In the autumn of 2018 David Hockney made a brief trip to France. He wanted to look at art – paintings from Picasso’s blue and rose periods and the great tapestries of Paris, Angers and Bayeux – and to enjoy “all that delicious butter and cream and cheese”. (As well as a country “more smoker friendly than mean-spirited England”.) While in Normandy Hockney declared a desire to capture the northern French spring as he had done a decade or so before in east Yorkshire, producing work that became the focal point of his blockbuster 2012 Royal Academy show. “There are more blossoms there,” he wrote to the art critic Martin Gayford. “You get apple, pear, and cherry blossom, plus the blackthorn and the hawthorn, so I am really looking forward to it.”
In impressively short order a large half-timbered farmhouse 40 minutes from Bayeux was acquired. It was a bit like “where the seven dwarfs live in the Disney film”, Hockney explained. “There are no straight lines; even the corners don’t have straight lines.” Set in four acres and surrounded by meadows, orchards and streams, it was quickly renovated and within just a few months Hockney was emailing out drawings from, and of, his new home to friends all over the world.
For someone so closely associated with his locations – the blue Californian skies and swimming pools early in his career, more recently the muddy lanes and hedgerows of the Yorkshire Wolds – Hockney rarely stays in one place for long. He has made work in China, Japan, Lebanon, Egypt, Norway and, of course, France. He lived in Paris for a couple of years in the mid-70s and, as Gayford points out, while the new house was bought, apparently, on the spur of the moment, “It was surely not entirely chance that an artist long admiring of French painting and the Gallic way of living, eating and smoking, with a French assistant, happened to find an ideal resting point just where and when he did.” It was time for a new venture.
Gayford has been a friend and sort of Boswell to Hockney for a quarter of a century and has written two previous books that were both with and on the artist. He visited Hockney in France during the summer of 2019 and it was assumed he would return the following year. Of course that was not to be. But what had begun as one type of project soon turned into a different and larger one as Covid-19 exerted its grip. Perversely, the new restrictions on movement had presented an opportunity for Hockney. One of the selling points of the house was that he wouldn’t have to drive anywhere to find his subjects, as it was all there in the trees, streams and skies on his grounds. Now his patch of land became his sole focus, and his excitement at the arrival of the 2020 spring, one of the most abundant for decades, was palpable. “It’s spectacular,” he wrote to Gayford. “And I’m getting it down.” Instantly, in those early days of the pandemic, the work became a source of hope and solace to a fearful public with his vivid iPad paintings of landscapes and still-lifes from his garden, made as the world locked down around him, appearing on the front pages of newspapers and on the BBC news.
By now Hockney and Gayford’s conversations had moved to FaceTime, Gayford with a glass of wine in Cambridge, Hockney with a beer in Normandy, happily intrigued by the weirdly distorting light effects a dodgy wifi signal could render on the screen. This book is Gayford’s record of their exchanges placed within the context of a wider appreciation of Hockney and his work, of art history in general and of some pleasingly digressive musings on the “new things said and done by an old friend, and the thoughts and feelings they prompted in me”. Gayford artfully deploys the notion of perspective, a longstanding artistic preoccupation for Hockney, as a recurring motif when examining the men’s relationship as it evolves over time with their vantage points equally recalibrated by major events – the pandemic, Gayford having a minor heart attack in January 2020 which required a stent, as Hockney had 30 years earlier – and by small observations about gardens or sunsets or rain.
Gayford convincingly conveys Hockney’s growing enthusiasm and energy for his task. When he alluded to Noël Coward’s dictum that “work is more fun than fun”, Hockney’s rejoinder was to quote Alfred Hitchcock’s variation on the old saying “All work made Jack”. Hockney’s burst of productivity manifested itself in a constant stream of new images arriving in Gayford’s inbox ready for distanced scrutiny. Some of this work will feature in a new Royal Academy show due to open this May. Examinations of Hockney’s lines made with crayons, charcoal, pencils and the ultra-thin marks available via an iPad led Gayford to ruminations on drawings by Rembrandt and Van Gogh. Paintings of the garden expanded into thoughts on Monet. Mention of the work of Hockney’s support team – Hockney often says “we” rather than “I” – spilled into assistants as a sub-genre of art taking in Velázquez, Tintoretto, Rubens, Warhol and Lucian Freud.
Gayford is a thoughtfully attentive critic with a capacious frame of reference and his brief excursions into houses in art, Hockney’s reading (Flaubert, Proust, Julian Barnes), his musical tastes (Wagner), and that almost definitive Hockney subject, the depiction of water – described by Hockney as always a “nice problem“ for an artist – consistently illuminate both Hockney’s work and the other artists his work brings to mind. (It should be added that the reader can see in the comprehensive illustrations almost everything Gayford mentions.)
While Picasso is the artist Hockney most often talks about, Gayford cites more often another favourite, Van Gogh, who liked to attach little sketches to his letters much like Hockney does with his emails. Living in the scruffy outskirts of Arles, and somewhat isolated as no one much liked him, Van Gogh just got on with making memorable and beautiful art with what was around him. The unprepossessing flat farmland of Hockney’s Yorkshire and now Normandy would similarly be seen as not obviously ripe locations for such close inspection, but as Gayford says, the moral is that “it is not the place that is intrinsically interesting; it is the person looking at it”. Following the spring Hockney continued to capture his four acres on through the summer and the harvest and the glimpses of autumn moons in anticipation of this year’s spring, for which he was intending to ban visitors to his home from March to May, lockdown or not.