Rebels in Paradise (20 page)

Though he attempted the more pragmatic commercial art course, within a month he had switched to a major in painting for the national diploma in design. For four years, he concentrated on drawing and painting, mostly from life. “I loved it all and I used to spend twelve hours a day in the art school,” he said later.
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He submitted a portrait of his father to a group show in Leeds and it sold for £10, a considerable amount in 1954. He called his father to ask if it was all right to sell it. “Ooh, yes.… You can do another,” he said.
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Following his father's example, he spent two years as a conscientious objector in the national service from 1957 to 1959, which he spent working in hospitals in Bradford and Hastings. He completed no paintings during that time but had done a lot of thinking before enrolling as a postgraduate student at London's Royal College of Art. His classmates included Ron Kitaj, Allen Jones, Derek Boshier, and Peter Phillips.

The abstract paintings of Alan Davie helped him realize that there were alternatives to the realism he had been practicing in school. American Abstract Expressionism had been shown at the Tate Gallery in 1956, and he saw the 1959 Jackson Pollock retrospective and 1961 Mark Rothko exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. But it was Picasso who made the biggest impact. After eight visits to the retrospective at the Tate, he realized, “Style is something you can use, and you can be like a magpie, just taking what you want.”
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Though he excelled at figurative painting, it was seen as antimodern. He began adding words—scraps of poetry or graffiti—to his pictures. Though thousands of miles apart, Ruscha was showing his first word paintings in the Common Objects show as Hockney was making brushy paintings of Typhoo tea boxes, his mother's preferred brand. He constructed one canvas to simulate a three-dimensional box just as Ruscha had painted the illusion of a flattened box of raisins. The two artists did not know of each other or even draw from the same source material, but both wanted to find a way around the dominance of abstract painting. Both would rise to prominence on their ability to look beyond and even elevate the clichés of the Los Angeles landscape in their art. (Reyner Banham, another British resident of Los Angeles, was able to perform the same feat in his writing.)

Hockney was among the first generation of English artists to reject Abstract Expressionism. His work was included in the Young Contemporaries Exhibition of 1961, organized by Lawrence Alloway. Larry Rivers had visited and influenced many of the students. Richard Hamilton, who was teaching in the Royal College of Art's school of interior design, had constructed proto-Pop collages in the 1950s and was supportive of Hockney and Kitaj. (Allen Jones was kicked out after the first year for failing to follow the traditional course of study.) Hockney recalled, “There was subject matter, and the idea of painting things from ordinary life, and that was when everything was called ‘pop art.'”
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Word spread about these rebellious young artists, and soon the stodgy Royal College of Art was transformed by attention from the press. Visitors regularly stopped by Hockney's studio and bought paintings. The topic of homosexual love, in
The Fourth Love Painting
, 1961, was slightly coded in the number “69” and the poetry of W. H. Auden. It was considered cheeky, but he was eager to tell others about himself through his paintings. “The moment you decide you have to face what you're like, you get so excited, it's something off your back,” he said.
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Doll Boy
, a painting of a figure, was loosely based on pop singer Cliff Richard. Hockney had photos of him pinned up in his studio as the other students had pinups of starlets.

The summer of 1961, with the £100 of prize money for his print based on a Cavafy poem, he went to New York City. “I must admit I'd begun to be interested in America from a sexual point of view.”
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He was in search of the matinee idol boys with beautiful bodies featured in American magazines. He dyed his hair platinum blond and went to the few gay bars that were opening in Manhattan. He met Oldenburg, Warhol, and Hopper. That Christmas, Hockney visited the Uffizi in Florence but was unmoved by the seduction of its great Renaissance paintings. “In 1961, the modern world interested me far more, and America specifically,” he explained.
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Portrait of David Hockney by Don Bachardy

Photograph courtesy of Don Bachardy

Despite the fact that he barely passed his courses in art history, he earned a gold medal from the Royal College of Art in 1962. The following year, British art dealer John Kasmin opened a gallery and gave Hockney a contract for £600 a year to paint. He had his first solo show at the age of twenty-six.

His experiences in New York led him to execute twenty-four etchings on the theme of lost innocence called
A Rake's Progress
, after William Hogarth's work. In 1963, the Royal College of Art published the series as a book, and the etchings were purchased for £5,000 by Paul Cornwall-Jones to be published as an edition of fifty, each set to be sold for £250. “I didn't dare tell people the price because it was so outrageous, I was ashamed of it.”
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The income allowed him to move to Los Angeles in 1963.

Los Angeles lived up to his expectations. “I think my notions were quite accurate in the sense that L.A. is a city where you can go and find whatever in a sense you want.” Months before he arrived in the city, Hockney painted
Domestic Scene, Los Angeles
, showing a man wearing an apron and scrubbing the back of another man in the shower. It was based on photographs in the Los Angeles body-building magazine
Physique Pictorial.

John Rechy's startling, homoerotic novel
City of Night
inspired Hockney to paint
Building, Pershing Square, Los Angeles
based on Rechy's description of the downtown area: “Remember Pershing Square and the apathetic palm trees.” He had never driven a car and, in all innocence, bought a bicycle to ride downtown from his quarters in Santa Monica, a short straight distance on the map that turned out to be sixteen miles. The next day, a friend volunteered driving lessons and in just one week, he had got his license and bought a Ford Falcon for $1,000. He managed to get on the Santa Monica Freeway but, not knowing how to get off, wound up driving all the way to Las Vegas, where he won some money at a casino and then drove home the same night. The next day, he drove to Venice, where he rented an apartment with a view of the ocean. This was the easy, affordable America that had captured his imagination back in London. “I thought, it's just how I imagined it would be.”
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In the winter of 1964, Kasmin came to Los Angeles to see Hockney and took him around to visit a few art collectors. “I'd never seen houses like that,” Hockney recalled. “And the way they liked to show them off! They were mostly women—the husbands were out earning the money. They would show you the pictures, the garden, the house.”
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His feelings were made clear in
California Art Collector
, his painting of a woman in her garden where a sculpture by the English artist William Turnbull competed for attention with the swimming pool.

In a seedy area downtown, he tracked down the
Physique Pictorial
offices and met the owner, who paid young toughs just out of jail to be photographed in the buff. “I was quite thrilled by the place,” Hockney recalled. “I bought a lot of still photographs from him.”
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These inspired yet more paintings of men taking showers. Hockney was obsessed by American showers. “They all seemed to me to have elements of luxury: pink fluffy carpets to step out on, close to the bedrooms (very un-English that!).
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“A lot of sex is fantasy,” Hockney said. “The only time I was promiscuous was when I first went to live in Los Angeles. I've never been promiscuous since. But I used to go to the bars in Los Angeles and pick up somebody. Half the time they didn't turn you on, or you didn't turn them on, or something like that. And the way people in Los Angeles went on about numbers! If you actually have some good sex with somebody, you can always go back for a bit more, that's the truth. I know a lot of people in Los Angeles who simply live for sex in that they want somebody new all the time, which means that it's a full-time job actually finding them; you can't do any other work, even in Los Angeles where it's easy.… It doesn't dominate my life, sex, at all.… At times I'm very indifferent to it.”
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After showers and cars, Hockney embraced yet another innovation. He switched from slow-drying oil paint to a quick-drying acrylic invented in the 1950s. The water-based Liquitex changed the appearance of Hockney's painting by facilitating smooth surfaces and intensifying colors. He also bought a new Polaroid instant camera, which, he said, “coincided with an interest in making pictures that were depicting a place and people in … California.”
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These instant snapshots, with a shallow depth of field and artificial color, contributed to the flattened perspective of his pictures of boxy buildings with carpets of green lawn or turquoise pools.

Once he had settled in, Hockney decided to visit the galleries and meet other artists during the Monday night art walk. Daunted by the “Fagots Stay Out” [
sic
] sign at Barney's, Hockney felt the macho atmosphere of the Ferus group was not welcoming. He met art dealer Nicholas Wilder, who had just moved to the city from San Francisco. His closest friends became English author Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy, who invited him regularly to their home overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica Canyon. After spending the summer teaching at the University of Iowa, Hockney drove through the southwest with designer Ossie Clark, visiting from London. They got back to Los Angeles just in time to see the Beatles perform at the Hollywood Bowl. In late 1964, Hockney attended the opening of his exhibition at the Alan Gallery in New York, where his paintings sold out at $1,000 apiece. After this exciting year, he found himself back in cold, gray London painting pictures of swimming pools as though revisiting Los Angeles.

Six months later, after teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1965 he moved back to Los Angeles and shared a small house with his art school friend Patrick Proctor. During his short time back, Hockney concentrated on a series of lithographs,
A Hollywood Collection,
for the just-launched publisher Gemini GEL. His renderings of palm trees and other city icons were surrounded by his elaborately depicted frames.

Hockney's restless creativity led him to Beirut to do drawings for a set of etchings relating to the poems of C. P. Cavafy and then to London to design sets for the Alfred Jarry play
Ubu Roi
at the Royal Court Theatre. In the summer of 1966, Hockney moved back to Los Angeles and stayed for four months in the Larrabee Street apartment of Nicholas Wilder, who had opened his eponymous gallery on North La Cienega Boulevard. Hockney recalled, “I liked Nick because he, like me, was a slob, untidy some people said, but I would tell them our excuse was a higher sense of order, and I mean that.”
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Meaning that Wilder was devoted to his artists and showed both Hockney and Bachardy. “Everything was a lot more bohemian than it is now. I admired Nick's intelligent eye. I don't think he ever made much money, and possibly never expected to,” Hockney added. “He was a very sensitive person, and the time I am talking about, his gallery was the centre of L.A. to me.”
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Teaching at UCLA, Hockney anticipated a class full of lithe surfer boys, but there was only one: a full-lipped, shaggy-haired teenager named Peter Schlesinger. Together, they moved into a run-down house on Pico Boulevard near Crenshaw. Instead of installing a telephone, they made do with the corner pay phone. Hockney painted during the day, while Schlesinger attended school. It was the first time that Hockney had lived with a lover. Their neighbor was the geometric abstract painter Ron Davis, who also showed at Nicholas Wilder's gallery. Hockney and Davis played chess together. Hockney relished the memory: “I think the very first game of chess we played he won, and he said, ‘That's what comes of playing with geometric artists.' The second game I won, and I said, ‘That's what comes of playing with figurative artists who know what to do with a queen.'”
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Schlesinger was only nineteen so they couldn't go to the bars. It was a quiet and productive time during which Hockney produced some of his greatest paintings. “It was certainly the happiest year I spent in California, and it was the worst place we lived in,” he reflected later.
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Hockney painted a number of large canvases that barely fit into the room he used as a studio. The first was a portrait of the elegant blond art collector Betty Freeman, who had seen his first show at the Kasmin Gallery in London and bought the one remaining drawing for $150. When Hockney moved to Los Angeles, actor and writer Jack Larson took Freeman to meet him at the run-down house. “David asked if he could paint my pool,” she remembered. “He came over and took little Polaroids. Then Felix Landau called and asked if I wanted to see the finished painting.”
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The first two times that he offered it to her, she refused. It was about to be shipped to a New York dealer when Freeman finally bought it. In the painting, she wears a floor-length pink caftan (that she kept for the rest of her life) and stands near her zebra-striped chaise and a mounted antelope head on the wall, a trophy of her engineer husband Stanley Freeman, who was a big-game hunter. After seeing it, she informed Hockney, “There is only one thing you can call this painting:
Beverly Hills Housewife.
So he did.”
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