The shaping of David Hockney

There are plenty of books about David Hockney’s art. One of the most recent, by Marco Livingstone, called David Hockney: My Yorkshire, focuses on the seven years the Bradford-born artist has been painting on canvas and on his iPad the landscape of East Yorkshire.

Hockney himself has written two enjoyable volumes of autobiography. Were he not busy putting the finishing touches to probably his biggest-ever exhibition of new work at London’s Royal Academy in January, he might have been tempted to add a third in time for his 75th birthday next July.

As far as I know he has not. “I’m not in the mood for reflection. I’ve got too much to look forward to,” he told Christopher Sykes when first approached about giving interviews for a projected biography, reportedly the first for 25 years. Evidently he relented and talked to Sykes for 20 hours.

The result, the first of two volumes published in time for the Royal Academy show, is an illustrated retrospective covering the years 1937 to 1975. In those 38 years, Hockney made his way from the back streets of north Bradford to international stardom as a commercially-successful painter, printer, illustrator and set designer.

It contains images I have never seen. There’s Hockney, aged ten, in his Cub cap, looking like a Bradford version of Bluebottle, Peter Sellers’s invention for The Goon Show, the radio comedy which young David loved listening to, being a bit of a goon himself.

The chapter entitled Doll Boy is accompanied by a full-page photo of a smiling bespectacled Hockney on the back of a Lambretta driven by the painter John Loker.

The Hockney standing formally between his mum and dad, Laura and Kenneth Hockney, in 1962, wears a button-down collar shirt and a smart dark suit. His hair is blond and cropped. He had just won the Royal College of Art’s Gold Medal for painting. He was going to be famous, well-travelled and a legend in his own lifetime.

Three chapters on, a slightly chubbier Hockney in a red cardigan is standing by an easel in the-then studio of his Notting Hill flat. Those familiar with Jack Hazan’s 1974 biopic, A Bigger Splash, will be aware that the mid-1970s was a time of great creativity and personal distress.

Hockney’s big relationship with Peter Schlesinger finished. Sykes gets the story from both Hockney and Schlesinger as well as mutual friends who witnessed the break-up. “When love ends, two people suffer,” says Mo McDermott in Hazan’s film.

Sykes says: “Hockney’s break-up with Schlesinger was the first really painful thing that had ever happened to him, and he took it very badly.” Hockney’s solution to heartbreak was to embark on a series of paintings including one showing Schlesinger in a pink jacket looking down at a figure swimming in a pool.

This is the first time I have seen Hockney’s sexuality opened discussed in a book; but don’t get the idea this is a kiss-and-tell job. There is a good deal of other material, some diary extracts, including his mum’s bemused reaction to her son’s choice of book on Desert Island Discs – Floyd Carter’s pornographic novel Route 69. “Was he joking?” she asks and adds, “I love him very much”.

The book ends in 1975, when Hockney’s stage sets for Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress, were used for the Glyndebourne production, which was repeated last year. A second volume next autumn awaits.