As threatened in a previous post, here is the first of the Vogue archives that feature Mr. Hockney. Titled Our Man in Malibu and written in the Nov 1993 issue by Georgina Howell.
A fellow Hockney volunteer and researcher drew my attention to her copy of a 2006 issue of Vogue featuring our man, and so I decided to trawl the archives online and found three entries, a nov 1990 issue that I dont have and this one, which I do!
One of my favourite covers of all time, Linda Evangelista shot by Nick Knight and promising that
Glamour is back. How fitting for an Un Homme Un Style post.
The article is quite revealing and surprising, unfortunately not available to read online, but here are a few quotes that are particularly insightful and amusing...
"I lead a reasonably isolated life," he says, standing out in the garden, hands in pockets. His spectacles flash in the sunlight. "Frankly, I can keep myself amused."
"Today the only television that has any power is live, but I've even given up watching the news." He says news and action have parted company. "I mean, the Gulf War was all diagrams, all experts and no action. The LA riots were all action and no information - no diagrams. no experts!"
His ridicule of the Tate's buying policy under Norman Ried helped force a rethink on aquisitions. Writer Peter Webb tells the story of David Hockney accompanying curator Richard Morphet around the Tate Gallery. Hockney stopped to look at a work by David Tremlett, consisting of a plastic grid of cassettes. He indicated the ventilator he happened to be standing on at the time and asked, "Who did this, Richard?", to which Morphet responded, "You're terrible. At times, you're almost philistine."
"Tell me," Hockney insisted. "What's the difference?"
"That's art," said the curator, pointing to the cassettes, "because an artist did it."
"Anyone can say he's an artist," said Hockney. "My mother could say she's an artist, You're not going to exhibit her knitting."
There are also some revealing phycological insights into Mr. Hockney in the vogue article.
"His father was extraordinary," says fabric designer Celia Birtwell, a close friend and frequent model who comes from the same north of England grammar school background. "Recently, when I visited David's mother with him in Bridlington, we found copies of some of the letters his father wrote. One was to Izal, the lavatory paper manufacturer, congratulating them on their perforations." In a story Hockney likes to tell, he came back from school one day to find his father sitting in an armchair outside a telephone box. It turned out his father had advertised something he had to sell in the local paper, and had given the number of the call box.
There is, of course, more to david Hockney than the social icon and the brilliant performer. When Hockney was living in Powys Terrace, Nikos Stangos remembers the large room perpetually full of laughing friends while the painter could often be found working behind a closed door in the small room off to one side. "He is generous with his time and attention, but there is also a desperation and sadness to him which comes when he feels imposed upon. At low moments he feels used."
The article ends with,
An artist's work should be judged, not over the span of a few years, but over a lifetime. The book may be finished, but meanwhile the painter is groping for the next step. It is a lonely existence. It was lonely in eighteenth-century China, and it was lonely in Piccasso's Paris.
"Its fun in the studio, too. Oh yeah! However much you struggle, you enjoy it too. If there wasn't a pleasure principle in it you wouldn't be caught up in it at all." That's the way he sees it.
The book, of course, is
That's The Way I See It and it is a great book! Available at the Ferens shop and online at amazon and various other places.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention CM! (Poor Mr. Tremlett)
