David Hockney: Retrospective

Sleeping Beauty, 1977, from Fag Ash Lil's Tate Retrospective.

Here's a long article about Hockney by Waldemar Januszczak from The Sunday Times.

She's 80 now, you know?

David Hockney: Artist

Sunday Times.

'Ee by gum, I live in California, but I'm from the North and like smoking. Fancy a fag?' etc.

David Hockney: 82 Portraits & 1 Still Life

Barry Humphries by David Hockney, from 82 Portraits  & 1 Still Life, which opens at the Royal Academy, London today.

Tate: Dammit Janet

This week, the Tate Gallery announced the first major exhibition to explore ‘queer art’, marking 50 years since male homosexuality in Britain was decriminalised. In 2017, Tate Britain’s show will include work by David Hockney, Duncan Grant, Francis Bacon and Keith Vaughan. 

Is this a cause for celebration, or another reminder that definitions of gender have come to dominate our thinking in so many areas of modern life? Surely art is either good or bad? Lumping together gay artists, as if their sexual preferences make them members of a particular club, is highly questionable...

Janet Street-Porter, The Independent. 

Oh do shut up, you braindead cow.

Exhibitions always organise works around a theme - that's the bloody point!

• Queer British Art opens next April.

Hockney: Portrait Of An Artist

Tate Britain is to stage one of the biggest shows it has ever organised – an extensive retrospective of the work of David Hockney, one of the most recognisable and popular artists active today.

Details of the show, which will cover six decades of Hockney’s work, will be announced on Monday. It will open in London in 2017 before travelling to the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York...

Hockney said he had enjoyed revisiting works he made decades ago. “Many of them seem like old friends to me now.

“We’re looking over a lifetime with this exhibition, and I hope, like me, people will enjoy seeing how the roots of my new and recent work can be seen in the developments over the years.”

The show will offer a full overview of his career from very early work, such as the proudly homoerotic Love paintings of 1960-61; to his many portraits of family, friends and himself; his love affair with the boys and swimming pools of Los Angeles; to the Yorkshire Wolds landscapes of the 2000s and the work he has been making since he returned to California in 2013...

Guardian.

Vogue: Strike A Pose

I met David in California. We’d lived there together for two years before moving to England. He’d started the painting of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy [seen in the background, above] in their house in Santa Monica, and had shipped it over to finish in London.

This candid moment between David and [the model] Maudie James was shot in David’s London studio. David was pretending to paint.

I don’t think I was meant to be in the picture at all – I just happened to be there. We weren’t directed or asked to wear any fashionable clothes. Cecil Beaton focused on Maudie – we were just there in the background.

It was a very exciting time for me: I had just arrived in London and was 20 years old. I had never met Cecil before. He was formidable: very witty but also quite terrifying. He was snooty and snobbish and I was just this little kid. Sometimes he was quite dismissive. But later we became good friends.

The Telegraph celebrates 100 years of Vogue with this Cecil Beaton photograph of David Hockney, in front of his portrait of Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood.

Words by his then boyfriend, Peter Schlesinger (seated, obvs).

National Portrait Gallery: Vogue A Century Of Style.

Stephen Spender: Father & Son

Matthew sighs. “Living dangerously. I didn’t want to get involved in that side of Dad’s life, but I didn’t disapprove of it.”

“I think your form of rebellion was to become straight,” says Maro, addressing her husband before turning back to me. “He was longing for Matthew to be gay, so if I hadn’t come along…”

“He did try and bring me into that world,” agrees Matthew, talking of Stephen’s circle, from Lucian Freud to Francis Bacon.

“Stephen wanted Matthew to be David Hockney and would always hold him up as an example.”

A long pause fills the kitchen. “Yes, it’s true,” says Matthew. “That was so irritating.”

The campaign continued well into Matthew’s 40s. He recounts his father’s “nicest and last attempt to make me successful” by getting Francis Bacon to buy one of his sculptures. The pair took a bemused Matthew to the infamous Colony Room, the Soho members’ club. It is not an experience he looks back upon fondly. “As we were going in, these two queens shouted at us: ‘Oh here comes Spender. You know why he’s called Spender, because he hasn’t got the bottoms of his pockets,’” Matthew recalls. “I suppose the illusion is so he can keep masturbating the whole time.”

He stops, looking like he’s changed his mind about telling the anecdote, that he may reveal too much, but then shrugs and continues. “Yes, well, all of a sudden here I was on the fringe of a world that I had totally avoided for all these years. And all I could think was: what am I doing here? Francis went over to the bar, shouted for a large bottle of ‘Tattinger ’52 please’. And as I sat there for about half an hour, the chaos just got worse and worse. There was this huge stuffed bird hanging over the Colony Room with a cage over it, and I remember staring at this thing and feeling like I was stuck in a Francis Bacon painting.

“In the end I just said: ‘Francis, this has been the most happy day of my life, you buying my sculpture, but I think I’m going to lie down’ and left. Afterwards Dad was very disappointed and said: ‘Finally I’d set you up with this whole world.’ And all I could reply was: ‘Dad, thank you very much but – and I know you find this hard to believe – I’m happily married, with two children. This is your world, not mine.’” Matthew pauses. “I don’t think he ever really came to terms with it.” ...

From a fascinating interview in The Observer.

A House In St John's Wood: In Search Of My Parents by Matthew Spender is published by HarperCollins.

David Hockney: The War Against The Curtain Sniffers

Nice buns.

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...

Great words from a great profile of the great man by Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian.

The young David knew two things from an early age: that he wanted to be an artist and that he liked boys...

If you ask me, gay life hasn't become significantly more conservative, despite the best efforts of so much of the gay media to get gay men to conform to a hetero norm; work, consume, marry, breed, get rich, get off Grindr, stop taking drugs blah blah blah...

PS Though some gaybores clearly don't need to have this thrust upon them, see these Pink News reader comments. Maybe they was born that way?

Update: I'm delighted that David Hockney thinks gay men have become boring - Artist David Hockney says today's gay men have become boring and just want to fit in. There's no bigger sign that they are winning the battle for equality, says Cristo Foufas. Telegraph online. FFS.

David Hockney: Revolutionary

Of all the liberating pop icons of the swinging sixties there was only one who was so nonchalantly gay. John Lennon enjoyed cracking homophobic jokes, Monty Python included gay stereotypes among their silly voices, but Hockney in the early sixties was painting scenes of gay life with zero self-consciousness. There’s a story in the film about how he once had a stack of male nude magazines seized by customs. He refused to accept their judgment, protested and mocked and eventually hired a lawyer until his magazines were delivered to his door in a bag labelled “On Her Majesty’s Service”. When Lord Snowdon showed him round Kensington Palace he refused to sign the visitors’ book because “I don’t want my name in there come the revolution!”

Jonathan Jones profiles David Hockney in The Guardian. 

With Randall Wright's documentary, Hockney, now on release, Fagburn gets the distinct feeling this won't be the least we hear about David in the weekend newspapers.

'By 'eck, 'e's a bloomin' national treasure...' etc.

PS And here's a fun-packed BBC interactive timeline thing.

Hockney: Did He?

No.

But thanks for asking.

Thought For The Day: David Hockney

“You think about them [friends who've died of Aids] every day and then you stop it.

“Because there’s too many actually, and it would rather drive you mad if you think about it. And slowly you have to realise that it’s kind of become part of your life.”

From a new  documentary, Hockney, which opens at the BFI Film Festival this evening, Standard.

David Hockney: Mother's Ruin

The late Henry Geldzahler, a friend, once said to his mother: “Goodness me, you must be very proud of your son,” to which she replied, “Oh yes. To be mayor of Bradford!” Paul, Hockney’s eldest brother, was appointed to that position in 1977.

From a piece about David Hockney: The Biography, Volume 2, Pilgrim's Progress, in The Times.

William Hogarth: Progress

Bedlam, David Hockney.

To mark the 250th anniversary of Hogarth’s death, Progress brings together for the first time three great contemporary responses to his eternally modern moral tale, A Rake’s Progress. David Hockney’s A Rake’s Progress, 1961-3, Yinka Shonibare MBE’s Diary of a Victorian Dandy, 1998, and Grayson Perry’s The Vanity of Small Differences, 2012, are shown alongside Hogarth’s original 1735 prints and joined by a newly commissioned work by Jessie Brennan.

Hogarth’s popularity with both artists and the public has endured for over two hundred years, and his work has provided inspiration to successive generations. Hockney, Shonibare and Perry not only update Hogarth’s searing social commentary, they also add their own personal concerns to the creative dialogue. Commissioning an emerging female artist to respond to Hogarth’s work, the Foundling Museum further develops the conversation.

Exploring issues of sexuality, race, class, vice, temptation, youth and urban living this exhibition both highlights Hogarth’s continuing relevance and allows us to consider the idea of ‘progress’.

The Foundling Museum, London. 

And look! Here's Claire going to the star-studded opening bash.

A member of the establishment off to the works do. pic.twitter.com/I0pTR3rH4t
— Alan Measles (@Alan_Measles) June 3, 2014

PS Booze, Whores And High Living, Guardian article on Hogarth and your actual modern art.

Dennis Hopper: Found Found Found

Apropos of nothing much, this photo is SUPERCOOL!

Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album, Royal Academy, London W1 (royalacademy.org.uk) 26 June to 25 August. (dennishopper.com)

Fagburn's pretty sure he's seen this photo before, but if you want to say it's just been discovered, fine...

David Hockney: Splash!

Sunday Times.

"Eeh, by 'eck, put kettle on, I'm parched. I like smoking me. Smoking and bums. Pardon me, but I speak as I find. It's all about the lighting. Like that Caravaggio. I did that one on the iPad. Then I thought Bridlington or LA, and you know what... " etc etc.

Hockney first moved to LA when he was 27 and already a star, having ­created what was then known as ­British pop art. He used acrylic paint to capture the dazzling colours and the unending sunlight. He created a new city in our imaginations, a new kind of paradise. Most famously, there was A Bigger Splash, a swimming pool in which somebody has just vanished beneath the surface, leaving behind only the exquisitely painted white splash and a haunting feeling of loss. It was a modern version of a Van Gogh boot or chair, a portrait of somebody who isn’t there.

And here Hockney is, almost 50 years later, painting people who are most definitely there, and now peering at the surface of an LA pool, an old man in sweat pants, waiting for his masseur to work on his legs. Perspective is a lie, time doesn’t stop — but genius can make it linger.

David Hockney: Your Actual Gay Art

Despite his admiration for Cavafy, Hockney found his poems "slightly old-fashioned. They never describe sex." In his etching to the poem above he removes the shame and depicts the young man lying back contentedly, arms folded behind his head, with his penis (the key body part unmentioned in the poem) frankly exposed. Attitudes had changed in the 40 years since the poem was first published. Even so, had Hockney's etching appeared any earlier, he would have been liable to prosecution: it was only in 1967 that homosexuality in Britain was finally decriminalised.

Blake Morrison on David Hockney about people who write books and that in the Guardian today.
Oh yes!

Brilliantly, The Guardian don't show you the actual etching, In An Old Book, referred to.

David Hockney: Thought For The Day

“Life is a killer, we all get only one lifetime and there is only now. This is my excuse for smoking, but do I really need one if I enjoy it? I have read the cigarette packets (and you can easily get out of the habit of reading them) and all the warnings etc. I accept fate as part of my life and tend to think that to aim for longevity is life denying. I have smoked for sixty years so why stop now. Adolf Hitler was the great anti-smoker, that says it all for me.”

Introduction to Unlucky Strike: Private Health and the Science, Law and Politics of Smoking by John Staddon.

Never trust a non-smoker.

David Hockney: "I Like Bums!"

Hockney, however, is reluctant to be seen as a symbol of anything, and seems almost insouciant about his influence. He doesn’t see himself as remarkable for being openly gay in the early 1960s, when it was still illegal. “No, because I lived in bohemia and I thought I would always live in bohemia. And bohemia was separate from suburbia and the rest was suburban and stuff.

“At the RCA, Quentin Crisp was a model and I got to know him a bit. I noticed he was the only model who’d go around looking at the drawings and comment on them. He’d make some funny comments. He was one of the first homosexuals I met, who was just gay, accepted what he was and he lived in a bohemian way. That’s what I did and I never thought much of it.”

Hockney may have enjoyed celebrity in London but it wasn’t enough to keep him. He was drawn to LA as his idealised version of America. “I was brought up in Bradford and Hollywood – because Hollywood was the cinema,” he told his biographer Christopher Simon Sykes. He was also in search of sun, sex and space. “I’d say one of the reasons I came here was sex. I knew all these Physique Pictorial [magazine] photographers were based here. I first came in 1964 and it was sexy, it was.”

Above a large pink bucket of paintbrushes in his studio, I notice a calendar of naked rugby stars on the wall. I point it out as Hockney is being photographed. “They’re nice bums,” he bellows, cheerfully from across the room. “I like bums.”

Caroline Daniel interviews David Hockney for FT Weekend.

All this and Grayson Perry and Douglas Coupland, too, in Britain's most gay-friendly weekend supplement.

See also David Hockney: A portrait of the artist as a gay man by Mark Brown in The Guardian on the exhibition of his early work at Liverpool's Walker gallery.

Hockney in the 1960s was making work on subjects he knew and cared about – primarily being a young gay man when you really couldn't shout about it. He wanted to propagandise homosexuality.

Some of the earliest paintings, heavily codified, reflect his desire for the singer Cliff Richard. Also in the show is the important We Two Boys Together Clinging, inspired by a work by the 19th-century poet Walt Whitman. The painting references a newspaper clipping detailing a climbing accident – "Two Boys Cling to Cliff All Night".

PS BBC Vision On-type gallery of your actual David Hockney homosexual art.

David Hockney: Art For Arse Sake

A new exhibition of Hockney's early work has just opened at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, which happens to own one of my all-time favourite Hockneys.

This 1966 painting is called Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool. Why do I love it? I admire its courage and clarity. Hockney watches Peter's nude back and bottom as his tanned form emerges from crystalline blue water. The image of a beautiful human body rising out of water is one of the great fantasies of European art: this painting is a male version of Titian's Venus Anadyomene or Raphael's Galatea. It's a hymn to perfection and a dream of love. Hockney's significance in cultural and indeed social history is perfectly expressed in this happy painting...

Jonathan Jones on the Guardian Arts Blog.

Fagburn was reminded of another leading arse arts critic Brian Sewell talking bum last year...

David Hockney: A Bigger Splash

 

AN aide to David Hockney was killed in a drugs and booze bender at the world-famous artist’s home — when he guzzled TOILET CLEANER.

Dominic Elliott, 23, downed Knock Out fluid as the painter, 76 — recovering from a mini-stroke — slept upstairs, a coroner heard yesterday. The studio assistant had spent 24 hours getting high with Hockney’s gay former partner on temazepam, pot, cocaine and ecstasy — washed down with whisky and lager...

The Sun.

The papers are loving this tale of gay sex and drugs and death and modern painting, natch.
Oh, the wages of sin etc etc.
The Sun have captioned their photo; "Bender - Dead aide Dominic Elliott".
(Edit see also the Mirror heading a story about Graham Norton's wine with the words "Cheeky little number with rampant fruit").
Stay classy!

Update: The Sunday Telegraph interview the dealer who "discovered" David Hockney. 
I think they may have fallen out...