Twilight of the Bad Boy

By Richard Lacayo/Bridlington

Just as Goya did, David Hockney is going deaf. He has been for years. It doesn't keep him out of many conversations, though. He loves to talk, and with the help of two hearing aids, he can follow the flow of most discussions well enough. He's always happy to talk about art. He's particularly happy to talk about portraiture, especially since his own portrait work, more than five decades of it, is the subject of an important show that will open Feb. 26 at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He's very happy to talk about the shortcomings of photography, which he wants you to know is hopeless when it comes to representing the visible world. "The camera can't see space," he says. "It sees surfaces. People see space, which is much more interesting."

But we'll get back to art in a moment. What Hockney really wants to talk about lately is smoking. To his immense annoyance, the British government plans by 2008 to ban it in nearly all workplaces, in restaurants and even in pubs that serve food. A few weeks ago, leading me around his sturdy brick house in Bridlington, a British seaside resort town not far from where Hockney was born, he's steaming. "You know that Hitler didn't smoke?" he asks suddenly, as though daring me to disagree that this alone might explain der Fuehrer's lust for world conquest. Last fall on British radio Hockney debated Julie Morgan, the Labour Member of Parliament who spearheaded the ban. "Death awaits you whether you smoke or not," he warned her. "Pubs are not health clubs." As for New York City, now that it has its own smoking ban, he's through with it. "Little Emily with asthma," he sighs. "She has taken over Manhattan."

So although it has been a while since he was the bad boy of British painting, a title that passed years ago to Damien Hirst--he of the dissected sharks--Hockney still takes pleasure in casting aside the latest standard of middle-class morality. He has aged, and in some ways he has mellowed, but he has not gone soft. He's 68, a time when many artists are repeating themselves or fading into the margins. But Hockney has always managed to take his art down enough new paths--double portraits, photocollages, Cubist landscapes--to keep himself, if not always cutting edge, then at least fresh and relevant. He's in the small club of living artists whose work has fetched more than $2 million at auction ($2,869,500 in 2002 for his 1966 Portrait of Nick Wilder). His devotion to representational art has sometimes made him seem out of step, sometimes in. Two years ago, he was one of just a handful of artists of his generation to be included in the Whitney Biennial, the New York City museum survey that tries, however bumptiously, to define what's happening. The curators credited him with "serving as a model for painting's renewed focus on the intimate and the figurative." And with the Boston show, which will travel to Los Angeles and London, Hockney is more visible than he has been for some time.

THIS IS, AFTER ALL, SOMEBODY WHO started his career by remaking not just his work but himself. In 1961, when he first visited the U.S., not long after finishing London's Royal College of Art, Hockney was thrilled by the freedom and challenge of Manhattan. He responded by bleaching his hair blond, his trademark look for years to come. But his real transformation began three years later, when he discovered Los Angeles and refashioned himself into somebody even more California than the Beach Boys. So heartfelt and persuasive was his embrace of L.A. that within a few years his lambent paintings of lawn sprinklers, swimming pools and palm trees became part of everybody's mental picture of the place. Although he saw it all through eyes schooled in Piero della Francesca and Picasso, you could tell that what he loved above all was simply how of-the-moment L.A. was, with its sunstruck hedonism and emerging sexual freedoms, so unlike the confines of postwar Britain. It's useful to recall that one of Hockney's enduring contributions to the history of the nude--we mean this--is the tan line. That's not something he would have seen very much of back in Yorkshire.

All the same, in his 60s, Hockney has been looking homeward. Since last spring, Yorkshire is exactly where he has been, living and painting in the rolling farmland he has known since childhood. And he has gone native again, just as much as he ever did in California, although this time it's in the place he's native to. In California Hockney was all about brightly striped shirts and mismatched pastel socks. Bridlington Hockney goes in for charcoal tweeds and plaid slippers. The blond hair has gone gray. The big round eyeglasses have been exchanged for wire ovals. His socks match. Hockney has begun looking like a man who has found his psychological default mode. It's the eternal English householder.

Even so, he's not the type to keep an ordinary household. His downstairs parlor is crammed with tall cartons that contain the stretched canvases he has delivered regularly from London. On the stairway leading to his studio, somebody has tracked bright red paint up the carpet. Hockney lives here with John Fitzherbert, his companion for more than a decade, and a studio assistant, Jean-Pierre Goncalves de Lima. Hockney still keeps a place in London and another in L.A., where he plans to return in May. But until then he's in Yorkshire to paint landscapes through all four seasons, a natural cycle he lost touch with in California. "I was coming here for years with my mother," he says. "To paint a landscape, you need to know the place quite well--where the sun is going to come up, how it will move."

That's pretty much the guiding philosophy behind Hockney's portraiture too. He rarely accepts commissions, so almost all his portraits are of friends, lovers and family. Many of his pictures feel intimate even when they don't involve an old boyfriend hoisting himself buck naked out of the water, as in Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool. Some of Hockney's most interesting canvases are the double portraits he started doing in the 1960s, pictures of people, like the writer Christopher Isherwood and his lover Don Bachardy, whom Hockney knew well. In My Parents, the physical space between the two figures becomes a psychological separation as well. "I am very interested in space," he says. "Especially the space between two people--which, after all, is what a lot of people want to eliminate. All creatures want union."

The Boston show will have more than 150 portraits in almost every medium that Hockney has worked in, including the intricate photocollages he made in the 1980s under the influence of Picasso's Cubism, a recurring obsession. "People feel that the world depicted through photography is absolutely real," he complains. "But it's not. That's just a tiny aspect of reality." So to make The Scrabble Game, 1 January 1983, Hockney combined dozens of separate photos from a succession of moments, allowing the scene to play out in time as well as space. The picture also presents itself in the way the eye actually sees, as a sequence of darting glances. In pictures like that, Hockney beats the camera at its own game, using photographs to prove the insufficiency of any one photograph.

He often talks about his art as though it were an assault on the still formidable cultural pre-eminence of photography. That's a big job, but Hockney gives the impression that he has the energy for it. One morning, as we're driving around the Yorkshire countryside, he gets out of the car to approach a large tree he painted the day before. "You see," he asks, "how its branches bend down and then curve up again?" To demonstrate, he abruptly lifts both his arms into the air. "The life force pushes it up, then gravity pulls it down, but it insists on rising back up!" He's holding a cigarette, of course. The smile on his face is just this side of triumphant. It doesn't take long to realize that he's talking about himself. o