David Hockney takes two crumpled cigarette butts from his pocket and places them on the lunch table. “You’re disgusting,” says his lifelong friend Celia Birtwell, who has featured in many of his paintings. “Terrible! Terrible!” But the noxious items he placed next to our sandwiches are not what they seem. “They’re not real,” Hockney says. “They are sculpted. They are from a gallery in Berlin. He shines.
Hockney, who is on a short visit to Britain from his beloved new home in Normandy, popped over to see an exhibition of his work at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Hockney’s Eye: The Art and Technology of Imaging is open to him on an otherwise closed day, with select curators and friends awaiting his arrival. The mood is one of a royal audience and everyone gathers in mild awe when he finally enters in a wheelchair, pushed by his partner Jean-Pierre Gonsalves de Lima, known as JP.
Smoking is very pleasant. They send me the cigarettes from Germany – 20 cartons at a time – and I keep them in the drawers
The artist, now 84, is dressed in typically stylish attire: a blue and yellow plaid suit, light blue socks, white shoes, a red tie, a flat hat and large round gold-rimmed glasses. As we go to look at portraits in a dimly lit gallery, the mood is subdued. But everything changes when Birtwell arrives, unmistakably the same woman who stands against greenish blinds, her golden hair catching the sunlight, in Hockney’s 1970-71 masterpiece Mr and Mrs Clarke and Percy.
Birtwell was married to Ossie Clark at the time. She is a famous textile designer and her husband is a fashion guru. He is depicted sprawled on a chair with the white cat Percy on his lap, while Birtwell stands, engaging Hockney’s eye in navy blue and red. Hockney later painted and painted Celia alone, many times, in various clothes and nude. She kisses him in his wheelchair. She’s white-haired, radiant and petite – I understand that Hockney made her look a lot bigger by putting Clark in there.
Golden hair against green blinds… Mr. and Mrs. Clarke and Percy. Photo: Mark Heathcote/David Hockney
Birtwell examines Le Parc des Sources, Vichy, the best painting in this show, a vast, eerily beautiful vista of grass and trees. She asks Hockney when he painted it. “Right before I draw you!” he says, smiling at her. “It was in my 1970 retrospective in Whitechapel [Gallery]. And Mr. and Mrs. Clarke and Percy weren’t because I was still doing that.
The painting depicts two men sitting on metal chairs painted with olive enamel. They look at two rows of tall trees in the cool, misty morning light. “It’s Ossie Clark and Peter Schlesinger,” says Hockney. “Peter was wearing a snakeskin jacket.” Like many of Hockney’s unforgettable paintings from the early 1970s, this work is filled with tension and mystery. Schlesinger was a lover of Hockney. There is a third, empty chair on the left. Was that Hockney’s? Was it symbolic?
“Yes, it was,” he says. “I had gotten up to paint.” The empty seat has a haunting presence, like Van Gogh’s chair. As Hockney notes, the chairs can represent people: “They have arms and legs.” Hockney points out a division in the painting where the lawn meets the brown foreground. “It’s like a painting down there, isn’t it?” he says. “Then there are a few seats up front.” So it’s as if the two men are sitting and looking at a huge painting of a park. “It’s kind of like paintings within paintings,” says Hockney.
Greenery and ghost… Le Parc des Sources, Vichy. Photo: © David Hockney. Photo by Diane Naylor
In the next iPad gallery, the artist’s flower photos flow into each other on a screen that sits among the museum’s 17th-century Dutch paintings of flowers. “The first year I was at the Royal College of Art,” he recalls, “I went round a lot of small museums in London because I thought I needed to catch up, as there weren’t any in Bradford or Leeds. Every little one in London I’ve been to. Do you think we could just go out for a cigarette?’
Outside, Hockney fires up the Davidoff. “They’re only sold in Germany and Switzerland, maybe the Netherlands,” says JP, wearing a light beige suit and blue patterned shirt, his brown hair a little wild and his beard slightly graying. “I send them from Hans in Germany,” says Hockney. “He sends me 20 cartons at a time – 2,000 cigarettes – and I keep them in drawers.” Is it an addiction? “No, I’m glad. Smoking is a very pleasant thing. Why resist? Many people who do not smoke get lung cancer.
For Hockney, smoking has been a symbol of freedom since the 1960s. He was a pioneer in this era of liberation, perhaps the first artist to describe male gay life without apology or melodrama, just as he and his friends lived it. His portrait of Patrick Proctor shows a fellow artist smoking in a Wilde pose.
Hockney traces the equation between cigarettes and bohemia to 19th-century Paris: “In Boston they have that wonderful Renoir painting of a couple dancing. If you look closely, there are many bevels on the floor. They smoked while they danced. They had a good time – they had a good time!” He laughs.
Hockney… “I shut myself up in a nice house in Normandy where I can smoke. And there I will stay. Photo: Jonathan Jones
Hockney is keen for JP to join him for a second cigarette. Smoking is the reason he lives in France: what he sees as a basic freedom is now restricted in Britain and the US. They’ve only been on this side of the Channel for a few days and already they’ve found rules to fight against. They dined with the headmaster of Downing College and were told that smoking was prohibited on the grounds of Cambridge University. Exhibition posters, which are all over the city, use a photo that has been cropped to remove the cigarette in his hand. His era, says Hockney, “was the freest time, probably ever. Now I realize it’s all over, so I shut myself up in a nice house in Normandy where I can smoke and do what I want. And there I will stay. Are we having lunch?”
The museum restaurant is closed on Mondays so lunch is from Marks & Spencer. Hockney misses French food: he tells me how much he loves andouillette (tripe). I ask about his hometown of Bradford, named the UK’s next city of culture. He didn’t know and wasn’t too excited about it. “Well, I haven’t lived in Bradford since the 1950s,” he says. “The only time I go is to see Salter.”
He is referring to Salts Mill, a Victorian industrial building in the village of Saltaire, brought back by his late friend Jonathan Silver. His art gallery reliably displays Hockney and now displays his photographs of the spring in Normandy, arranged in a tapestry like the Bayeux Tapestry. So Hockney made a cultural contribution to Bradford and may even have helped his candidacy. “This must be the first exhibition they do directly from the Orangery in Paris,” says the artist.
As he drinks rhubarb juice, the conversation between him and his friends turns to Normandy and then to Yorkshire, where he and JP plan to visit Hockney’s sister Margaret.
“She’s 87, but she’s still driving,” he says. “She can park.”
“Because she has a disabled parking sticker,” adds Birtwell. “They are very helpful.”
Margaret Hockney is deaf and reads lips, it turns out. Her brother’s deafness may be one of the reasons why he falls silent during our conversational lunch and starts looking at his latest works on his paint-splattered iPad. “Deafness is a disability that is still underappreciated,” JP tells me.
Catching up in a time of crisis… Hockney’s iPad painting #133 created during the pandemic. Photo: © David Hockney
Hockney’s iPad images include a photo of a freshly taken portrait of Harry Styles. During the pandemic, the artist depicted nature – the arrival of spring in Normandy and blooming flowers – in sparkling iPad paintings that were an inspiring example in a time of crisis. But in November he returned to portraiture and oil on canvas.
In fact, he says as we look at his portrait in Stiles, these works are made only with paint. No drawing, no initial outline. He just creates colorful people. The pop star, he adds, was a new challenge as he prefers to draw friends. “I think if you know a face – you have to know a little face – I don’t know his face that well. Everyone’s face is a little different.” He pauses to collect his thoughts and finally says, “I’m still not sure what people look like.”
It is a surprising remark, full of doubt, from a man who has spent his life trying to capture a likeness, an essence. This helps explain why he has introduced a friend like Birtwell so many times, as if he is still trying to get to the truth. This is also why he is suspicious of photography: it tells us what people, landscapes or objects look like, as if it were a simple, fixed fact. In contrast, the modern artist Hockney most admires is Picasso, whose Cubism is a rejection of simple photographic images, a search for what things really are.
The first Picasso he saw was a reproduction of the Weeping Woman when he was 12 years old. He puts his hands over his face to imitate her holding a handkerchief to her wrinkled features. When curator Jane Munro brings Hockney a Picasso drawing from Fitzwilliam’s shops, he holds it in awe. This is a portrait of the dancer Lidia Lopokova, made in the Spanish neoclassical style. It’s perfect – but Picasso soon started distorting the faces again. “He was just drawn to something else,” Hockney says. “He had something else to do.”
Is this also true of Hockney, who in the mid-1980s returned from landscapes to freehand portraits? “I always do…
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