Hockney, on a brief visit to Britain from his beloved new home in Normandy, stopped by to see an exhibition of his work at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Hockney’s Eye: The Art and Technology of Depiction is open for him on an otherwise closed day, with select curators and friends awaiting his arrival. The mood is to expect a royal audience and everyone gathers in mild awe when he finally makes his entrance, in a wheelchair pushed by his partner, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, known as JP. Smoking is very pleasant. I get my cigarettes shipped from Germany – 20 packs at a time – and keep them in drawers The artist, now 84, is dressed in typically elegant attire: blue and yellow plaid suit, blue socks, white shoes, red tie, flat hat and large round gold-rimmed glasses. As we go to see portraits in a dimly lit gallery, the mood is subdued. But everything changes when Birtwell arrives, unmistakably the same woman who stands against the greenish blinds, her golden hair catching the sunlight, in Hockney’s 1970-71 masterpiece, Mr and Mrs Clarke and Percy. At the time, Birtwell was married to Ossie Clark. She is a famous textile designer and her husband was a fashion guru. He is depicted reclining in a chair with Percy the white cat on his lap, while Birtwell stands, Hockney’s eye in dark blue and red. Hockney later drew and painted Celia alone, several times, in different clothes and nude. She kisses him in his wheelchair. She is white-haired, bright and tiny – I realize that Hockney made her look much bigger by having Clark sit. Golden hair against green blinds… Mr. and Mrs. Clarke and Percy. Photo: Mark Heathcote/David Hockney Birtwell looks at Le Parc des Sources, Vichy, the best painting in this show, an expansive, strangely beautiful vista of grass and trees. He asks Hockney when he painted it. “Just before I draw you!” he says, smiling at her. “This was at my 1970 retrospective in Whitechapel [Gallery]. And Mr. and Mrs. Clarke and Percy weren’t because I still did that.” The painting shows two men sitting on metal chairs painted with olive enamel. They look out over two rows of tall trees in a cool, misty morning light. “That’s Ossie Clark and Peter Schlesinger,” says Hockney. “Peter was wearing a snakeskin jacket.” Like many of Hockney’s memorable paintings from 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 Hockney’s? Was it symbolic? “Yes, 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 gap in the painting, where the lawn meets the brown foreground. “It’s like a picture up there, isn’t it?” He says. “Then there are some seats up front.” So it’s like the two men are sitting and looking at a huge painting of a park. “It’s a picture within pictures kind of thing,” says Hockney. Green and a ghost… Le Parc des Sources, Vichy. Photo: © David Hockney. Photo by Diane Naylor In the next gallery, the artist’s iPad images of flowers morph into each other on a screen set among the museum’s 17th-century Dutch flower paintings. “In my first year 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, as they didn’t have them in Bradford or Leeds. Every little one in London I’ve been to. Do you think we could go out for a cigarette?’ Outside, Hockney turns on a Davidoff. “They’re only sold in Germany and Switzerland, maybe Holland too,” says JP, who wears a fawn suit and blue patterned shirt, his brown hair a little wild and his beard slightly gray. “Hans sends them to Germany,” says Hockney. “He sends me 20 cartons at a time – 2,000 cigarettes – and I keep them in the drawers.” Is it an addiction? “No, I’m enjoying it. Smoking is a very pleasant thing. Why go against it? A lot of people get lung cancer who don’t smoke.” 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 depict male gay life without apology or melodrama, just as he and his friends happened to live of. His portrait of Patrick Proctor shows his colleague smoking in an almost Wildean pose. Hockney traces the equation of cigarettes and bohemia to 19th-century Paris: “In Boston, they have this great Renoir painting of a couple dancing. If you look closely, there are many cigarette butts on the floor. They smoked while dancing. They had a good time – they had a good time!” Laughs. Hockney… “I have locked myself up in a nice house in Normandy where I can smoke. And there 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 considers a basic freedom is now restricted in Britain and the US. The two have only been on this side of the Channel for a few days and already they’ve found rules to rage at. They had dinner with the Downing College teacher and were told that smoking is prohibited on Cambridge University grounds. Exhibition posters found throughout the city use a cut-out image of him removing the cigarette from his hand. His time, says Hockney, “was the most free time, probably ever. Now I realize it’s over, so I’ve locked myself away in a nice house in Normandy where I can smoke and do whatever I want. And there I will stay. 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. I ask about his hometown of Bradford, which has been named the UK’s next city of culture. He didn’t know and he’s not too excited about it. “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 reclaimed by his late friend Jonathan Silver. Her art gallery has a reliable Hockney view and now shows his photographs of the springtime of Normandy, organized in a strip like the Bayeux Tapestry. So Hockney is making a cultural contribution to Bradford and may even have helped his cause. “It must be the first exhibition they had directly from the Orangerie 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. “He’s 87, but he’s still driving,” he says. “He can park.” “Because it has a disabled parking sticker,” adds Birtwell. “They are very helpful.” Margaret Hockney is deaf and reads lips, it seems. Her brother’s deafness is perhaps one reason why he falls silent during our chatty lunch and starts looking at his latest works on his paint-splattered iPad. “Deafness is a handicap that is still underappreciated,” JP tells me. A takeaway in a time of crisis… Hockney’s iPad painting No 133, created during the pandemic. Photo: © David Hockney The images on Hockney’s iPad include a photo of a portrait he just took of Harry Styles. During the pandemic, the artist depicted nature – the arrival of spring in Normandy and the flowers blooming – in glittering iPad paintings that were an inspiring collection in a time of crisis. But in November, he returned to portraiture and oil on canvas. In fact, he says, as we see Styles’ portrait, these works are done purely with paint. There is no blueprint, no initial outline. It just creates people of color. The pop star, he adds, was a new challenge, since he prefers to draw friends. “I think if you know a face – you have to know a little bit – 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’s a startling observation, full of doubt, from someone who has spent his life trying to capture a likeness, an essence. It helps to explain why he’s portrayed a friend like Birtwell so many times, as if he’s still trying to figure out the truth. This is also why he is suspicious of photography: it tells us what people or landscapes or objects look like, as if it were a simple, fixed fact. By contrast, the modern artist Hockney most admires 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 the Weeping Woman when he was 12 years old. He puts his hands to his face to mimic her holding a handkerchief to her creased features. When curator Jane Munro brings Hockney a Picasso drawing from the Fitzwilliam shops, he holds it reverently. It is a portrait of the dancer Lydia Lopokova, made in the Spanish neoclassical style. It’s perfect – but Picasso soon started distorting faces again. “He was just drawn to something else,” says Hockney. “He had something else to do.” Does this also apply to Hockney, who in the mid-1980s has returned from landscapes to free-form portraits? “I always do…
