June 18, 2026 : Wondercab Mini (115A)
June 18, 2020
WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse
WELCOME
Recalling David Hockney, another of the greatest artists of the past century, and a frequent visitor to our Cabinet, who died a week ago in London, age 88.
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The Main Event
DAVID HOCKNEY (1937-2026)
As you will have doubtless heard by now, my longtime friend and subject David Hockney died a week ago last Thursday, at the age of 88. Followers of this Cabinet will have savored his many appearances over our past issues, as for instance in Issue 30 when we plumbed the uncanny convergence of his Mulholland Drive painting with a similarly pitched Aboriginal Australian masterpiece; or Issue 37A, when he blew up Bruegel’s The Tower of Babel into a mammoth two-story-high reproduction; or Issue 46 when he was poolside with the Oakes Twins, Richard Feynman and a bug; or Issue 47, on the occasion of the record-setting auction of his Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures); or Issues 93 and 93A when we sampled our friends the Russian pianists Pawel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy’s concert in David’s honor at the time of his big show in Paris; and finally, just a few issues back, in 102A, when we backlit his exquisite Normandy nighttime moonscapes, currently on view incidentally at the Pace Gallery in New York.
As it happens, I was in London last week and hoping to visit with David that Wednesday (I had great good news for him, fresh discoveries by way of our other pal Benjamin Binstock regarding one of his favorite pieces, Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, insights I felt sure he would savor [I could almost hear his smile breaking])—only to be told that, alas, he was in medical quarantine and fading, unable to entertain visitors.
Such that I wasn’t especially surprised to hear of his passing the next morning, June 11—nor frankly was I all that saddened. If anything, as I kept telling the floodtide of sweet correspondents who kept showering me their heartfelt condolences across the days ahead, I was gladdened at the splendor of a life well-lived and the magnificence of a legacy well-left, and then, too, at the impish delight David must have taken in having managed to extend his six-plus decades of defiant smoking almost to the very end, respiratory challenges be damned.
Funny about the smoking: over his last several decades his mounting annoyance at the way smoking was being challenged on all sides got to be like an intellectual screen saver with him: when he wasn’t focusing on work or declaiming on anything else, he’d revert to his endlessly harrumphing plaints about the persecution of smokers. It got so those around him almost succeeded in ignoring their mounting intensity. I remember one time, about twenty years ago, when my daughter Sara and I went to visit him at his studios in Bridlington, England (to which he’d repaired when anti-smoking restrictions in LA had become too onerous): at one point he took us and several members of his crew out for lunch at a Chinese place, and while we were waiting for the waitress, he resumed his rants: “People keep talking about all the human rights violations in Sudan and Darfur, but what about the rights of smokers in their own countries?” he demanded. At which point Sara intervened, exasperated, “David, that’s insane!” And the rest of us looked up at each other sheepishly at the way we’d somehow allowed things get this out of hand. David puffed away and smiled at Sara indulgently (glad, I think, that somebody at least was still listening).
Another time, as you will presently see in the A-V Room below, when the Getty asked me to curate an 80th birthday commemoration for David, the whole thing was almost thrown into terminal chaos when David insisted on the fact that he would not even go on stage, the standing-room-only audience notwithstanding, if he were not allowed to smoke. A last-minute compromise, as you will see, was thankfully achieved.
And then just a few months back, the last time I in fact managed to visit with David, he was merrily smoking away, the oxygen tanks and full-time nurse hovering about likewise notwithstanding. And I managed to record this last snap:
David happily intent on whatever point he was making, the stubbed-out butts accumulating in a Hockney show souvenir ashtray. Talk about ashes to ashes. Note the button:
And for “bossiness,” of course, read everyone-telling-him-and-others-to-stop-smoking. “SOON,” he explained to me, “because just plain ‘END BOSSINESS’ would itself have been too bossy.” But, I countered, was “soon” going to be soon enough? “Yeah,” he replied, “maybe I should have had it read ‘SOONER.’”
Well, it’s a moot point now, but the gleam persists and will no doubt keep illuming and blithing us for decades into the future.
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Ren’s New York Times Appreciation
Anyway, the Times asked me to contribute a piece on David and his lifework which appeared online on June 13, and then in the paper itself on June 16, 2026. And here is a slightly expanded version of the thoughts I offered:
I first got to know David Hockney in 1982—I now realize just about the very midpoint of his life (he’d been born in 1937)—and, as would become clear in the years immediately thereafter, a perhaps decisive fulcrum moment in his career.
I mean, of course I’d known of him for many years before that, followed (granted, at some distance and remove) his explosively successful debut, right out of art school in the London of the late fifties and early sixties (difficult perhaps nowadays to credit the sheer freshness and elan with which he ever so heedless/matter-of-factly expressed his gay inclinations, still entirely illegal in Britain at the time, only a few years after Alan Turing had been chemically castrated for far less),
and then his wordly peregrinations, culminating in his arrival in a Los Angeles he quickly helped we longtime residents to start seeing again, as if for the first time—the pools, the palms, the sprinklers, the building facades, the sky, and the light!
He was regularly showing up in the social pages of the papers, a veritable flâneur, it seemed, his love life (achingly chronicled in his drawings and paintings) an object of public fascination. I imagined I knew him, though almost all of my preconceptions were quickly upended the moment we actually met.
For starters, the facade of easygoing dandyism. I somehow had grown to imagine him as almost always out partying or else lollygagging on extended vacations. On the contrary, I grew to realize, he was one of the hardest nose-to-the-grindstone art workers I’d ever encountered.
All those images of him lazing about (St. Tropez, China, Malibu): He was working the entire while, prolifically generating the very images that promoted the illusion. Think for instance of Le Parc des Sources, Vichy (1970) that magnificent painting of two seated friends gazing out into a pair of receding tree lines in a French spa, flanked by a third empty chair (which would have been his, except he’d gotten up to ever so painstakingly record the scene).
As for the party-boy image, he insisted to me that he really didn’t go out that much, didn’t like to, it’s just that whenever he did, the paparazzi descended and then kept recycling images of the same outing. He much preferred to stay home and read—and indeed, he was a voracious self-improver, burrowing into an ever-widening private library to make up for the relative narrowness of his art school education and always eager to declaim on his latest discoveries.
The early ’80s signaled a distinct shift. The Vichy painting and the whole series of similarly vivid double-portrait masterpieces that had famously characterized his production during the previous decade (Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott, Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell and their Cat Percy) had generally been locked into a receding one-point perspective.
He’d often used photographs as study tools in those efforts, snaps as he called them, but he had increasingly grown to suspect the vantage afforded by their constricting one-point vise.
“Photography is okay,” he said to me that first day in 1982, as he held in his hand a veritable deck of such snaps, gazing over the intricate collage he was in the midst of fashioning, “if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops, for a split second.” And indeed the collages he was working on, at a truly ferocious clip (he’d had me up to his studio to see if I’d be interested in writing the text for a forthcoming deluxe tabletop book of same, a project I then took on, the first of several such collaborations), though it deployed literally tens of thousands of photos, did so in an effort to call into question the very claim of such monocular vantages (“the optical look” as he took to calling it) to define reality, because as he went on with that cyclops analogy, “that’s not what the world is actually like—it’s simply not true to life.”
His progressive separation from the hegemony of the optical had been signaled just a few years before that, first in his depiction of a bedlam asylum in his 1975 staging of Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress as an array of solitary prison cells receding in one point perspective,
and then, in 1980, in his wall-length masterpiece Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio, a sweeping portrayal of the ridgetop road astride which he’d recently purchased an adjacent home and studio, and of the entire city over which it straddled.
In “Mulholland Drive,” drive was a verb as Hockney invited his viewer on a ride across a moving focus, the succession of vantages afforded by each new curve successively laid out and zoomed past. If Hockney in California was a ferocious autodidact, he put the auto in that passion, and as important as the boys and the pools and the light were to him, in some ways the most important thing was becoming the driving, the sheer bliss of not standing still.
“Yes,” he concurred enthusiastically a few months ago when I offered up that observation in person, on a late-life visit to his London studio, “my very first week in L.A., I took driving lessons, took the driving test, got a driving license and bought a car!”
That moving focus began consuming him in all sorts of ways—in a fresh fascination with the implicate order physics of David Bohm and George Rowley’s explication of the endlessly shifting perspective across the unfurling of Chinese scroll paintings, and on and on, presently even the celebration of reverse perspective in the work Pavel Florensky, a Russian orthodox monk martyred by Stalin (each new body of work entailing its own fresh mentor—all the while probing deeper and deeper into the work of the cubists, especially Picasso, whose ongoing project he insisted he was still pursuing.)
An ever more pronounced liberation from the monocular could be seen across the work leading out from the photocollages. Just sense the transition from that 1970s double painting of his dear friends Isherwood and Bachardy through the Polaroid collage of them a few years later, and on through the subsequent painting of the trip to their home a few years after that.
And it was also true of “The Great Wall,” the mammoth undertaking upon which he launched himself a few years after that, initially under thrall to Ingres but then Caravaggio and eventually even Van Eyck, tracing the history of the rise and fall of the hegemony of the optical across six centuries Western painting from 1350 to 1900, which he laid out along all the two-story-high walls of his studio
(installing a high quality color photocopier in the middle of the space and rifling through his extensive art book library, plastering the surrounding walls with images of paintings, Northern Europe above and Southern Europe below in a vast chronological procession, and there was no doubt about it, something happened in the decade to either side of 1430, first in Flanders and then in Florence, “it was as if Europe had suddenly put on its glasses,” and opticality suddenly became the measure of the real—but how? Answering that question grew into a years-long project and the publication of his controversial tome Secret Knowledge (2001) in which he asserted (and would insist proved) that Western artists had been using optical aids—curved mirrors and projecting lenses—long before most scholars had imagined, a conviction that has in the meantime gradually taken on more and more adherents.
His obsession with moving focus was increasingly consuming his opera stagings as well. His excellent technical assistants rigged up a mini theater atop a table in his studio, complete with miniature lights, for his work on Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, providing him with a dashboard of light controls, which he then proceeded to “drive around,” as it were, for any visiting guests—
a delight that he presently flipped into a series of actual drives, deploying the latest in audio tape-players in his car trunk. He’d take guests at his Malibu cabin out into the surrounding Santa Monica mountains, keeping precise time through a succession of perfectly apt snippets of classical pieces (Sousa, Mozart, Schubert),
and then cresting the final ridge and heading back toward the sea into which the sun was setting at that very moment (Wagner!). Moving focus, indeed.
In painterly terms, the obsession perhaps culminated with 1998’s Garrowby Hill, a heartrending painting he made, after a season of driving back and forth from his Yorkshire base in England to visit his dear boyhood friend Jonathan Silver, who a few years earlier had bought an abandoned old textile mill in their hometown of Bradford to refashion into a Hockney exhibition space, and who was now dying of cancer in a York hospital, with Hockney bringing him fresh paintings on each outing, right up until he died, after which—back in LA—David launched into a final painting in the series of the view from the top of a ridge he’d had to drive over each fresh time, the view ahead,
with York Minster brooding there in the distance, all the fields splayed out in reverse perspective, and it was somehow clear that you were coming over that hill (over-coming it, as it were) in a car whose back wheels were on one side of the summit and front wheels already on the other. Instead of your eyes going for a drive as in Mulholland Drive, you were now in the car, surging, a moving focus in an utterly moving moment, into the future.
But mortality—the cessation of movement—had already been a contrapuntal theme in Hockney’s work for some time. That period around 1982 also constituted the very years of the horrendous onslaught of AIDS. Hockney sometimes had the reputation of a bon-vivant, a lightweight, not an entirely serious person. He was even criticized at the time for not confronting AIDS directly in his work. Instead, people claimed, good lord, he’d taken to painting his dogs!
But as with his first paintings, he wasn’t talking through a bullhorn: the facts of the situation simply saturated the work. Indeed, his was a continual assertion of life against death, and more specifically love against oblivion. Those dachshunds, look at them: At a moment he could no longer heedlessly paint sleeping or cuddling naked young men, he took to portraying his beloved pooches in the very same sorts of languorous poses.
Several of the people in those photocollages were, in fact, dying of AIDs as he snapped their final multiple vantages. And the Liebestod in Tristan, what else did people think David was wrestling with?
His was a deeply profound witness, an arcing sorrow (albeit traced with a light touch), a refusal to be crushed by death, and a continual insistence on remaining true to life (the title I eventually gave my own collection of 25 years of conversations with him).
I am thinking of a little canvas he painted one evening during those worst plague years, through the sea-facing window of his Malibu outpost: a dainty porcelain tea-setting delicately ranged against the roiling, boiling storm-waves surging just beyond. Like his fellow English master W.H. Auden in the late poem “Thank You, Fog,” Hockney was a profound aficionado of the cozy, only for him, in this image, coziness was an assertion, an achievement, sustained up against the chaos.
Around the same time, Carl Sagan, another of his virtual mentors, died, and Hockney produced a loving tribute, a drawing of a tombstone with Sagan’s name engraved atop under which he’d slotted the typescript of a particularly prized passage from Sagan’s writings. He made copies of the image and sent them out to friends, and in the one he sent me he signed off with one of his frequent exhortations.
Those who insisted on viewing David through the gossipy rubric of his love life failed to take in the power and grace of that simple, overarching (albeit hard-won) assertion:
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A-V ROOM
David Hockney at Eighty:
A Celebration at the Getty in LA
August 8, 2017
And finally, the video of an event I was happy to curate for the Getty Museum almost a decade ago on the occasion of David’s eightieth year. The panel included Tacita Dean, the British film, video and optical artist, who had recently completed a fifteen-minute Portrait of David Hockney which was shown at the event though alas cut out of this video record (the film included copious footage of David smoking—and if anyone has a link to the video itself, please do include it in the Comments below); friend of the Cabinet Ramiro Gomez, a young Latino artist whose work existed in profound dialog with David’s (see Gomez’s appearance in our Issue number 4); Charles Falco, the optical scientist who collaborated with David on the deep research behind their contention that Old Masters themselves deployed all manner of optical devices from as far back as Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece in 1430! And then, as it were, the aforementioned Russian Orthodox monk Pavel Florensky, who was at the time David’s latest intellectual lodestar, and because the good monk for various reasons could not attend himself, a surprise guest who could (following a brief crisis of his own) did. Enjoy.
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See you next week!
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I loved True to Life . . . picked it up again this week . . . and these delicious fragments. "the gleam persists." Thank you so much for your insights and context in both the personal and painterly lines.
Sorry to hear your friend passed away 🙏 o wasn't a fan of his work - but thsnkyou for sharing