There’s a story that English artist David Hockney tells of the occasion on which his mother came to visit soon after he had relocated to Los Angeles in 1978. Hockney was born in Bradford, a West Yorkshire city that’s a little smaller than Cleveland, Ohio, and possessed of a similar degree of glamour and cultural pedigree. He was born into a working-class family, in 1937, and he explains that when his mother gazed out from his Hollywood Hills home at the beautiful clear blue skies of Southern California, what she found unable to fathom was the fact that no-one was taking advantage of the wonderful climate by hanging out their laundry to dry.

It’s a story that gently illustrates Hockney’s remarkable journey. Certainly, you’d have difficulty unearthing a role model for the artist from his Bradford youth. As Christopher Simon Sykes makes clear in A Rake’s Progress (part one of a planned two-volume biography), Hockney is unique, a character of his own invention.

David Hockney’s clear and obvious talent gained him early entry him to The Royal Academy of Arts in London, and he shot to fame immediately upon leaving art school in the early-Sixties. His work during that decade was political in the sense that from the beginning he used his work as a means of declaring his homosexuality. Perhaps it’s a little strange then that while he was busy announcing his homosexuality to the world at large, he was apparently neglecting to share the fact with his parents – and with his mother in particular, with whom he was especially close. After seeing Jack Hazan’s 1974 documentary film, A Bigger Splash, shot during Hockney’s break-up with long-term lover Peter Schlesinger, Laura Hockney confided to her diary:
‘It was rather a shock…. At first it did not hit me – I guess I am very naïve – tho I’m not quite ignorant. I am very surprised David has allowed himself to be filmed in these private corners of his life, whatever he feels about it.’

Not that it altered Laura’s devotion to her son any. Equally unsurprising was the reaction of Hockney’s father, Kenneth – classically dour Yorkshire, and in this instance, monosyllabic. He declared the film ‘muck.’

What’s most striking about Hockney as we meet him here is his inquisitive nature, particularly as viewed through his unquenchable thirst for travel. Today we tend to take journeys across countries and continents for granted, but at a time when it was considerably more difficult and unusual to do so, Hockney travelled constantly across Europe and America. And as soon as he had the means, he lived for extended periods in New York, Los Angeles and Paris.

These varied landscapes in Hockney’s life prove a boon for the purposes of Sykes’s book, as do the colorful art world characters engaged by the artist: the writer Christopher Isherwood and his lover, Don Bachardy; the flamboyant theatre and film director, Tony Richardson; the great poet W.H. Auden (an uncomfortable sitter for a Hockney portrait. Of his weathered features, Hockney was given to wonder ‘If his face looks like that, what must his balls look like?’).

It’s difficult to recall an unfavorable impression of Hockney from the entire narrative, but then, A Rake’s Progress adheres to a biographical mode that follows chronology rather than critical analysis. No great time is spent raising a cultural backdrop, and considering the size of the project, there is relatively little in the way of extended observation of Hockney’s art. What Sykes does, instead – and does very well – is provide a palpable sense of the man himself. Hockney is revealed here as flamboyant and gregarious, loyal and witty, keenly intuitive and supremely devoted to his craft. He’s good company, and so, in turn, is the book.

When Progress ends, Hockney is thirty-eight years old, and mostly recovered from the traumatic end of his affair with Schlesinger (an event described by Sykes as ‘the first really painful thing that had ever happened to him.’ Those who wonder about the existence of art without angst might do well to consider Hockney). Ahead lay the years in Hollywood, the vast Grand Canyon paintings, and the formal experiments with photo-collage and computer technology (Hockney is a leading proponent of I-Pad art, utilizing the ‘Brushes’ application).

The current Hockney exhibition at The Royal Academy of Arts, A Bigger Picture, is the draw of the season in London, and it cements a kind of homecoming. Hockney returned to Yorkshire in 2005, making it his primary home once more. It will be worth following Sykes through volume two of his biography to find out exactly how he got there, and all that happened in between.

David Hockney: A Rake’s Progress- The Biography by Christopher Simon Sykes will be released on April 17th.

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture is up at The Royal Academy of Art in London through April 9th.

Top Image: iPad drawing by David Hockney.

We are all in the gutter, and most of us have our minds firmly entrenched there. Certainly that’s the case with the lovelorn desperadoes who populate the personal ads of The London Review of Books. Like most of us, they’re looking for love but willing to settle for a little dirty action…yet what separates these high-minded lowlifes from the rest of us (thankfully), is their refusal to compromise their truest selves, they’re determination to give full voice to their darkest desires:

‘I’m everything you ever wanted in a woman. Assuming you’re into fat 47-year old moody bitches who really don’t enjoy the mornings. Stop talking and pour the bloody mary’s at box no. 1908’

‘Man, 46. Animal in bed. Probably a gnu. Box no. 1910’

‘Sexually, I’m More of a Switzerland’ is the second  collection of LBR ads, following on from the surprising mainstream success of ‘They Call Me Naughty Lola.’ Together, the collections may be read as a portrait of a particular sector of England’s reading class – sarcastic, bitter, wildly inventive, willfully perverse, abject losers in love. Alternatively, they can be read them for the simple pleasure of  the laughter they provoke – particularly if grew-up with the advantages of American dentistry and are able to laugh unselfconsciously in public. For these sad-sacks however, the sun may have set on the old empire, and Great may less frequently be attached to Britain, but the people’s continuing delight in adventurous word-play and its ongoing love affair with eccentricity suggest that there will, indeed, always be an England.

www.wordsandimagesbyjohnd.com