David Hockney - Moving Focus

David Hockney is Britain’s most celebrated living artist.

Constantly moving into new terrain, he never fails to capture a wide public imagination. This pioneering publication positions Hockney’s groundbreaking work within a wide cultural context and explores the ways the artist has interrogated the nature of looking and representation, from his days as a promising student to his place as one of the greatest artists working today.

UK £35.00 US $50.00 CAN $63.00

Edited by Helen Little

Featuring contributions by some of the most exciting voices in the worlds of art, design, literature and performance, the book offers an essential overview of Hockney’s career, revealing the depth of his influence and how his art continues to shape modern culture.

Edited by Helen Little, with contributions by Catherine Cusset, Rineke Dijkstra, Frank Gehry, Jann Haworth, Allen Jones, Owen Jones, Andrew McMillan, Richard Morphet, David Oxtoby, Eddie Peake, Walter Pfeiffer, Christina Quarles, Bruno Ravella, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, Ed Ruscha, Gregory Salter, Wayne Sleep, Ali Smith, Christine Strueli and Russell Tovey

DAVID HOCKNEY MOVING FOCUS

A panoramic new perspective on the life and work of David Hockney

DAVID HOCKNEY MOVING FOCUS

THE ROAD TO THE STUDIO: DAVID HOCKNEY AND THE TATE HELEN LITTLE

To collect the art of our era is as important, therefore, as keeping a record of any other serious human activity. And the most important of contemporary collections in this country is undoubtedly the one in the Tate Gallery.

David Hockney, 1979 Tate’s holdings of over a hundred works by David Hockney form a vital part of its national collection of modern and contemporary art. Tate is fortunate to represent Hockney by some of his most celebrated paintings, including A Bigger Splash 1967 and Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy 1970–1, which not only exemplify his originality but remain key elements in the story of British art of this period (pp.94, 130–1). Consistently on display, seen by millions and widely considered to be among Britain’s best-loved paintings, their popularity is a reflection of Hockney’s ambition to make memorable pictures and for his art to reach large audiences beyond the narrow confines of the art world. ‘I have the vanity of an artist,’ he commented on the eve of his 2017 retrospective at Tate Britain: ‘I want my work to be seen.’1 While he may be best known for his canvases, Hockney has always enjoyed experimenting with different media and Tate’s collection offers a unique overview of his prolific range and activity in painting, printmaking, drawing and photography. Revealing how the potential and limitations of Hockney’s materials and techniques have become essential to his practice, it traces a remarkable journey through the unconventional ways he has interrogated the nature of looking and making pictures, from his days as a promising student at London’s Royal College of Art to his place as one of Britain’s most important artists working today. From this narrative emerges an overwhelming sense of continuity in Hockney’s art – not only in the enduring presence of art history, literature, human relationships and close looking at the world, but in the artist’s refusal to conform during periods of uncertainty and polarisation when he traversed the boundaries of class, nationality, sexuality and high art – issues common to both his time and the times in which we live.

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Hockney’s deep engagement with the history of art is reflected in the frequent visits he has made over the years to Tate’s galleries on London’s Millbank. From his first visit in 1958, he remembers the impact of his encounter with The Resurrection, Cookham 1924–7 by the celebrated British artist Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) (p.14). Drawn to the literary and historical content of his multi-figure compositions and eccentric reputation, Hockney began to reference Spencer in his sketchbooks as well as emulating his appearance, adopting a pudding bowl haircut and using a pram to transport his painting materials.2 As a student at Bradford School of Art (1953–7), Hockney received a traditional art training based on life drawing and faithful observations of the exterior world. As he would later reflect, ‘I was one of the last to be trained in the old tradition. That meant lots of formal drawing … it’s one of the few things an art school can actually teach.’3 During this period, he produced a series of paintings and lithographs of domestic, working-class scenes, characterised by sombre colours and illusionistic space, in the style of the Euston Road School, a postwar movement in Britain which reacted against avant-garde styles in favour of painting traditional subjects in a realist manner. Woman with a Sewing Machine 1954 (p.41) is one of Hockney’s earliest prints to show his mother Laura Hockney as his model; he would go on to portray her numerous times (see pp.174–5, 177).

A defining aspect of Tate’s collection is the depth in which it can present the breakthrough work Hockney made in the early 1960s as a postgraduate student at the Royal College of Art. At that time, as Hockney later recalled, the British art schools were undergoing a period of rapid transformation: ‘Immediately after I started at the Royal College, I realized that there were two groups of students there: a traditional group who simply carried on as they had done in art school, doing still life, life painting and figure compositions; and then what I thought of as the more adventurous 13

DAVID HOCKNEY AND QUEER HISTORY IN THE 1960S GREGORY SALTER

Looking back at the early part of his career in a series of interviews with Nikos Stangos in the mid 1970s, David Hockney – by then a well-established and successful artist – reflected on the relatively explicit references to homosexuality that had first emerged in his student work in the early 1960s: What one must remember about some of these pictures is that they were partly propaganda of something I felt hadn’t been propagandised, especially among students, as a subject: homosexuality. I felt it should be done. Nobody else would use it as a subject, but because it was a part of me it was a subject that I could treat humorously.1 These comments, typically for Hockney, suggest a desire to represent the significant changes in attitudes to homosexuality in Britain in the 1960s and beyond with lightness and humour.

Indeed, as public and institutional interest in queer histories has increased in recent years in the UK and internationally, Hockney’s art has lent itself to interpretations that trace a line between the figure of the liberated homosexual in western Europe and North America today and his initially coded, then celebratory representations of homosexuality (many produced, it is worth noting, before partial decriminalisation in England and Wales in 1967 and before the Stonewall Riots in the United States in 1969).

This essay seeks to extend and complicate these in many ways legitimate readings of Hockney’s practice in the 1960s. First, it situates Hockney’s work in the postwar, predecriminalisation context of the London art world, and considers how this work emerged in a dialogue with art and queer visual culture.

Then, it explores Hockney’s improvisatory, non-linear approach to history and its relationship to his sexuality. And finally, it examines how Hockney’s work touches on two little-discussed international influences that shaped his understanding – and that of many other queer men – of his sexuality and selfhood: namely, the poetry of C.P. Cavafy and broadly ‘Orientalist’ conceptions of the Middle East, 26

and encounters with Black spaces and the politics of race in the United States. Together, these areas illuminate the trans-historical and international encounters and fantasies that shaped Hockney’s approach to homosexuality in his art in the 1960s.

HOCKNEY, MASCULINITY, AND QUEER CULTURE IN POSTWAR BRITAIN David Hockney’s early 1960s works are careful but playful negotiations of masculinity, homosexuality and artistic identity, plotted out while he was still a student at the Royal College of Art in London. A prominent example of this kind of approach is Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style 1961 (pp.28, 57). It is one of four Demonstrations of Versatility that Hockney produced at the RCA and exhibited together in the Young Contemporaries exhibition in February 1962; his aim was to ‘prove I could do four entirely different sorts of picture like Picasso’.2 Tea Painting is also considered to be the third and final work in a series of paintings based on Typhoo tea packets. This was a subject he adopted for both personal and practical reasons: I used to go into the Royal College of Art very early in the morning … I was usually in there about seven, seven-thirty, or eight in the mornings, before Lyons had opened in South Kensington, and I used to make my own tea in there, because they wouldn’t serve a cup of tea till eleven o’clock. I had a little teapot, and a cup, and I bought a bottle of milk, and packets of tea – it was always Typhoo tea, my mother’s favourite.

The tea packets piled up with the cans and tubes of paint and they were lying around all the time and I just thought, in a way it’s like stilllife paintings for me; I’d like to paint something, take something different as a subject… There was a packet of Typhoo tea, a very ordinary popular brand of tea, so I used it as a motif. That was as close to pop art as I ever came.3 Tea Painting emerges, then, from Typhoo’s 27

A CAT CAN LOOK AT A KING IN THE AMERICAN STYLE

For me, Normandy, Île de Ré and Paris came first, and the making of the film The Longest Day, starring Bob Mitchum and the lads. Then came London. It is important to note that the London of 1961/62 is pre-Beatlemania and 58

Media needed a subject – and the subject was Young Contemporary Creative Cultural Change.

And then there was Young Contemporaries, a yearly exhibition of student work. The exhibition busted open the door for David and many of us.

We were able to step out onto the stage while still pretty green in our development.

The Young Contemporaries show of 1962 was electric. As you entered the space Hockney’s work was perpendicular to you on a large wall to the right. A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style 1961 (private collection) and The Third Tea Painting 1961 blasted off the wall, brimming with the joy of young expression. Round the corner and equal in impact were Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips.

There was a striving in the work – a wonder ‘mess’ – an incompleteness that left a trail of mark making and thought-prints. Later all

JANN HAWORTH In July 1961, David Hockney crossed the Atlantic bound for New York. Meanwhile I was swimming for my life in the Pacific Ocean, having misjudged a post-earthquake super surfing wave in Crystal Cove, California just six days before leaving for France. He, leaving a richly endowed postcolonial, postwar grey Great Britain, was heading into the Future; I was leaving still provincial Hollywood, a nineteen year-old UCLA student primed and starving for the vast cultural feast of Europe. I was heading into the Past.

Samuel Becket, Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker, John Osborne and Jeremy Sandford; surreal ‘fringe’ humour; skiffle; Ronnie Scott’s; The Establishment Club; the Kitchen Sink art movement; the This Is Tomorrow exhibition; art and lectures at the American Embassy; the accessibility and abundance of Art Schools; students at the RCA, Slade and the RA… and the burst of cheap colour reproduction, allowing for magazines like Queen, Nova, the Sunday Times Colour Supplement… London life that verbally and visually caught the ‘Shock of the New’.

these painters would become professional.

Today I savour the striking evidence of brilliance in their early works.

Early 1960s British art is rich in energy, personal calligraphic brushwork, the zest of youth, humorous surrealism and passion.

My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean 1961–2 is all this. It’s a small stunning intimate work that catches at the contrary feelings many of us experience when we cross international lines: the loss of what is left behind and the elation of running free. Crossings are the place where creative ideas burst and release. Peak creative moments happen where old ideas intersect and new ideas are born. The place and moment may be full of contradictions: pleasure and pain, the crossbreed of the old and new, the leaving and the arriving, the rich and the poor. The old world and the new.

I think My Bonnie sets the stage for Hockney’s lifelong creative crossings. It captures both the transformative experience of travel, and the pleasure and pain that becomes the catalyst for original art. The Atlantic is the centre point of the work and the song grieves at the divide.

The ‘Oceon’ divide roars but makes no sound.

The song is silent and internalised in the viewer.

‘P’ appears twice like a lover’s carving in a tree or a tattoo – the love that, in 1961, still ‘dare not speak its name’.

further to note that the Beatles were a product of the opportunities offered by postwar Britain and the resulting creative explosion, not the cause. As was David – and one might say that it was the austerity and the negative pressure of the war that was ‘causal’, together with the loss of Empire breaking the back of the posturing ‘superiority’ of the upper class, which in turn allowed the spotlight to turn to and celebrate the working-class creatives.

The creative catalysts for the 1960s culture boom began as rationing finally ended.

There was a crossbreed of energies arising from a mish-mash of creatives – the Goons; the writing of Kingsley Amis and the poets Philip Larkin and Sylvia Plath; Barbara HughJones; OZ magazine; the radical theatre of

Jann Haworth (born 1942, Hollywood, USA; lives and works in Salt Lake City and Sundance, USA) is an American pop artist. After moving to London in 1961 to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, she became one of the few practicing and recognised women artists working in Britain. A pioneer of soft sculpture, Haworth creates art from materials with domestic associations to address and question preconceived notions about women in art and society. She was the co-creator of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover, frequently referred to as one of the most important album covers of all time.

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A Bigger Splash 1967 94

Lithographic Water Made of Lines, Crayon and Two Blue Washes Without Green Wash 1978–80 95

Vase and Flowers 1969 126

Lillies 1970–1 127

Hotel Acatlan: Two Weeks Later 1985 148

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Celia with Green Hat 1984 166

An Image of Celia Case Study 1986 167