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David Hockney Drawings 1963–1977 David Hockney Drawings 1963–1977 All works by David Hockney © David Hockney All works by David Hockney © David Hockney pa l l a s athene

Love Life: David Hockney Drawings 1963-1977 Chris Stephens

Previous pages and opposite: David Hockney drawing, Carennac, 1970, Brian Young

as the installation of his eightieth birthday retrospective exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2017 was completed, David Hockney took a brush and wrote in bold letters of blue paint on the final, pink wall, ‘Love Life DH’. In the run up to the touring show, which started at Tate Britain, London, I had asked him what he hoped its visitors would take away. ‘Joy’, he said instinctively, and then added that he hoped it would encourage them to look more closely at the world around them. In recent years, these things had come to summarise Hockney’s philosophy and his art: a positive celebration of life and the world around him through a close observation of, and delight in, even its most mundane details. The drawings in this book demonstrate that, while he might have been explicit about these motivations in later life, they had in fact underpinned his art from his early years, if not the very beginning. From the outset, and consistently throughout his career, in different ways, Hockney’s work has been concerned with the real world. He dubbed his inaugural exhibition at Kasmin Gallery in 1963 Pictures with People In as a jab at the hard-edge abstraction that was dominating the contemporary scene and the gallery itself. In that body of work he seemed to appropriate some of the visual vocabulary of his abstract contemporaries and used it for representational purposes. He quickly developed the idea, using the language of abstract painters to describe the movement of water in Californian swimming pools. Moving into the 1970s, Hockney’s painting became increasingly realistic until, facing something of a crisis in his development, he felt he’d got caught in ‘the trap of naturalism’. He stopped painting and looked to photography to find a new route towards what he saw as an enhanced form of representation that rejected traditional western perspective and instead embraced cubism to better capture the world around him as experienced in time and space. Exploring the potential of multi-directional depictions of space has continued to dominate his work from the 1980s through to the present. In the twenty-first century, alongside his landscape painting, his delight in the detailed observation of the quotidian world around him has been most strikingly demonstrated through his use of the iPad as a drawing device.

Love Life: David Hockney Drawings 1963-1977 Chris Stephens

Previous pages and opposite: David Hockney drawing, Carennac, 1970, Brian Young

Hockney began working on his Apple iPhone in 2009 and, almost as soon as it was launched the following year, transferred this activity to the larger and more sophisticated iPad. In size and immediacy, the iPad has many of the characteristics of a sketchbook but the images that can be generated through it have the depth and richness of a painting. In 2010, he made a series of images of the majestic landscape of California’s Yosemite National Park using this new technology. Later, he produced a group of works documenting the progress of spring in Yorkshire in 2011, and again in Normandy during the Covid-induced lockdown of 2020. Alongside landscape imagery, the iPad prompted Hockney to capture in art some of the ordinary details of life around him: cigarette stubs in an ashtray, clothes thrown over a chair, pairs of slippers lined up by the skirting, the mess of wires spilling from adapters plugged into an electrical outlet, and, most notably, over seventy images of the window of his bedroom in Bridlington, where he principally lived from 2004 to 2013. Seen together, the unintended sequence of pictures demonstrates the rich variety that can be extracted from a single, everyday subject. This hunger, generated by the immediacy of the iPad, to capture in art odd details of everyday life signalled a return to a central theme in Hockney’s graphic work of the late 1960s and 1970s. The artist’s rapidly changing painting style has always been underpinned by his genius as a draughtsman but this was especially evident in the twelve years from 1966 to 1977. Though not literally descriptive of the world around him, his drawings of the early 1960s nonetheless reacted to and played off the perceived world with typical wit and irreverence for the conventions of picture-making. In the second half of the 1960s, however, Hockney developed a way of drawing that sought to capture the visual reality of a scene and, at the same time, use observation and representation to achieve a deeper form of realism. Hockney used his powers of observation and his skill at capturing telling details while omitting the inessential to achieve an art of drawing that communicated not only the appearance but also the feeling and essence of an object, a scene, a place, a situation or a person. From 1966, Hockney produced hundreds of works using a fine pen and ink in which we see an extraordinary ability to describe three-dimensional forms and weight with only the use of line without shading and with little spatial recession. Alongside these works he also made drawings 6

using coloured pencils, the texture of which adds a further dimension while the tones enrich the compositions without giving them any more of a sense of depth than the pen drawings. Before 1966, however, Hockney’s drawing style progressed from the more conceptual, abstract mode of the very early 1960s to something that combined elements of that language with clear observations of the real world. This aspect is, perhaps, best seen in the works he produced while travelling in Egypt in 1963. These don’t purport to depict the world as seen and yet, often starting from a single detail, they capture something of the scene and the feeling of the place. Drawing in a hotel bar in Luxor, for example, Hockney contrasts the emptiness of the barely described tabletop and glasses with the detail of his book of matches and the ants that scramble after the sweet contents of the glasses. The foraging insects are a detail that immediately situates the scene somewhere unfamiliar, further established by the Arabic inscription. Three years later, Hockney’s keen eye for telling detail fell upon the striped sports socks of the otherwise naked Peter Schlesinger and, again, in the pencil drawing of Mo McDermott and Dale Chisman. An erotic touch is often an aspect of these drawings and humour is rarely, if ever, absent. Later in 1966 we see emerging the clean, sharp style of pen drawing that would dominate Hockney’s graphic work for a decade or more. Most commonly, this was applied to depictions of people – friends mostly, or writers or celebrities, or all three in one. From 1966 until the late 1970s, the pen and ink drawings show a remarkable consistency: the sharp economy of his delineation of Christopher Isherwood’s window seat in 1966 is mirrored in the tulips in a vase of 1977. Yet, during this period Hockney’s painting changed significantly. In the mid 1960s he was using abstract languages to depict Los Angeles swimming pools; from 1968 to 1971 or ’72, he was focused on hard-edged depictions of actual scenes, notably his series of double portraits of friends; in Japan and Paris in the early 70s, he used different painting techniques to create a variety of atmospheric effects; and, in 1977, fearing that he had become trapped by naturalism, he produced a number of paintings that questioned the protocols of picture-making, notably his variation on Hogarth’s Satire on False Perspective (1754), that critiqued the orthodoxy of Renaissance perspective. It may be that Hockney’s drawing style could remain constant through those changes in

his painting because it had already ironed out many of the pictorial conventions of which he was becoming increasingly suspicious. The purity of Hockney’s line enabled him to create an impression of mass and volume, even of foreground and background, without the spatial illusion of one-point perspective. The coloured pencil drawings similarly rejected spatial illusion, the sitters mostly having minimal context other than the seat they are in. Biographically, the period of our focus was even more turbulent. In 1966, Hockney moved to Santa Monica in Los Angeles and met Peter Schlesinger, one of the great loves of his life. Their relationship lasted for around five years though there were other men before, during and after. Hockney was always somewhat peripatetic but in this period especially he seemed frequently to be moving for short or long periods of time. In the later 1960s, while he was with Peter, he seems to have oscillated between Los Angeles and his flat at 17 Powis Terrace in London. Later, following their split, he settled in the Latin Quarter of Paris. In between, there were numerous foreign excursions: road trips across the United States; in Europe, holidays with friends in the Dordogne and Italy, visits to spa towns in Germany and France; journeys to Japan and South-East Asia. By the end of the 1970s he was settled once again with another great love, Gregory Evans. The combination of travel and a constant desire to draw creates the impression of a privileged and idle life. Hotels, in the spa town of Vittel, for example, or Los Angeles, and holiday destinations like Kasmin’s chateau at Carennac appear repeatedly. In fact, Hockney was a workaholic, committed to making pictures at all times. Drawings reflect his travels and leisure time because it was on those occasions that he was unable to paint. Wherever he was, whatever the occasion, Hockney would be making art. His drawings are not secondary works; they are not simply preparatory for a painting, rather they are conceived as independent works of art in their own right. Though their subjects often seem incidental, they were frequently carefully planned and took many hours. Hockney himself noted the degree of concentration demanded by pen and ink drawing where errors cannot be corrected, and failure was common:

I never talk when I’m drawing a person, especially if I am making line drawings. I prefer there to be no noise at all so I can concentrate more. You can’t make a line too slowly, you have to go at a certain speed; so the concentration needed is quite strong. It’s very tiring … because you have to do it all at one go … It’s exciting doing it, and I think it’s harder than anything else; so when they succeed, they’re much better drawings, often. The failure rate among my line drawings is still high; I’m always tearing them up. As much as their locations reflect Hockney’s rich and varied life of travel and sociability, they are also dominated by the familiar through the people who appear repeatedly. Friends provide his subject matter again and again: Peter Schlesinger, Gregory Evans, Mo McDermott, Celia Birtwell, Henry Geldzahler, Peter Langan. Perhaps the intimacy and familiarity of these people enable Hockney’s wonderful capability of observing and extracting quirky, telling details, whether it be the coil of a cord on a window, the cars in the street behind, or the pattern of a shirt or stitch of a jacket. These drawings are full of such life-enhancing observations. They are equally full of wit. At the same time, they can possess a certain air of melancholy, a sense of solitariness. Unpopulated rooms and empty chairs are common themes; a sense of distance can often be felt in the portraits, especially where the subject is asleep. The warmth and passion with which Hockney appears to observe the world around him is sometimes, it seems, balanced by a sense of detachment from his subjects. Though clearly not conceived as a cohesive body of work, Hockney’s drawings over the period of this selection demonstrate his ability to notice and capture the world around him in an act which, whether melancholy or joyous, is always celebratory. There is an intellectual depth and emotional complexity to these works which combine with the extraordinary technical brilliance of their making to secure their place in the great pantheon of drawing across history.

These Matches Belong to David Hockney, 1963 Ink on paper, 31.4 x 25.1 cm/12.4 x 9.9 in Private Collection In September 1963, Hockney was sent to Egypt by The Sunday Times. Visiting Cairo, Alexandria and Luxor, he produced around forty drawings inspired by things that he saw there. The planned article was cancelled, however, following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The title is a translation of the text on the matches.

Dale and Mo, 1966 Pencil on paper, 49.5 x 40.6 cm/19.5 x 16 in Ivor Braka Ltd Hockney met Mo McDermott while a student in London in 1961. McDermott would become Hockney’s lover and assistant. Dale Chisman, also an artist, was a student in the class that Hockney taught in Boulder, Colorado, in 1965 and became Hockney’s boyfriend for a time. A less intimate variation on this drawing became one of the etchings that Hockney made to illustrate a book of Fourteen Poems by the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, taking the title Two Boys Aged 23 or 24, 1966.

following pages Peter, 1966 Graphite, coloured pencil and ink on two sheets of paper, 29.8 x 65.4 cm/11.7 x 25.7 in Private Collection, London Hockney met Peter Schlesinger when the eighteen-year-old Californian joined his drawing class at UCLA in the summer of 1966. He would become one of the great loves of Hockney’s life.

Christopher Isherwood’s House, Santa Monica, 1966 Ink on paper, 25.2 x 31.5 cm/10 x 12.2 in Private Collection Hockney met the emigré English author during his first visit to Los Angeles in 1964. The window seat in this view of Isherwood’s home at 145 Adelaide Drive, Santa Monica, appears on the margins of one of the artist’s majestic double portraits, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968.

1059 Balboa Blvd., 1967 Coloured pencil on paper, 35.6 x 45.1 cm/14 x 17.7 in Private Collection During 1966 and 1967, Hockney made a number of paintings and drawings that exploit the sharp-edged simplicity of modernist architecture seen in the bright Californian sun. This was close to where Peter Schlesinger had grown up in the suburb of Encino.

Alf Young at Nick’s, 1967 Ink on paper, 43.2 x 35.6 cm/17 x 14 in Private Collection, Courtesy of Offer Waterman, London Hockney stayed at Nick Wilder’s apartment in Los Angeles from summer 1966 to 1967 and continued to see him after he moved out. He recalled, ‘We saw Nick Wilder a lot, and Nick’s friends, who were always rather young and beautiful boys.’

Peter Feeling Rough, 1967 Ink on paper, 36 x 43.7 cm/14.2 x 17.2 in Private Collection The inscription indicates that the drawing was made on board the liner the Queen Elizabeth on which Hockney and Schlesinger sailed to Europe in June 1967. Peter is, presumably, suffering from seasickness.

For Sleepy Kas, 1967 Ink on paper, 35.6 x 43.2 cm/14 x 17 in J. Kasmin John Kasmin was Hockney’s first dealer and the subject of numerous paintings and drawings. In the summer of 1967, having returned to Britain from California, Hockney toured Europe with Peter Schlesinger. After visiting Italy, they stayed with Kasmin in Carennac, a regular haunt where the gallerist rented an old hotel for the summer.

Lizzie Spender, 1967 Pencil on paper, 43 x 35.5 cm, 16.9 x 14 in Lizzie Spender Elizabeth Spender, daughter of poet Stephen and concert pianist Natasha, was seventeen when Hockney made this portrait.

Peter, 1968 Ink on paper, 35.6 x 43.2 cm/14 x 17 in Ivor Braka Ltd Having sustained their relationship for two years shuttling between London and Los Angeles, where he was at art school, Schlesinger moved into Hockney’s flat on Powis Terrace in London’s Notting Hill in 1968. Numerous drawings followed, many of Peter reclining, naked and under the bed covers.

Peter Running, Santa Monica, 1968 Ink on paper, 34.9 x 27.3 cm/13.8 x 10.7 in Private Collection, London One of the occasional characteristics of Hockney’s drawings is the unusual positioning of the image on the page. The bold, stripey shirt that Peter wears here seems to appear in drawings and paintings of 1971 and 1972 when Hockney was mourning the end of their relationship. Hockney later recalled a trip to Japan with artist Mark Lancaster: ‘Mark had a shirt exactly like one Peter had been wearing once when I’d drawn him; I didn’t know this until the morning when I woke up and the shirt was lying on a chair, and I drew it, early in the morning, I made a painting of it later.’

Christopher Isherwood, Santa Monica, 1968 Ink on paper, 41.3 x 33.7 cm/16.2 x 13.2 in Courtesy of Offer Waterman, London In 1968, Hockney painted one of his greatest works, a huge portrait of Isherwood and his younger partner, the painter Don Bachardy. Hockney later noted that he made many drawings of each of them in preparation, ‘to get to know the faces’. The English-born novelist was best known for his Berlin Trilogy of the 1930s which enjoyed renewed attention when it was made into the musical Cabaret a few years before this drawing.

W. H. Auden i, 1968 Ink on paper, 43.2 x 35.6 cm/17 x 14 in Private Collection Hockney recalled that the music critic Peter Heyworth arranged for him to draw Auden in London in October 1968. He found the poet ‘playing a role, the grumpy man … rather like the headmaster of an English school.’ Three drawings resulted, another similar to this, and a third that Hockney tore up. Hockney noted his love of lines from Auden’s Letter to Lord Byron: To me art’s subject is the human clay Landscape but a background to a torso; All Cézanne’s apples I would give away For a small Goya or a Daumier.