David Hockney takes two crumpled cigarette butts out of his pocket and places them on the lunch table. “You’re disgusting,” says her lifelong friend Celia Birtwell, who has appeared in many of her paintings. “Horrible! Horrible!” However, the harmful objects he has placed next to our sandwiches are not what they seem. “They are not real,” says Hockney. “They are sculpted. They’re from a Berlin gallery. “
Hockney, on a brief visit to Britain from his beloved recent home in Normandy, has come to see an exhibition of his work at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Hockney’s Eye: The art and technology of representation is open to him on a closed day, with select curators and friends awaiting his arrival. The mood is to expect a royal audience, and everyone gathers with a slight admiration when he finally makes his entrance, in a wheelchair pushed by his partner, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, known as JP.
Smoking is very nice. I receive my cigarettes from Germany (20 cartons at a time) and store them in drawers
The 84-year-old artist wears a typically elegant dress: blue and yellow plaid dress, light blue socks, white shoes, red tie, flat cap and large round glasses with gold frame. As we look at portraits in a dimly lit gallery, the mood is understated. But everything changes when Birtwell arrives, unmistakably the same woman who rises against the green shutters, with her golden hair catching the sunlight, in Hockney’s masterpiece, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, 1970-71. .
Birtwell was then married to Ossie Clark. She is a well-known textile designer and her husband was a fashion guru. He is depicted lying in a chair with Percy the white cat on his lap, while Birtwell stands up, sticking Hockney’s eye in dark blue and red. Hockney then drew and painted Celia alone, many times, in different, nude clothes. She kisses him in his wheelchair. She has white hair, radiant and small; I notice that Hockney made her look much older with Clark sitting.
Golden hair against green blinds … Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy. Photography: Mark Heathcote / David Hockney
Birtwell looks at Le Parc des Sources, Vichy, the best painting in this exhibition, a wide and strangely beautiful view of the grass and trees. He asks Hockney when he painted it. “Just before you paint!” he says, smiling at her. “That was at my 1970 retrospective in Whitechapel [Gallery]. And Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy weren’t because I was still doing that. “
The painting shows two men sitting in metal chairs painted with an enameled olive. They are looking at two rows of tall trees with cool light and morning fog. “These are Ossie Clark and Peter Schlesinger,” Hockney says. “Peter was wearing a snakeskin jacket.” Like many of Hockney’s unforgettable paintings of the early 1970s, this work is full of tension and mystery. Schlesinger was Hockney’s lover. There is a third empty chair on the left. Was that from Hockney? Was it symbolic?
“Yeah, it was,” he says. “I had gotten up to do the painting.” The empty seat has a haunting presence, like Van Gogh’s chair. As Hockney observes, chairs can represent people: “They have arms and legs.” Hockney points to a division in the paint, where the grass is in the foreground brown. “It’s like a picture down there, isn’t it?” he says. “Then there are some seats in front.” So it’s as if the two men are sitting looking at a huge picture of a park. “It’s kind of image within image,” Hockney says.
Green and a ghost … The Parc des Sources, Vichy. Photography: © David Hockney. Photo of Diane Naylor
In the following gallery, the artist’s flower images for iPad are transformed into a screen that sits among the museum’s 17th-century Dutch flower paintings. “The first year I was at the Royal College of Art,” he recalls, “I went to a lot of small museums in London because I thought I had to catch up, because they didn’t have them in Bradford or Leeds. from London where I was in. Do you think we could go out and smoke a cigarette?
Outside, Hockney lights a Davidoff. “They only sell in Germany and Switzerland, maybe in the Netherlands,” says JP, who wears a fawn suit and a blue printed shirt, his slightly wild brown hair and his slightly gray-covered beard. “Hans sends them to me in Germany,” Hockney says. “He sends me 20 cartons at a time, 2,000 cigarettes, and I keep them in the drawers.” Is it an addiction? “It simply came to our notice then. Smoking is a very pleasant thing. Why go against it? A lot of people get non-smoking lung cancer. “
Smoking, for Hockney, is a symbol of the freedom of the 1960s. He was a pioneer in this era of liberation, perhaps the first artist to portray male gay life without apologies or melodramas, as he and his people lived. friends. His portrait of Patrick Procktor shows his fellow artist smoking in an almost savage posture.
Hockney traces the equation of cigarettes and bohemia to nineteenth-century Paris: “In Boston, they have that wonderful Renoir painting of a dancing couple. If you look closely, there are many butts on the floor. They smoked while dancing. They had a good time, they did! ”He laughed.
Hockney … “I locked myself in a nice house in Normandy where I can smoke. And here I will stay.” Photo: Jonathan Jones
Hockney wants JP to join him for a second cigarette. Smoking is why he lives in France: what he sees as a basic freedom is now restricted to Britain and the United States. The two have only been on this side of the Canal for a couple of days and have already found rules against which he gets angry. They had dinner with the Downing College teacher and told them that smoking is prohibited on the grounds of Cambridge University. The posters of the exhibition that are all over the city use a cropped image to take out the cigarette in his hand. His time, says Hockney, “was the freest time, probably never. Now I realize it’s over, so I’ve locked myself in a nice Normandy house where I can smoke and do whatever I want. And I’ll stay here. Shall we have some lunch? “
The museum restaurant is closed on Mondays, so lunch is from Marks & Spencer. Hockney misses French food: he tells me how much he likes andouillette (tripe sausage). I ask him if his hometown of Bradford will be named the next city of culture in the UK. I didn’t know it and I’m not too excited. “Well, I haven’t lived in Bradford since the 50s,” he says. “The only time I go is to see Saltaire.”
It refers to Salts Mill, a Victorian industrial building in the village of Saltaire recovered by his late friend Jonathan Silver. His art gallery reliably has Hockneys in sight and now displays his images of the Normandy spring, arranged in a strip like the Bayeux tapestry. So Hockney makes a cultural contribution to Bradford and may even have helped with his offering. “It must be the first exhibition they do directly from the Orangerie in Paris,” says the artist.
While drinking rhubarb juice, the conversation between him and his friends heads to Normandy and then to Yorkshire, where he and JP plan to visit Hockney’s sister, Margaret.
“He’s 87, but he still drives,” he says. “She can park.”
“Because it has a disabled parking sticker,” Birtwell adds. “They are very useful.”
Margaret Hockney is deaf and reads with her lips, you see. His brother’s deafness is perhaps one of the reasons he shuts up during our chatty lunch and starts looking at his latest works on his paint-splattered iPad. “Deafness is a handicap that is not yet properly appreciated,” JP tells me.
A rise in a time of crisis … Box no. 133 of Hockney’s iPad, created during the pandemic. Photography: © David Hockney
Images from Hockney’s iPad include a photograph of a portrait he just took of Harry Styles. During the pandemic, the artist depicted nature (the arrival of spring in Normandy and blooming flowers) in bright paintings for iPad that were an inspiration in a time of crisis. But in November, he returned to portraiture and oil painting on canvas.
In fact, he says, as we look at his portrait of Styles, these works are done exclusively with painting. There is no drawing, no initial outline. It only creates people of color. The pop star, he adds, was a new challenge as he prefers to paint friends. “I think if you know a face, you have to know a face a little bit, I don’t know it so well. Everyone’s face is a little different. “He pauses to gather his thoughts and finally says,” I’m still not sure how people are. “
It is an amazing comment, full of doubts, of someone who has spent his life trying to capture a resemblance, an essence. It helps to explain why he has portrayed a friend like Birtwell so many times, as if he was still trying to get to the truth. This is also why he distrusts photography: he tells us what people, landscapes or objects are like, as if this were a simple and fixed fact. By contrast, the modern artist Hockney adores most is Picasso, whose cubism is a rejection of simple photographic images, a search for how things really are.
The first Picasso he saw was a reproduction of Woman crying when she was 12 years old. He puts his hands against her face to imitate her with a handkerchief on her wrinkled features. When curator Jane Munro brings Hockney a Picasso drawing from Fitzwilliam’s stores, she holds him in reverence. It is a portrait of the dancer Lydia Lopokova, made in the Spanish neoclassical style. It’s perfect, but Picasso soon distorted faces again. “He was attracted to something else,” Hockney says. “I had something else to do.”
Is this also true for Hockney, who in the mid-1980s has returned from landscapes to freehand portraits? “I’m always doing …