ON THE ROAD
As a new David Hockney retrospective opens at Tate Britain, Martin Gayford explores how the artist’s travels have shaped his vision
How David Hockney painted his way around the world
The two great British painters of the early 19th century, John Constable and JMW Turner, were very different in their approach to travel. Turner was a roving artist, constantly moving around the country and over the Channel; Constable, in contrast, was, in his own phrase, a ‘stay-athome’ man. David Hockney, one of the most notable painters of Britain – and everywhere – in the early 21st century, is both.
If you talk to Hockney these days, he will explain that he scarcely leaves his house-cum-studio in the hills above Los Angeles, except to visit the doctor and the dentist. This is true, although you discover if you spend time there that – even so – quite a lot of the world, particularly the art world, makes its way up the winding road to his door. But Hockney is also a great traveller, as we will be able to see when the huge retrospective exhibition of his work opens at Tate Britain.
On display there will not only be works created, as one might expect, in Yorkshire, California and London but also – to list a few of Hockney’s other places almost at random – in Japan, Arizona, Paris, China and the Dordogne. Sometimes it can seem he’s been everywhere, and generally worked there too. When I mentioned a trip I’d made to Lucca, Hockney responded that he’d rented a villa outside the town in the summer of 1973. This was the spot where, among other works, he made a delightful portrait drawing of an Irish acquaintance, Dr Eugene Lambe, who looked a little like Lytton Strachey. It is full not just of his sense of the sitter, but also of the time and place: a relaxing August day in Italy; a good time, Hockney felt – typically – to get down to some picture-making. ‘It’s beautiful here’, he wrote to his mother back in Bradford, ‘but rather remote, therefore very good for work.’
In those years, Hockney roamed around. Egypt was one of his destinations and subjects; so was Beirut, and China, which he explored in company with the poet Stephen Spender in 1981. One result was that hotels became a theme in his art: the Grand Hotel, Vittel – where Hockney had stayed en route to Lucca – features in a drawing; La Mamounia hotel in Marrakesh; and another in Luxor…
From the beginning, there have been two distinct motives for Hockney’s restless journeying. One is to see new sights and experience different lights. Hockney is a connoisseur of the latter. He can compare the light of the Campagna, outside Rome – the golden glow painted by Claude Lorrain ‘which is lovely’ – with the sunshine and passing clouds of Monet’s Normandy or East Yorkshire. In 2002, he travelled to the far north of Norway to paint the landscape of the midnight sun.
He started off in Bradford, where the skies are often overcast. That, paradoxically, was what first drew him to Los Angeles. When he visited the local cinema and saw Hollywood movies, he noticed there were dark shadows on the ground – which must mean, he realised, strong sunlight. Ever since, he says, ‘I’ve always noticed shadows, simply because there weren’t many in Bradford.’
In earlier years, Hockney has reflected, he used to say that he was attracted to Los Angeles because of the sexual freedom he found there. But now, looking back, he wonders if it was really the sense of space: the vastness of the American West. As an artist, Hockney is a space explorer. A sufferer from mild claustrophobia, he positively craves that sense of openness, and searches for novel ways to depict it on the flat surface of a canvas, iPad screen or piece of paper.
Hockney’s other reason for moving is to escape distractions – in other words, from the consequences of his own fame. He is a sociable man, with many friends. In London in the early 1970s, he found that it was hard to concentrate because people kept dropping in on him, so he moved to Paris. ‘I liked it because I could walk into a café and there were always people you knew, and the great thing was that if you got fed up with it you could just get up and go.’ Then he found that there, too, he was plagued by popularity. ‘People started coming round to me, and when they arrived at 3.30pm and were still there at midnight, I realised that I couldn’t work there.’ So one day, he packed up and left.
Hockney is of course firmly rooted in certain spots – as Constable was in Suffolk. But he is also a global artist, fired as much by the sublime landscapes of the Grand Canyon and Yosemite National Park, for example, as by the gentle hills of the East Riding. Just as importantly, he has investigated and learnt from the artistic traditions of many places: Renaissance Italy and Impressionist Paris – and also the Far East.
Last year, I sent Hockney an email, mentioning that I was in Kyoto. Immediately, back came a recommendation of somewhere to visit: ‘Have you been to the moss garden, it’s really worth seeing with lots of different types of moss?’ Hockney made works in the Japanese town on two separate occasions. In 1971, he drew not the wet, mossy garden but the marvellous ‘dry’ Zen garden of the Ryoanji Temple – a 15th-century masterpiece consisting of just raked gravel and 15 exquisitely selected and positioned stones.
Twelve years later, he returned and made several of his photo collages there. He told me that one of these, Walking in the Zen Garden at the Ryoanji Temple, Kyoto, February 21st, 1983, was the first time that he felt he’d escaped European perspective. In the painting of ancient China and Japan, he had found a starting point for 21st-century pictures, multi-screen films and digitally collaged photographs. It is Hockney’s questing curiosity and his rooted sense of himself, as a person and a painter – his Turner and his Constable sides – that together make him a unique artist.
‘David Hockney’ is at Tate Britain from 9 February to 29 May.