how to use it.'  And canny as he is, there is only one stretch of work, around 1984, after the photo-collages and in the wake of the wide, roomy show of late Picasso at the Tate, that reveals any sustained attempt on Hockney’s part to ‘displace’ facial features in order to establish an animated space.  The resulting pictures — of Christopher Isherwood (alas only one here), Celia, Pierre Saint-Jean, Peter Langan and himself — are so good, so fetching, that this can seem a pity, as if Hockney has been compelled to steer away from anything that might seem to ape the master; yet characteristically he has also set himself a far stiffer challenge thereby, forcing open the peep-hole in other ways.

Quite apart from the human interest are the rewards this show offers in the range of techniques that fall into his hands — usually with what I might call hard-won ease.  There are drawings in crayon, pencil, charcoal and graphite, ink drawings by pen or brush, etchings and acquatints — too few for my taste — and watercolours and oils.  And the photographic collages.  No, of course, not a single still photograph.  (Though there must be trunkloads tucked away from various eras.)  This gamut of gifts is not skittish and those who have seen his work as flighty or even flippant will have to pipe down now.  Behind the seeming inventory of styles is one heart, one hand, and that hand makes marks with a basic technique of hatching and line and, where appropriate, a tonal chiaroscura as effective as it is often unexpected.  Sketches can look finished and large canvases still open.  And, away from faces, the poise of the subject is judged with revealing biographic insight, the fiddlesome feet or the tight-clasped hands telling their own indiscretions.  You don’t get pictures like this in twenty minutes for a tenner on the Ponte Vecchio.

Many sitters had come to the show, wearing the suit or clothes they have on in a picture — well, Gregory wore his blue suit over his birthday suit, all the same.  A glance at their faces beside the portraits made you see how intense and unfolding is Hockney’s sight, especially as a wistful element of romanticism may have evaporated towards the 1980s, presaged in his marvellous first volume of autobiography as he describes the end of his relationship with Peter Schlesinger.  There’s no flattery — his cheery dealer, for instance looks, well, dealerish all the same.  'Celia [Birtwell] once said to me after I had finished, “Well, you’re certainly off me today...”'  His subjects are his friends and — all the more in a museum with a roomful of grand Sargents, commissioned portraits at their dazzling best that knock you from your boots — it is interesting to see the difference of affection between these two circumstances of portraiture.  

'You want to get a likeness; but you know, history won’t mind if you don’t; there’s something more to it that’s more important.'  His only commissioned portrait, done in 1970 of Sir David Webster, then director of the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, resolutely shows Webster side-on and looking away, as if to say, this is only half the story.  'I do pictures of my friends.  Photographs aren’t even good enough for passports any more, they need biometric data; well, I’ve gone back to the hand.  Oah, I wonder sometimes, did I get a likeness?  But also, does it matter?  I have an artistic licence, you know.  I renew it every year; with my smoker’s permit.  When the idea for the show came up, I didn’t think of myself as a portraitist but, well,' he adds, slyly, amidst over 160 samples on show, the mere cream of a vast vat, 'well, I don’t think I’ve been wasting my time.' 

Time is an element in the process.  Without quite noticing how long it was, he once took nearly an hour and a half to decide upon a position for a couple he wanted to paint and many of the ink or pencil drawings themselves take three hours to execute, the watercolours even longer, all in all a marathon for sitters’ face muscles that must look back in stillness at Hockney’s own ever grimacing, grunting and scrunched, concentrating expressions.  One sitter could only relax between sessions by standing on his head.  And however much care goes into depicting clothes there is none of the almost distracting virtuosity of a Sargent; the face is the focus.

Yet time plays a more than anecdotal rôle.  Just as the lessons of space learned from Picasso are there the more Picasso seems not to be, lessons of time learned from photography are there the more the paintings have come to acquire a haste, a dashedness that is quite alien to the careful, slightly photographic fussiness that characterises the earlier work of the 1970s especially, such as the famous sequence of double portraits epitomised by Mr & Mrs Clark & Percy.  Those pictures took weeks where the new ones take a day or two; their fixedness is photographic in comparison now with the painterly exuberance of the new technique.  To defeat the deadening effect of slicing life into segments a five-hundredth of a second long, Hockney takes time by the scruff of the neck, shaking it to life.  As if haranguing a deceitful politician.  The paint runs to the floor in the scuffle.  Bystanders cannot stay still.

His almost wistful taste for double portraits relishes noticing the way a pair of people will define much about themselves by their positioning.  One of the most recent pictures, of photographer Jim McHugh enjoying the spectacle of his daughter in a sort of self-conscious, teenage raunchy pose before him, offers one of the richest counterpoints of wit, reference, observation and mischief, in a composition that has almost lascivious overtones in the manner of Balthus, alongside human devotion and the single, pointed juxtaposition of the painter’s brushes in a jar, up there on a table, and the photographer’s plate camera, down there on the floor.

As for the self-portraits, they are informal, unflattering and invariably inquisitive.  'Well, all portraits are self-portraits, of course.  I do think occasionally that it’s time to look at myself, though, — usually when I’m down.'  Yes, he can be down as down can be, despite an addiction to life as frothful.  These pictures also allow him to exercise his taste for mirrors, not to say bathroom mirrors where most of us look at ourselves most often, after all; and a recent self-portrait standing by a tall canvas in Vélazquez poise includes, in the ‘background’, a friend watching the whole process as we watch the watcher watching the watcher watch the watching... 

Remembering his friend Henry Geldzahler, a catalyst of the New York art scene in the heyday 1960s and, till his death in 1995, one of Hockney’s most frequent sitters, he recalls, 'You know, Henry had no mirrors in his house, only pictures of him by other people.  I noticed that.  He loved to sit and would strike a pose if he saw me take out my things.  On one occasion I started to draw and while he sat, posing gently, thinking I was of course drawing him, I took my time and did a picture of Mickey Mouse instead.  It was a little mean but I gave him the drawing.  Even at the end as he lay dying he wanted to be drawn and I would be by his bed and draw him but it became too much.'  The feeble last hold on life was conveyed in lasting feeble line, in sketchbook pages one of which is on show (but not reproduced in the catalogue), a threnody of graphite that brings tears to the eyes. 

Perhaps the most moving picture in the show, however, is the sepia ink drawing of his mother in her hat and coat on the day of his father’s funeral, done using the cannisse or reed pen beloved of van Gogh; it carries the world on a sheet of paper, a pebbly passage of dots in her eyes giving the texture of tears petrified by stoic resolve.  'She always praised whatever I did, as mums do; my parents were always supportative.  She led a very simple life and in later life would say, "I’m just waiting for the call."  I would say, "Well, you better stay by the telephone then."  She was 99 when she died after pretty much the only three days of illness in her life.' 

With the enforced inwardness of the very deaf, he himself knows his work goes on to the end.  'My work won’t be finished till, well, — till I get the call.'  My own thoughts turned to Picasso’s refusal to believe in death, in his last months signing a blank canvas as if to cheat the reaper, much in the way Mahler had tried to dodge giving his ninth symphony the dreaded number nine that had felled Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner and Dvorak before him — so, I ventured, 'Don’t worry.  When the call comes, David, you’ll not even hear the 'phone!'  He laughed, he laughed deep and long, that drawlsome, repeated hah hah hah that sees the strutting hour of life as it is, a music hall, a feast for the living.  'You know, for a real artist, love is the only theme.'

photographs & text  © Jonathon Brown  MMVI

"David Hockney Portraits", curated by Sarah Howgate and Barbara Stern Shapiro, is at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts [www.mfa.org] till 14th May; thereafter at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art [www.lacma.org], 11th June to 4th September; and at the National Portrait Gallery, London, [www.npg.org.uk] 12th October to 21st January 2007.