Book review: David Hockney - The Biography

Portrait of the artist as a young man is light on technique but the broad brushstrokes are good

‘What’s going on here? What’s all this bright colour? This is a grey day, this is grey South Kensington, this is a grey model, she’s got grey prospects. So what’s all this red and green all over the place?” The year was 1960. The speaker was Ruskin Spear, tutor at the Royal College of Art, and the student at whom this grey tirade was directed was Allen Jones. David Hockney was his fellow student. Theirs was a class that, according to Hockney, the tutors thought was “the worst they’d had for many, many years”. How wrong they were. Nothing could focus more sharply the generational confrontation from which the flowering of the Sixties was to grow than that misjudgment. Some of the others were pretty good, but Hockney was to become the outstanding artist of his generation. Ruskin Spear’s grey was the colour of the post-war settlement which had, in the words of the painter John Bratby, “the colour and mood of ration books, the general feeling of sackcloth and ashes”. Hockney, brilliant, colourful and flamboyantly gay at a time when the laws that put Oscar Wilde in jail were still in force, was its antithesis. He was to become the standard bearer for the new generation. They rejected the grey of their elders for colour, their glum acceptance of the status quo for irreverent humour and invention.

The staff eventually, if reluctantly, came to recognise Hockney as one of the most brilliant students the college had ever had and that story, the Sixties and Hockney’s instant rise to fame are at the heart of A Rake’s Progress, the first volume of Christopher Simon Sykes’s biography, covering the artist’s life up to 1975.

Hockney was born in Bradford in 1937, the fourth child of Kenneth and Laura Hockney. It was a working class family, but his parents were people of imagination and independent mind. Books were a constant. Education was what mattered most and so when David won a scholarship to Bradford Grammar, a school whose academic reputation was legendary, all his parents’ ambitions for their son seemed fulfilled. Drawing had been David’s passion since he could hold a pencil, however, and his own ambition was not academic success, but to go to art school, seen at the time as no fit destination for the brightest pupils. Reflecting his frustration, he sank from top of the class to the bottom, but eventually won his battle and enrolled in Bradford School of Art. One fellow student there was nicknamed Picasso because he couldn’t draw, but in spite of such attitudes, Hockney now sees the training he got “as vital to all his later work”. He then qualified for the postgraduate course at the Royal College, which he began in 1959 after National Service as a conscientious objector working in hospitals.

The tutors at the Royal College felt they were fighting a rearguard action against abstraction, or perhaps less honourably, they just didn’t like being upstaged by students like Hockney and his colleagues, who according to to Cecil Beaton, were known as the “naughty boys upstairs”. Although he did experiment with abstraction, Hockney himself has always remained a figurative painter, but he was also very clear that although in so many ways he personified the Sixties, he was never a Pop artist.

While he was still a student his distinctive talent was marked by successes outside of the college and when it came to his finals, they had to fudge the results. Technically he had failed, but he had also won the Gold Medal. He bought a gold lamé jacket to receive it, a garment later made famous by Anthony Armstrong Jones’s (Lord Snowdon) portrait published in the early days of the Sunday Times colour supplement.

Adolescent fumblings in the cinema had early persuaded Hockney of his sexual orientation. As a student at the Royal College not only did he become increasingly open about it, it began to inform his art in a way that was to be definitive. On one occasion he wrote in the college news sheet a spoof review of art in the Latrine Gallery, actually the graffiti in the men’s lavatory. Graffiti became a formative influence on his distinctive, casual drawing style while his love life, or at least its aspirations, shaped the imagery of pictures like Doll Boy, or The Most Beautiful Boy in the World and explicitly Adhesiveness, a picture inspired by Walt Whitman that depicted two men making love.

That Hockney was living for a while in a garden shed is indicative of his general financial position. His success began early, however, and in 1961 earned him the means to fulfill a dream and go to New York. He came back with a “yellow crew cut, smoking cigars and wearing white shoes”. He had also begun the Rake’s Progress, the brilliant series of etchings originally inspired by Hogarth that was to be one of his first major successes. He had emphatically come out and at the college review that year, he appeared wearing a frock and a pair of Yorkshire clogs, singing, “I’m just a boy who can’t say no”. Before he graduated, Hockney was signed up by John Kasmin, a young dealer who was to become leader in the London gallery scene. His future was already assured, but the dream of America lured him, especially Los Angeles and, in his own words, sexual freedom and dreams of golden surfing boys. He went to LA first in 1964 and was later to spend much of his time there. He knew so little about the city at first that he set out on a bicycle in search of one legendary gay hangout and ended up cycling 17 miles and finding nothing. He then bought a car. He couldn’t drive, but got a licence in a week. Not knowing how to get off the freeway, he drove to Las Vegas by mistake, the first long drive of many that were to take him, with various companions, all over the US. The most memorable images inspired by California were the Swimming Pools, an epitome of his dream of America, blue pools and golden bodies in golden sunshine.

With this book, you get exactly what the cover promises. It is a biography, not an artistic biography. There is no deep analysis of Hockney’s art, nor its development. The illustrations, though colour, are small, cramped and distinctly secondary. Perhaps the lack of analysis spares us the tortuous language associated with such things. Certainly the book is well written and tells a lively story, clearly based on first-hand information from the artist and those close to him.

• David Hockney: The Biography by Christopher Simon Sykes, Century, 368pp, £25