Christopher Simon Sykes - David Hockney: The Biography

Copyright 2011 by Christopher Simon Sykes

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Toronto.

www.nanatalese.com

Originally published in Great Britain as Hockney: The Biography by Century, an imprint of the Random House Group Ltd, London, in 2011. Published by arrangement with the Random House Group Ltd.

DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Cover design by John Fontana

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sykes, Christopher Simon, 1948
[Hockney]
David Hockney : the biography / Christopher Simon Sykes.1st United States ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: Hockney: the biography. London : Century, the Random House Group, 2011
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Hockney, David. 2. ArtistsGreat BritainBiography. I. Hockney, David. II. Title.
N 6797. H 57 S 95 2012
740.92dc23
[B]
2011041629

eISBN: 978-0-385-53145-0

v3.1

For my familyIsabella, Lily, Ditta and Joby.
And in memory of Christopher IV.

I first met David Hockney when I was seventeen, up in London for a day from school and hanging out at the Kasmin Gallery, whose owners, John Kasmin and Sheridan Dufferin, were friends of my mother. As a rather innocent and conventional Etonian, I was intrigued by Hockneys bleached-blond hair, his brightly coloured clothes and the fact that he was so obviously homosexual. His Yorkshire accent reminded me of home, for I had been brought up on the East Yorkshire Wolds, though my southern schooling meant there was not a trace of dialect in my own voice. I was immediately fascinated by his paintings, with their childish figures, and the words and numbers scrawled on them. I tried to persuade my mother to buy one for me, but she had no intention of spending over 200 on what she considered a foolish whim, though she did fork out a fiver for a small etching of a mans head perched precariously on two enormous legs. It was the first work of art I ever owned.

Man, 1964

Over the next few years, though I did not get to know Hockney himself any better than as an occasional acquaintance, encountered at parties and openings, I did get to know and love his work, and was thrilled when three friends, Bobby Corbett, Rory McEwen and Henry Herbert, all bought paintings by him, respectively Two Men in a Shower, The Room, Tarzana and Great Pyramid at Giza with Broken Head, which from time to time I could look at enviously. Then Hockney disappeared to California, and I followed his career through exhibitions and TV programmes, the likelihood of my ever owning another of his pictures receding into the distance as the prices of his work soared. I remained a fan and loved the fact that though the extraordinary images he continued to produce, of swimming pools and Hollywood and the Grand Canyon, seemed to redefine him as a Californian, he remained first and foremost a Yorkshireman. Ive got Bradford, he told his old friend R. B. Kitaj; theyll never take that from me.

Then one August afternoon in 2005, I was at home in Yorkshire when the telephone rang and it was my friend, the artist Lindy Dufferin, saying that she was at the bottom of the drive with David Hockney and could she bring him up for tea. It turned out that he had moved back to England and was living and painting in Bridlington, only half an hours drive away. He had quite fallen in love with the landscape of the Wolds, where he used to take summer holiday jobs as a farmhand when he was a pupil at Bradford Grammar School. For my wife and me, this was the beginning of a new friendship, and we have since spent many happy hours in his company, always marvelling at his ability to refresh one with his enthusiasm. I have never known anyone so engaged in his work and in the exploration of all the possibilities it throws out. Recently his childlike excitement at discovering what he can achieve firstly on his iPhone and latterly on his iPad has been a wonder to behold. Turner would definitely have used one of these if theyd been around then, he says breathlessly. When I asked him how come it took a 73-year-old to be the first artist to have a major show using this device, he said, Thats because none of the young ones can draw anymore.

The life of David Hockney almost ended when it had barely begun. Sometime in the small hours of 31 August 1940, a German bomber on a raid over Bradford in West Yorkshire released a stick of bombs, one of which fell on Steadman Terrace, a steeply inclined street on its northern outskirts. In number 61, the second house from the top, the seven members of the Hockney family and their neighbour, Miss Dobson, were huddled in a tiny space beneath the stairs, barely seven foot long. As the bomb came down, filling their ears with its high-pitched whistle and electrifying them with fear, three-year-old Davids older brother Philip clambered over his siblings, threw his arms round their mother and cried out, Mum, say a prayer for us. Laura Hockney clutched at a small promise box containing verses from the Bible before being hurled forward by the force of the bomb as it exploded, letting out a piercing scream that her children were never to forget. A timber merchant at the bottom of the street had taken a direct hit which all but destroyed it and left the road littered with wood. Every house in the street had its windows broken or the roof damaged. Yet miraculously number 61 was untouched. Forever after Laura was convinced it was the promise box that had protected them.

Kenneth and Laura Hockneys wedding, 1929

The city in which the family huddled that night, and in which David Hockney had been born three years earlier, on 9 July 1937, was the thriving centre of Englands wool trade, with a population of close to 300,000. Commonly thought of as a Pennine town, like its neighbours Halifax, Wakefield, Dewsbury, Shipley and Huddersfield, Bradford can in fact be considered as part of the Yorkshire Dales, lying as it does in the valley of the Bradford Beck, known locally as Bradforddale. Before the advent of steam, it was a market town with a population who raised sheep, sold home-grown fleeces and made cloth on handlooms. Then came the Industrial Revolution and, benefiting from the water power provided by the many streams rushing down the steep surrounding hillsides, the small town began to grow. As the hills became covered with woollen mills rather than sheep, there was a shortage of local wool, and Bradford looked to the empire for its raw material, importing from South America, India, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. It was not long before it became one of the worlds central markets for wool and wool products.

The city was immortalised in the popular imagination of the day as Bruddersford in J. B. Priestleys best-selling novels