David Hockney: ‘Just because I’m cheeky, doesn’t mean I’m not serious’
We are at his home in Kensington, where Hockney sits under a series of framed self-portraits in all manner of moods, all of them finger-painted on his iPad. He looks a little frail today. He has recently arrived from Los Angeles, where he spends most of his time. Yesterday he was jetlagged and bedbound, and today he’s getting his head back together. He’s surrounded by a team of assistants and friends who tend to him discreetly and lovingly – bringing in the fish and chips, filling his empty cup with more tea, fetching him a beer. As we sit down together, they leave the room; Hockney has been going deaf for 40 years, and has hardly any hearing left. The only way he can conduct a proper conversation these days is without background buzz.
But at 77, Hockney is still working ludicrously hard, with two new shows in London this summer. He’s also every bit as dapper as the peroxide hipster who emerged in the early 1960s – red tie, white shirt, baggy grey slacks, green cardigan and matching green lighter. In the 60s, Hockney seemed to swing with the best of them – Andy Warhol, Ossie Clark, Tony Richardson, much of Hollywood (Billy Wilder, George Cukor, John Schlesinger). But half a century on, his perspective has changed.
“I was never much of a party boy. I didn’t mind being seen that way, but I am actually a worker. An artist can approve of hedonism, but he can’t be a hedonist himself.”
What about all those LA swimming pools, the naked young men and the atmosphere of sunny indolence? His best-known art seems to reflect the happy excesses of the good life, a Californian bohemia. Ah, yes, he says, he did live in bohemia, but that didn’t dampen his Victorian work ethic: you can take the boy out of Bradford, etc. “I thought I was a hedonist at the time, but when I look back I was always working. I am always working. I work every day. I never give parties; I never gave them.” These days, when his team come round to his LA home in the evening (friends, assistants, former lovers – often all three in one), he leaves them to it. He unplugs his hearing aids and is in bed by 9pm.
As an artist, Hockney has never been more prolific. In 2012, the Royal Academy held an epic exhibition of his hyperreal Yorkshire landscapes, some painted, some finger-dabbed on an iPad – one of its most successful shows. Next year, another RA spectacular is planned, featuring a series of 100 new portraits. In the meantime, we are being treated to a taster at London’s Annely Juda gallery – a handful of the portraits, paintings of card players and chairs that pay homage to Cézanne and Van Gogh.
His resurgence follows a bleak and traumatic period in his life. In October 2012, eight years after he had moved back to the UK, Hockney suffered a stroke. Five months later, one of his assistants, 23-year-old Dominic Elliott, died after drinking drain cleaner at the artist’s seaside home in Bridlington, Yorkshire. Not long after, Hockney packed his bags and returned to the Hollywood Hills, where he has spent the past few years.
Now he is back in the UK for a visit, rejuvenated and ready for the opening of his latest show. He directs me to the 70-plus prints on the far wall and introduces me to a few of the subjects – Barry Humphries, art book publisher Benedikt Taschen, Hockney’s right-hand man Jean-Pierre Goncalves De Lima, and his manager and former lover Gregory Evans.
See, that’s what I’ve been doing, he says. Each character is sitting in the same chair, in the same studio, set against sky-blue walls and a turquoise floor. Each painting took three sessions of six hours – an 18-hour exposure, Hockney calls it, appropriately enough for a man so fascinated by photography. Throughout his career, he has fused photography and painting, and in his latest work he brings the two forms ever closer. So a photograph of the card players is composed of multiple photos to create a 3D effect (one of his complaints is that photography is so flat). In one corner of the work hangs a painting of the same scene. At the gallery, directly across from this photograph, stands the original painting. It messes with your head, and you can’t help but smile.
Hockney taps another cigarette. “Turkish cigarettes,” he says, “just delicious.” He licks his lips. Hockney is such a militant smoker you sense he sparks up even when he doesn’t fancy one, just to piss people off. His father, Kenneth, was just as militant in his non-smoking. “I have now outlived him. I am nearly 78.” He puffs and grins. Point proven.
It’s about the only thing he disagreed with his father about. Hockney adored both his parents. His mother, Laura, raised five children and lived until she was 98; his father, who died at 76, was a clerk who never earned more than £1,000 a year, and had romantic notions of the Soviet Union. “He was like the fella in that film I’m All Right Jack. ‘Have you been to Russia, Mr Windrush?’ And he says, ‘Oh no, it must be lovely, all those corn fields and ballet in the evenings.’ My father had that view; communism in the 30s was social justice.” His father never actually joined the Communist party, he says. Like Hockney, he lost his hearing at a relatively young age. “He never joined any parties, because he was too deaf, actually.” Hockney is wonderfully deadpan, and funny – even when he doesn’t mean to be. However curmudgeonly he likes to appear, he tends to give himself away with a twinkle in the eye or a solicitous word. “He had a kind heart, my father had. I mean, he thought there should be justice in the world.”
Just as Hockney does? “Yeah. I take after him a lot, I do.” A lifelong Guardian reader and letter writer, Hockney calls himself an anarchist-socialist. He says his dad would have called himself an anarchist, too, if he’d known what one was. His mother was quietly spoken and tough – strong-willed, boss of the house, industrious.
His father’s deafness impacted on his relationship with his mother, Hockney says. “I am sure he never heard a word my mother said for the last 10 years of his life, because she spoke so softly.” Are there any advantages to being deaf? He thinks, and a smile dances across his face. “Well, most people are talking a lot of crap, aren’t they?”
The young David knew two things from an early age: that he wanted to be an artist and that he liked boys. He was a clever lad who went to the grammar school, but in those days academic students dropped art, so Hockney failed exams deliberately.
What was he like at school? “I was always quite serious, but cheeky.” Has he changed? “Well, I am still cheeky, I suppose.” He pauses. “Just because you are cheeky, doesn’t mean you are not serious.”
At 16, he announced he was going off to art school. In working-class Bradford, boys didn’t do that kind of thing. His parents supported him, but his mother worried he might become a good-for-nothing. “When I went to art school, a neighbour said, ‘Some of the people in the art school just don’t work at all. Lazy buggers.’ And I said, ‘Oh I am going to work, don’t worry.’ And I did. For four years at the Bradford School of Art, from the age of 16, I was there from nine in the morning till nine at night, drawing in life classes.”
Who were his heroes? “When I was very young, Stanley Spencer.” Then in the mid-50s, he saw an exhibition in Edinburgh by the Russian ballet impresario Diaghilev, and marvelled at the way he embraced his sexuality. “What I heard about him was, he was homosexual and absolutely accepted it, and I thought, that’s what I will do, just accept it.” Back then, he says, few gay men were out. Most were repressed, and many were married, and he realised he didn’t want to live like that. From then on he never hid his sexuality. “I always took my friends home to stay.” That was incredibly liberal of your parents, for that time, I say. He nods, proudly. “Well, they were very sweet people. Kindly people.”
Hockney remembers the first painting he sold. He was a student; it was a portrait of his father and it fetched a tenner at the Yorkshire Artists Exhibition in 1957 – enough to keep him going for more than a week. After that, he never had a problem selling his paintings. He left for London and the Royal College of Art, where he befriended RB Kitaj and Peter Blake, won prizes for his work and very nearly didn’t graduate. He decided he should be judged solely on his art work, so refused to write the essay required for his written exam. Hockney was too good to fail, though, so the RCA changed its regulations and gave him his diploma.
In 1963, aged 25, his first solo exhibition, at John Kasmin’s gallery, was a sellout. Shortly afterwards he moved to Los Angeles in search of bohemia. By 1970, he was so successful that he was awarded a retrospective at London’s Whitechapel gallery. Hockney’s work broke new ground, documenting gay love and lust, the sun-drenched plasticity of Los Angeles, the domestic decency of his parents’ everyday life, the hawthorn blossom of Bridlington. He dedicated himself to his art, the hardest-working man in bohemia. Bohemia was a state of mind for him, something he could just as easily recreate in Bridlington as Los Angeles or Paris: you could be rich or poor, successful or unsuccessful, work-shy or a Trojan – it didn’t matter, so long as you were tolerant. This is what he thinks we’ve lost in recent times.
He waves his cigarette at me. “Do you smoke?” he asks, as if challenging me to a duel. I find myself apologising for having stopped, and he looks at me with a disappointment bordering on contempt – though he seems slightly pacified when I ask for a whisky.
“Bohemia was against the suburbs, and now the suburbs have taken over,” he says. “I mean, the anti-smoking thing is all anti-bohemia. Bohemia is gone now. When people say, well wasn’t it amazing saying you were gay in 1960, I point out, well, I lived in bohemia, and bohemia is a tolerant place. You can’t have a smoke-free bohemia. You can’t have a drug-free bohemia. You can’t have a drink-free bohemia. Now they’re all worried about their fucking curtains, sniffing curtains for tobacco and stuff like that.”
Does he think gay life has become more conservative in recent years? “Yes. I suppose it’s that they want to be ordinary – they want to fit in. Well, I didn’t care about that. I didn’t care about fitting in. Everywhere is so conservative.”
Would he have ever wanted to marry a man? “No, no, no,” he says with utter distaste. Would he have wanted children? “No,” he says, with equal conviction.
He recently visited his former lover Peter Schlesinger, the beautiful young man who featured in the 1970s documentary about Hockney and his entourage, A Bigger Splash, and was appalled by what had become of him. “We went for dinner in New York about a year and a half ago. We left at nine o’clock.” What time did he get there? He giggles. “Eight o’clock… Well, we wanted to smoke. He hates smoking, he hates this, that and the other. He has been with his lover for about 30 years, and they are like a couple of old maids.”
But, he says, Schlesinger is the exception rather than the rule. Take Gregory Evans, for example, who is with him today – a handsome, youthful-looking 62-year-old. They have been working together for 40 years, and were lovers for 10. Many of Hockney’s relationships simply evolve, and ex-lovers remain a part of his posse. “I’m not one to fall out with people, really. There are some people I don’t see, but it’s because they’re so boring.” Who is the love of his life? “Maybe Gregory,” he whispers, touchingly, if uncertainly.
He talks about the 80s, and the horror of Aids. He lost so many friends over that decade. “Aids changed New York. The first person to die of Aids that I knew was in 1983, and then for 10 years it was lots of people. If all those people were still here, I think it would be a different place. We were recently in San Francisco. It’s a very boring city now. Where are the Harvey Milks?” he shouts.
We tuck into our fish and chips. He burps, slurps back his tea, and puffs on his ciggie contemplatively. Look, he says, he’s closing in on 80, he shouldn’t be surprised that his friends are dying. If there was one artist he could choose to be around now to chat with, who would it be? “Picasso,” he says instantly. He worships Picasso – his lust for life, his work rate, his inventiveness. They never met, though he once drew an imaginary meeting in which Picasso sketches a naked Hockney.
Like Picasso, Hockney has tried to hold on to his little patch of bohemia. Whether in LA, Yorkshire or London, he and his team have shared a house, where they would smoke, of course, drink and take drugs, and where he would continue to go about the business of making art. Nothing was outlawed so long as it didn’t hurt others. By his 70s, he barely drank and had given up on the more exotic drugs. These days he restricts himself to a nightly spliff. Where does he gets his dope from? He has a marijuana card, he says, and pops down to the cannabis shop in Hollywood to get his fix. Does he take it for pain or pleasure? “According to the card, it’s for anxiety. But it’s for pleasure.” He tells me that his biggest anxiety is that he won’t be able to get stoned, and bursts out laughing. He laughs and laughs, wheezes, then laughs some more.
How is the world of love these days? Nonexistent, he says. When was the last time he had a man in his life? “John was the last one.” He separated from John Fitzherbert, a former chef, in 2009; they had been together for almost a quarter of a century. Is Fitzherbert still a part of the team? “Yeah a bit…” But he seems distracted, “I haven’t had a really good hard-on since I had the stroke,” he says suddenly.
Look, I say, I don’t want to appear unsympathetic, but at 77, you’re not doing badly to get a semi-good one. He giggles. “OK. OK!”
The stroke happened in 2012. For eight years he and his friends had been living in the Yorkshire coastal town of Bridlington. He had never meant to stay so long, he says, but it just worked out that way. He didn’t even realise what it was at the time. He was walking to the shops, fell, picked himself up and bought the newspapers. It was only when he got home that he realised he couldn’t complete his sentences. But, he says, he was lucky – a few weeks later his speech was repaired. “The stroke didn’t affect my drawing, and that’s the most important thing.”
It was only a few months after the stroke that Hockney’s assistant Dominic Elliott died. The inquest heard that Elliott had a history of depression. He had dropped out of university and was working for Hockney. He was said to have been having a relationship with Fitzherbert, though family friends suggested he was not gay. on the night he died, Elliott was with Fitzherbert at his house, and had drunk alcohol and taken ecstasy, cocaine and cannabis.
I ask Hockney if the incident has made him reluctant to return to Bridlington. “Perhaps a little bit…” He looks away. “Very sad, very sad.”
Has he been back since? “ No. I will go back. My sister lives up there.”
There was such joy in those Bridlington paintings, I say: did he lose that after Dominic’s death? “The only thing I did in Brid after Dominic’s death was the charcoal drawings of the arrival of spring in 2013, and I nearly gave it up. I nearly gave it up twice, actually.”
Hockney didn’t paint for four months after Elliott’s death, he says, the longest he has gone without picking up a brush. His first painting after returning to America was of his friend Jean-Pierre De Lima, who had been in Bridlington, sitting with his head in his hands. “He was just sitting like this, and I remembered the Van Gogh painting At Eternity’s Gate. And JP felt like that. He said, ‘Well, yes, you’ve got what I feel like.’ That was July, and the death was 17 March.”
De Lima later told the inquest that, at the request of Fitzherbert, he had got rid of the drugs in the house to shield Hockney from scandal. The inquest ruled that Elliott’s death was a result of misadventure; De Lima and Fitzherbert were not charged with any offence.
Had Hockney been close to Elliott? ”I hadn’t been that close to him. John was close to him. But he was a very intelligent boy, and I’d started talking to him about paintings. I always thought he’d be good, because he was very young and very quick with things.”
Hockney says he never saw him at night. “I’d go to bed at 9 o’clock, and he’d often go out and get very drunk. I never saw him really drunk, but other people did and he could be angry then. I just saw a very bright young intellectual. But I didn’t know him that well.”
Did the painting of De Lima help get the grief out of his system? “Well, it got me started on those portraits.”
We’re looking at his new series, and I ask if he has a favourite. He laughs. “Well, it’s a collective work, so I don’t.” OK, if you could keep just one picture, which would it be? “I don’t think like that. It’s always just what I’m doing now. I don’t reflect too much. I live now. It’s always now.”
I ask Hockney what he thinks of the Young British Artists who emerged in the late 1980s, led by Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. “Damien Hirst made some memorable images, didn’t he?” Did any of their work give you real pleasure? “Real pleasure?” He giggles again. “Well, maybe some, a little bit. Individual paintings. Gary Hume. Damien Hirst, but his paintings aren’t so good. They were terrible, actually.”
Having dispatched the Brits, he’s on to the Americans. “Jeff Koons is a terrible painter. Terrible painter. The sculpture’s something else.” Does he like the paintings of Gerhard Richter? “Richter is the one person I don’t really get. I saw the shows, but I thought it was like belle peinture, Paris 1959, and belle peinture was meant as a putdown. Sigmar Polke I like. German painters are very good. But Richter, I just don’t understand why they’re $24m.”
In 2009, Hockney’s painting Beverly Hills Housewife sold for more than £5.2m – a Hockney record. The 100 new portraits are valued at £1.3m each. Does the money amaze him? He lights a cigarette and thinks about it. “It does actually, yeah.” Does he think his work is overpriced? “When I look at some other things I think, well, maybe I am.” He smiles. “But when I look at some other things I think, well, maybe I am not.”
He talks about some of his dead artist friends, whose work he admires. There was Lucian Freud, for whom he sat for 120 hours in 2002 – Freud returned the favour by sitting for four hours for him. “He paints slowly and he gossips. Well, I can’t do that. When I’m painting, I’m in silence.” He talks about Freud, who died four years ago, in the present tense. What did he gossip about? “He’d go on about other artists, sometimes very funny. He could knock an artist and I’d laugh, but I’d think, well, it’s a bit cruel…”
Why did he give him so much time when Freud gave him so little? “Well, he talked me into it.” But it also happened to be spring in England – the first spring Hockney had experienced after 21 years in LA. Every day, he would walk through Holland Park to get to Freud’s studio, and he found the experience so thrilling that it inspired the landscape series in Bridlington.
Then there’s Francis Bacon, the master of screaming despair. “He said the best art was Egyptian and it’s been downhill ever since. Hehehehe!” Does Hockney socialise with many artists today? “No. I don’t see that many artists now. I’m just concerned with my own work.”
Hockney says he has a propensity towards negativity, but he tries to control it. What makes him pessimistic? Events, he says, the world, war, politics. He mentions 1 May, 1997, the day New Labour got into power, when many of us were still glowing with hope. “I remember watching the election with a friend, and he said, ‘What d’you think of Blair?’ I hadn’t seen him before, but I was watching him, and I said, ‘Well, I don’t really like him, that smile, it’s too much. And that guy behind him just looks like a creep to me.’ And that was Gordon Brown. I said, ‘I don’t find them very impressive.’ Years later he said, ‘Well, you were right.’”
He talks about all his plans for the future – to complete this series of portraits, to reinvent photography with his 3D project, to give away all his work to galleries. So much to look forward to, he says. Does he think artists improve with age? “Some do. Picasso. They said it’s all gone to pot with him, but I never thought so at all. Titian, Rembrandt, they got really good, didn’t they?”
He lights a fag and dunks a biscuit. It’s funny, I say, despite that gloomy demeanour you are a force of nature. “I am an optimist. As I say, if I’m on my own I can get quite pessimistic.” But your work kicks that tendency into touch with its positivity. “Yes, in the end it’s no good being a pessimist. And I have a good laugh every day. You’ve got to. That’s what keeps you going.” And just the thought of laughter is enough to set him off again. “There’s loads of people who don’t laugh at all, you know.”
Hockney’s work has given many people such pleasure over the years. Does he enjoy creating it? “It’s hard work, but I like it. Frank Auerbach said once it is a lot of fun as well, and it is. I like making pictures, I do, yeah.” There’s something art can do for the soul that you can’t really put into words, he says. He talks about a Matisse exhibition that he saw at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Critics can be dismissive of art that makes people feel good – as they have been at times of Hockney’s. Sod ’em, he says. “That Matisse show was unbelievable. It was pure joy. Pure joy. And joy is a great thing to give to people.”
• David Hockney Painting and Photography is at Annely Juda Fine Art, London W1, from 15 May to 27 June.
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