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Meit was springtime in Paris and I was floating among the little green leaves and white flowers – but I wasn’t in the park. I was on the top floor of the Fondation Louis Vuitton excited, scrolling through a few of David Hockney’s iPad photos of his garden in Normandy. In one room, this green space was highlighted by the light of the silvery moon: the dark room was alive with the white reflections of the moon, blue clouds and the shadowy fingers of the tree branches.
It was the beginning of April last year and this was the opening of David Hockney 25, a blockbuster exhibition, driven by his influence, covering his entire career – but emphasizing his work in this century. It was bold and bloody, insisting that Hockney’s later paintings of balls and pools are as good, if not better, than his famous swimming pools and abstract paintings. And what a success! With surprising interest, Hockney made his point. You went from looking in awe at some of his greatest paintings of the past, staring at their California studio and airing in London, to a sudden stop. Yorkshire gardens in the early 21st century, looking at emerald hedgerows and purple trees. And everything suddenly made sense.
One of my most precious memories was a dinner in a house in west London after visiting the National Gallery. Not just any old trip to the NG but the last hours that Hockney, my host, used his special privilege as a modern master to go there when he liked: the only other guests that evening were the artist Leon Kossoff and his family. Now I sat down to dinner with a man who had been one of my heroes since I first saw the picture of A Bigger Splash in my childhood encyclopedia. We had fresh sweet lychees – a first for me – along with Hockney’s views on art. He explained more in his book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, which came out at the beginning of this century. We watched the Caravaggio exhibition where he saw evidence that the 17th century painter used a type of camera obscura.
I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t even know why it was important. Instead, I try to think of this extraordinary man as I look at Hockney, whose graceful age, but social horrors abound in Jack Hazan’s short play A Bigger Splash. When I realized that one of the characters in the film was wandering around the house, I was very happy.
Hockney in the 21st century ceased to be different from his 20th century self. He seemed to be more interested in history and ideological views than in male beauty or Hollywood hedonism. Well, maybe not completely. The first time I spoke to him, he said something interesting about the power of beauty: “When you see someone so beautiful, it’s like a door opens…”
He also liked the country more than the city, lawns more than swimming pools. The next time I met him was in Bridlington, Yorkshire, where he lived in an old house painted in strong California colors with a conservatory. Upstairs, a small room was like his studio – or more like a store for his latest paintings, because he was doing real work in real Yorkshire, with his own toilet. outside like the French impressionists.
It was hard to get used to this unattractive Hockney. The first time I ever saw him in the flesh, he had peroxide blonde hair: he was bowing in a revival of Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress at Sadler’s Wells. I was above the gods, clapping furiously. But he soon stopped doing ballet and theater because of hearing loss, and his hair turned gray. One Hockney was thought to be dead, but he was replaced by another.
However if I had thought harder, Stravinsky’s production would have shown me that Hockney is still the same artist, always aware of history, fascinated by style and interested in how ideas create imaginary spaces. For this play, based on William Hogarth’s 18th-century story, Hockney set the stage in a dramatic setting with Hogarth’s misguided performances. Smart stuff. When he began to paint the woods and crops in Yorkshire, he was also cautious.
It took, however, a global tragedy for Hockney’s seemingly mild, private passions of late to become urgent, public, even redemptive. When the plague breaks out, he lives in Normandy, where he finds an old house in the midst of nature. Always interested in new technologies – although he had time to fax – he was proficient with the iPad. When the shutdown began, he took iPad photos of his garden and emailed them in an attempt to spread cheer during the shutdown. I somehow ended up on his mailing list and I wake up to a new Hockney, or several, in my inbox every morning. From his iPad to mine. He was describing a spring in Normandy – trees blown by the wind, rain pouring down a pond – and offered an unforced view of nature as another sign of hope and joy in a broken world.x
At first, to me, Hockney’s back-to-basics idea of painting directly into nature seemed like his break. Interesting, but wasn’t it painting the pastoral beauty of Yorkshire that wasn’t the same as the artist being at peace on a gardening afternoon? Now his insistence on seeing and showing the constant variation of the climate and the strength of nature seemed profound. What do we have but life, in all its forms? What is important except to wake up and see the light and feel the wind?
Ping: another email from Normandy, another sunrise in bright electric yellow on green leaves, and drinking my morning coffee.
In one closing email, he referred to “my favorite JP”. It was surprising because he was so busy with his private life. I couldn’t get him to talk about his creative ideas. He liked to talk about the pictures. JP is Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, who was Hockney’s assistant before he became his lover. I vividly remember both of them having a puff of smoke outside the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge, Hockney in a wheelchair as he mocked the university’s anti-smoking policy. I think JP helped Hockney by entertaining him. His art of late seemed to improve as their relationship grew. Hockney found love and put it in his paintings of Normandy, kissing the world.
However, you cannot put Hockney in a simple box or make him who you want him to be. On the way to the Fitzwilliam exhibition, which looks at scientific ideas in his art, I stood next to him in front of a wonderful painting from 1970 and tried to get him to say something about the portrait of his former lover Peter Schlesinger, but he kept talking about his hypocrisy. And my interest in Hockney’s early days was heightened that day by the arrival of Celia Birtwell, his muse, who was as beautiful as she is in her paintings Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy.
Let’s be honest. It will be Hockney’s paintings from the 1960s and early 1970s that last for many years. His approach to form makes him a great narrative artist whose social observations are deeply disturbing. But he made his point of focusing on nature in his late work. When art seemed to have lost faith and painting and photography were rumored to be dead, he returned to his Yorkshire roots to express the irreverent idea of art as pure awareness.
When he was growing up and his hand and eye were very small, he also showed how democratic and universal art can be. We all need to look at the environment around us, draw and paint. The iPad is fine, you don’t need an easel. It is the journey of the eye that is important.
At the high-profile Paris exhibition, this delayed vision won out – and Hockney was vindicated. He was a curmudgeonly, strong-minded Yorkshireman. His latest successes included an exhibition this year at London’s Hipper-Than-hip Serpentine Gallery. The artist who started the 21st century away from fashion ended his life as a leaven of art. It was the last spring of glory, of victory.
