Private faces in public places
Grey Gowrie
MARTHA'S VINEYARD AND OTHER PLACES by David Hockney Thames & Hudson, .f100 Wystan Auden used to play a rather campy game which divided writers into Alices and Mabels. The reference was to Alice in Wonderland, where Alice de- scribes herself as knowing all sorts of things and her friend Mabel as knowing 'such a very little'. The game offers intuitions about the role of intelligence in artistic creation and the role, too, of sophistica- tion: a double-edged term. Like Auden in his day, David Hockney is one of the most intelligent artists alive and a terrific Alice. Following the twists and turns of his career provides the same kind of delight, the disinterested pleasure, that I imagine comes when you can track what certain scientists are up to. A nagging, conditional Mabel of the spirit, however, wants artists to hack away at the rockface of common experience, to get their hands dirty, to give us the approximation their medium allows to the denseness of the phenomenal world. In this mood it is easy enough to sneer at this publication: a hundred-quid precise facsimile, blank pages, scribbled telephone numbers and all, of one of the artist's three sketch books from the summer of 1982. Is the thing in any moral, let alone financial, sense worth it? Is it another instance of the hype and flattery which too often distin- guishes the 'art world' from the world of art? Hockney himself may be a little bothered by such questions because slip- ped into the cardboard box in which all this uncanny verisimilitude appears is an auto- biographical essay about his use of both sketchbook and camera on his travels and their relation to the more complicated issue, as he puts it, of major compositions. Sketchbooks, he says,
are like diaries, and like diaries they are private; drawing in private. Of all things an artist does, drawing is the most personal, and keeping a sketchbook is like that . . .
Sketchbooks are not made with the inten- tion of publishing them. They are made just to note something down. They can record emotions as well as events; they record one's feelings of a place. Also, they record diffe- rent ways of looking at the house where I had been staying on Martha's Vineyard — an old wooden house. I was struck by the fact that it was all wood that goes grey because of the salt in the air; so there are many drawings all about wood: that is your feeling, that you suddenly notice it's all about wood. Next day you don't notice it is wood at all and you draw little Timmy, the little boy of my friend Dagny Corcoran with whom I had been staying.
The essay, it seems to me, makes, just, the case for publication of a sketchbook which almost as few people are liable to see (the cardboard container discourages browsing; it takes nerve actually to unpack things in bookshops) as will study the real thing when it ends up in the British Museum or the Getty at Malibu or wher- ever. Accept this, and there are immense pleasures in the book: drawings that will never otherwise be exhibited, marvellous instances of the way the arrogance of Hockney's wit combines with the humility of his powers of observation. It is full of pages that entice one to say 'There, that's it! That's the real thing' in a kind of Mabelisation of all that Alice-like know- ingness and grace. There is, for example, a coloured crayon drawing — rendered, un- sketchbook-like, complete — a bedroom by the sea where the light and the erosion of colour tones by salt all spell sea without 'Have you a newspaper without a colour picture of the Queen on it?' the least glimpse of it from a window. (I confess some sentimental bias as I seaside in the same house, privileged to step into the Master's green bathing trunks. But even if you don't know the room the drawing's as good as the best Bonnard.) There is a still-life in crayon, pencil and what looks in reproduction like water- colour (it may be crayon smudged with spittle) of a Sony Walkman, the cassette tape beside it a homage to Donizetti. Some line drawings seem less successful, as if Hockney were doing Steinberg doing Picasso, until you remember that this is private, a sketchbook, so why shouldn't he doodle or fool around? But then again lt isn't altogether private, is it, being submit- ted here for a review?
A way out of such ambivalence might be to ask what signs there are in this sketch- book, admittedly nearly four years old now, of Hockney's current state of de- velopment as an artist. Possibilities and dangers are apparent everywhere. In an age when the sensuous side of painting, the side which echoes Wallace Stevens's re- quirement that a poem must give pleasure, connects usually with abstract or colour field pictures, Hockney's work is con- cerned with the pleasure of noticing. He Is one on whom little is lost. He aims to please in quite a complex way, happiness being hard to pin down, in painting as well as writing. Historically, he hits target best when his close analysis of the casual look of things provides a shock of recognition. In our popular culture, Hollywood has for years now sold itself as a great good place of the erotic imagination. What an ordin- ary pleasure it is, and therefore, given art s limitations, what an extraordinary achieve' ment, that David Hockney was able Ie invent Los Angeles, that marriage of Monte Carlo with Staines, for painting. The downside is Hockney's obsession with Picasso. It seems to be growing rather than diminishing as he approaches 50 (although the Cubistic Polaroids, thank goodness' appear to be behind him). It is not that he is aiming too high. Since his twenties he has drawn nearly as well as Picasso and that alone would make him great. Tile trouble is that, at best, he has begun .t° take on the restless, protean characteristics of his master, the reluctance to settle down and bring off the big stuff, as Monet did; 3. t worst, he has a tendency to Picasso-Ise, the sense of camp-up, traditional HockneY material: America, Henry Geldzahler, pretty boys. As one who first saw his painting at the RCA a quarter of a century ago, as afli admirer and a friend, I believe that he Oh in time be able to combine sensuousness and wit with a dense and sculptor -like feeling for oil paint and its correspondeOce. with the observed world, the whole poo of 20th-century painting. I hope so. Hoe,_k: ney is one of a tiny group of people wriv_ define their generation. We all have 3 stake in his success.
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