Medium rather rare
Hockney’s holiday... a watercolour painted by the Yorkshire artist in a French chateau half a century ago is sold for the first time. John Vincent reports.
David Hockney certainly knew how to travel in style, even back in the Flower Power year of 1967, when most Brits were only just beginning to rid themselves of a thinly veiled suspicion of foreign climes. The up-and-coming artist from Bradford first visited California in ’63, finally settling in Los Angeles in ’66, and had already visited Beirut that year before spending the Summer of Love travelling through France and Italy with Peter Schlesinger, who had become his lover and favourite model.
It was during this heady era that Hockney spent several summers at the historic Chateau de Carennac in the Dordogne, which was rented by
John Kasmin, the distinguished dealer and collector who transformed the art world of the decade. The guest list was particularly impressive and included the subject of this watercolour, Howard Hodgkin, the celebrated abstract painter and printmaker who won the Turner Prize for contemporary art in 1985 and was knighted in 1992.
Sir Howard died last month and the expressionistic watercolour portrait, entitled simply Howard Hodgkin, inscribed “Carennac 67” and given to Hockney’s close friend in the year of its execution, has just fetched £81,250 after surfacing for the first time at auction at a Bonhams sale of Contemporary and PostWar Art in London which coincides with the artist’s career retrospective at the Tate in London.
As an indication of how far Hockney had come in a short while, other VIP guests at John Kasmin’s rented chateau that summer 50 years ago included Sir Anthony Caro, Britain’s finest sculptor since Henry Moore, with whom he worked early in his career; a young Wayne Sleep, the ballet dancer, director and choreographer; Patrick Procktor, the artist dubbed with his friend Hockney “the dandy twins of the art world”; Ossie Clark, the fashion designer described as London’s answer to Yves Saint Laurent; and Celia Birtwell, Hockney’s muse and Clark’s partner.
Although Hockney had previously worked with watercolours, largely on his visit to Egypt in 1963, he had abandoned the practice until his trip to Carennac, one of the most beautiful villages in France, when he borrowed Procktor’s paints. In addition to the portrait of Hodgkin, he undertook four other watercolours during the 1967 holiday – two depicting Schlesinger, one of Kasmin’s wife, Jane, and one of Ianthe Cornwall-Jones, whose husband Paul published Hockney’s earliest prints.
Although Hockney returned to watercolour every once in awhile, it wasn’t until 2002 that he did so in any significant way, embracing the medium through a series of landscapes, portraits and interiors which he showcased the following year in a solo exhibition entitled Paintings on Paper at the National Portrait Gallery.
A less expensive Hockney popped up at Christie’s sale of Modern British and Irish Art in London, the Yorkshireman’s George, Blanche, Celia, Albert and Percy, from 1983, fetching £12,500. At Bonhams Prints and Multiples in Knightsbridge, a Hockney lithograph made £1,750 and one of his etchings realised £937.