Lust for life | 3 December 2011

Seduced by the hayseed hair and the Yorkshire accent it’s tempting to see the young David Hockney as the Freddie Flintoff of the painting world: lovable, simple, brilliant, undoubtedly a hero, and delightfully free of angst. In this enjoyable book, which sets out to to ‘conjure up the man he is and in doing so to put his paintings and drawings in the context of his extraordinary life’, Christopher Simon Sykes provides us, naturally, with a more complex story. Hockney is a hero if course — not least to homosexuals, for blazing a stylish and courageous trail to emancipation in the 1960s, and more recently to beleaguered smokers in his stand against politically correct bullying. And he shares with Flintoff that irresistible suggestion of innocence combined with strength —  like a figure out of one of the fairytales that Hockney so memorably illustrated.

Sykes conjures up the settings in which the young artist’s originality, his prodigious appetite for work, friendship and life in general, was played out: Bradford in the Fifties (where heraldry was still on the art- school syllabus), and the sleezy and glamorous circles in London, California, and Paris between which Hockney divided his time in the Sixties.

We see Hockney the conscientious objector and militant vegetarian (his first serious paintings inspired by vegetarianism), Aldermarston-marcher and Cliff Richard fan, who modelled his appearance, for a time, on Stanley Spencer; we see him taking the waters at Vichy and delighting in promiscuous sex in LA; breakfasting alone at the Café de Flore as he takes refuge in Paris from a broken heart; staying with the film-director Tony Richardson at Le Nid de Duc; taken by John Pope-Hennessy, the Director of the V&A, to visit Harold Acton at La Pietra.

We have Hockney the clown, the rebel and the Boy Scout; the music-lover, the patient friend, the thoughtful and devoted son.