Mine, In a Way

“The sunflower is mine, in a way.”

Vincent Van Gogh

 

Offering to Flora, Juan van der Hamne, 1627

 

The Sunflower. Engraving from Erasmus Francisci’s Ost- und West-Indischer wie auch Sinesischer Lust- und Stats-Garten in drey Haupt-Theile unterschieden.., 1668

 

Peacocks, Melchior d’ Hondecoeter, 1683

 

Small butterfly and sunflower, Ohara Koson, no date

 

Studio of Sir Kenelm Digby, Anthony van Dyck, c. 1630

 

Selbstporträt mit Sonnenblume (Self Portrait With a Sunflower), Anthony van Dyck, after 1633

 

Marquise Athenais de Montespan or Montespan en déshabillée, school of Pierre Mignard, c. 1670

 

Portrait of Elizabeth Claypole, Jacob Huysmans, 1680

 

Misses Wilson, James Sant, 1875

 

Bouquet of Sunflowers, Claude Monet, 1881

 

Tournesols, Claude Monet, 1881

 

Clytie, Evelyn De Morgan, 1887

 

Vase of Sunflowers, Henri Matisse, 1898

 

The Four Seasons (Summer), Alphons Mucha, 1898

 

Brita,a Cat and a Sandwich, Carl Larsson, 1898

 

Hide and Seek, Carl Larsson, c. 1900

 

Eighteen Years Old!, Carl Larsson, 1902

 

Farm Garden with Sunflowers, Gustave Klimt, 1905

 

Sonnenblume (Girasol), Gustav Klimt, 1907

 

Sunflowers, Piet Mondrian, 1907

 

Dying Sunflower, Piet Mondrian, c. 1908

 

Sonnenblume, Egon Schiele, 1909

 

Welke Sonnenblume, Egon Schiele, 1912

 

Welke Sonnenblumen, Egon Schiele, 1914

 

Sonnenblumen, Egon Schiele, 1916

 

Versunkene Landschaft, Paul Klee, 1918

 

Mature Sunflowers, Emil Nolde, 1932

 

Sunflowers, Sir Jacob Epstein, c. 1936

 

A Sunflower from Maggie, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1937

 

Girasoles (Sunflowers) Diego Rivera, 1943

 

Sunflowers at Choisel, Georges Braque, 1946

 

Composition with Sunflowers, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, 1949

 

Die Sonnenblumen und die (The Sunflowers and The City), Friedensreich Hundertwasser, 1949

 

Le Tournesol, Fernand Léger, 1953

 

Cover for International Textiles, René Gruau, 1955

 

Sunflowers for Jonathan, David Hockney, 1995

 

The Orders of the Night (Die Orden der Nacht), Anselm Kiefer, 1996

 

Untitled (Sunflowers), Glenn Goldberg, 1999

 

Hommage a van Gogh, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, c. 1998

 

Sunflower in Grey and Green no.1, Jimmy Wright, 2008

As Adam Early In The Morning

“…Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach,
Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,
Be not afraid of my body.”

Walt Whitman

 
 

Peter Schlesinger. Photo by David Hockney, 1970

We Two Boys Together Clinging

We Two Boys Together Clinging, David Hockney, 1961

 
 

“We two boys together clinging,
One the other never leaving,
Up and down the roads going—North and South excursions making,
Power enjoying—elbows stretching—fingers clutching,
Arm’d and fearless—eating, drinking, sleeping, loving,
No law less than ourselves owning—sailing, soldiering, thieving, threatening,
Misers, menials, priests alarming—air breathing, water drinking, on the turf or the sea-beach dancing,
Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness chasing,
Fulfilling our foray.”

Walt Whitman

Dachshunds Lovers

Queen Victoria

 

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh; Queen Elizabeth II. Photo by Terry O’Neill, 1992

 

English composer Benjamin Britten and “Clytie”.

In this photograph taken by Yousuf Karsh, Britten is shown holding a dachshund and looking towards the score from his opera Gloriana (1953) which was written for the coronation of Elizabeth II. According to Karsh “the dog demanded to become part of the picture”.

 

Yousuf Karsh and “Jacques”

 

Abraham Lincoln

 

John F. Kennedy, Lem Billings and Dunker, Den Haag, The Netherlands, 1937

 

Lee Radziwill and Andy Warhol with his dog, Archie. Photo by Ron Galella, Montauk, 1973

 

Andy Warhol and Archie

 

Lou Reed

 

Christa Päffgen a.k.a. Nico. Photo: Mark Shaw for Life Magazine

 

Adele and “Louie”, named after Louis Armstrong

 

Cole Porter

 

George Harrison

 

Vincente Minelli and Katharine Hepburn playing with George Cukor’s pet

 

Grace Coddington

 

Juliette Gréco. Photo by Robert Doisneau

 

Elizabeth Taylor

 

Clint Eastwood

 

Marlon Brando

 

Ginger Rogers

 

Marilyn Monroe

 

Carole Lombard

 

Joan Crawford

 

Brigitte Bardot

 

Liv Ullmann

 

 Brooke Shields

 

Jacques Cousteau, his wife and “Scaphandrier”

 

David Hockney with Stanley and Boodgie

 

Pablo Picasso and Lump. Photographer David Douglas Duncan published a book of Picasso’s pictures along his pet, which was titled A Dachshund’s Odyssey

 

The gardener and writer Christopher Lloyd at Great Dixter House, a 450-acre estate restored by Edwin Lutyens. Awarded in 1979 the Victoria Medal of Honour, the highest horticultural accolade, Lloyd was the best informed, liveliest and most innovative gardening writer of our times.

 

Within the Wall Garden of Great Dixter is a terrace, with a pebble mosaic of Christopher Lloyd’s two beloved dachshunds, Dahlia and Canna. The stones for Canna’s eye and nose were acquired from Derek Jarman’s rock-garden, at Prospect Cottage, in Dungeness.

Stanley and Boodgie

“From September 1993, I painted and drew my dogs. This took a certain amount of planning, since dogs are generally not interested in Art (I say generally only because I have now come across a singing dog). Food and love dominate their lives.”

“I make no apologies for the apparent subject matter. These two dear little creatures are my friends. They are intelligent, loving, comical, and often bored. They watch me work; I notice the warm shapes they make together, their sadness and their delights. And, being Hollywood dogs, they somehow seem to know that a picture is being made.”

David Hockney

 
 

David Hockney’s Dog Days, published by Thames & Hudson (2006)

 
 

David Hockney and his pet dachshunds Stanley and Boodgie photographed in front of some of the artist’s many artworks based on the dogs, c. 1994

 
 

Hockney and his muses at BMW Car Art, 1995

 
 

Sketches made in 1993

 
 

His subjects, Stanley and Boodgie, accompanied for over 10 years. They’re all getting on a bit. The dogs are about 70 in human years. Hockney is 60. He bought them both when they were puppies. ‘My neighbour has got a little dachshund and I fell in love with it. He said, “You’re very good with dogs, why don’t you have one?” But I used to travel so much. Then I thought, “I don’t really want to travel any more so if I get a dog it will stop me.” ‘

Stanley cost $300. Boodgie, who arrived a year or so later, was slightly pricier. ‘When the stock market crashed,’ Hockney recalls, ‘people said, “Did you ever make any investments?” I said, “Yes. I made an investment in the dogs. Now they’re worth a million dollars.” ‘

As a young man Hockney much admired Stanley Spencer, to the extent of imitating him by wearing a bowler hat and pushing a pram containing paints, but in fact, the dog is named after Stan Laurel. Boodgie is Boodgie because he looked like one. ‘When I got little Boodge he was very small,’ says Hockney. ‘I put a bell round him so I knew where he was.’

Graphic Art for the Olympic Games 1972

 
 

The desire to reach the general public was also, to a large extent, the goal of the Olympic Games that took place in Munich in 1972. It was the first time that such an event was transmitted worldwide by television and, thereby, tragically also the first time a terrorist attack was viewed globally. For the first time the overall design, created by Otl Aicher, used predominantly images instead of text. Nearly 30 international artists were commissioned by the Olympic organizers and the Bruckmann-Verlag to create editions of prints especially for the Olympic Games. The goal was to unite art and sports.

These posters were displayed all around the city of Munich and around the Olympic sites. Posters were hung in twos alongside posters designed by famous artists chosen to represent this Olympics such as David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Tom Wesselmann, Friedensriech Hundertwasser, Victor Vasarely, Serge Poliakoff, Allen Jones, and many others.

 
 

Pierre Soulages

 
 

Josef Albers

 
 

Eduardo Chillida

 
 

Serge Poliakoff

 
 

Friedensriech Hundertwasser

 
 

Oskar Kokoschka

 
 

Hans Hartung

 
 

Ronald Brooks Kitaj

 
 

Allen Jones

 
 

Charles Lapique

 
 

Tom Wesselmann

 
 

Victor Vasarely

Getting In and Out Of The Pool

A visit to California, where David Hockney subsequently lived for many years, inspired him to make a series of paintings of swimming pools in the comparatively new acrylic medium rendered in a highly realistic style using vibrant colours. The artist moved to Los Angeles in 1964, returned to London in 1968, and from 1973 to 1975 lived in Paris. He moved to Los Angeles in 1978, at first renting the canyon house he lived in and later bought the property and expanded it to include his studio.

 
 

Study for 1972 Munich Olympics Poster, David Hockney, 1970

 
 

David Hockney’s poster is great example of his graphic design work. Showing an athletic figure diving into a shimmering pool of crayon abstract shapes, the artwork is reminiscent of his painting, Peter Getting Out Of Nick’s Pool

 
 

Peter Getting Out Of Nick’s Pool, 1967

Hockney’s masterpiece of audacious desire, won the John Moores prize in the year homosexuality was decriminalized in The United Kingdom.

 
 

Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1971

The Biggest Splash

A Bigger Splash, David Hockney

 
 

A Bigger Splash depicts a swimming pool beside a modern house, disturbed by a large splash of water created by an unseen figure who has apparently just jumped in from a diving board. It was painted in California between April and June 1967, when David Hockney was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, United States. Jack Hazan‘s 1974 film A Bigger Splash, a fictionalized biopic concentrating on the breakup of Hockney’s relationship with Peter Schlesinger, was named after the painting.

 
 

Photograph by Richard Kolker, 2011

 
 

Hockney’s composition is based on a photograph of a swimming pool in a book and an earlier drawing by Hockney of Californian buildings. It was created with meticulous care, simplified, but enlarging his earlier paintings entitled A Little Splash (1966) and The Splash (1966). Both are held in private collections; the latter was sold at Sotheby’s for £2.6 million in 2006.

The Marquess of Dufferin and Ava bought the finished work from John Kasmin‘s gallery in 1968, and sold it to the Tate in 1981.

In a March 2009 interview for the Tate, to the question “Who jumped into the pool?” Hockney answers : “I don’t know actually. It was done from a photograph of a splash. That I haven’t taken, but that’s what it’s commenting on. The stillness of an image. (…) Most of the painting was spent on the splash and the splash lasts two seconds and the building is permanent there. That’s what it’s about actually. You have to look in at the details.”

 
 

Peter Schlesinger in Beverly Hills, date and photographer unknown

 

To watch the Jack Hazan’s A Bigger Splash movie trailer, please take a gander at The Genealogy of Style’s Facebook page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2sEkXKxQs8

Reciprocal Exchange

“It is always fascinating to see someone as remote as oneself working in the same field. I was intrigued to see him admiring things that I like from a completely different point of view. We could not be farther apart as human beings and yet I find myself completely at ease with him and stimulated by his enthusiasm. For he has this golden quality of being able to enjoy life”.

“He is never blasé, never takes anything for granted. Life is a delightful wonderland for him; much of the time he is wreathed in smiles. He laughs aloud at television and radio. He is the best possible audience, though by no means simple. He is sophisticated in that he has complete purity. There is nothing pretentious about him; he never says anything he does not mean. In the world of art intrigue he is a complete natural”.

Cecil Beaton

 
 

David Hockney photographed by Cecil Beaton, March 1965

 
 

Portraits of David Hockney by Cecil Beaton, 1969

 
 

David Hockney at Reddish House, Cecil Beaton, 1970

 
 

In 1969, David Hockney was asked by Vogue to do a drawing of Cecil Beaton, David went to stay with Cecil for three days at Reddish

 
 

“To begin with I was utterly appalled, having remained in some romantic but extremely uncomfortable pose for a great deal too long, when I saw an outline in Indian ink of a bloated, squat, beefy businessman. He laughed. No it wasn’t very good, and he embarked upon another which turned out to be just as bad”

“About eight horrors were perpetrated while the days advanced until, finally, something rather good emerged”.

Cecil Beaton

 
 

Portraits of Cecil Beaton by David Hockney

Complementing Each Other

David Hockney and Cecil Beaton at Reddish House. Photo by Peter Schlesinger

 
 

“I met David Hockney in 1966, at a University of California summer school where he was my drawing professor. I was 18 and he was a decade my senior. We fell in love and moved to London when I was 20. Before we left California, my father, who was into photography, gave me my first camera.

In this shot, taken in 1970, Cecil Beaton was having a break after taking pictures of David and me in the conservatory of his house in Wiltshire. He and David were telling jokes and bantering as I took their photo. David had become friends with Cecil when Cecil bought one of his very early paintings, but I got to know him as well. He was gossipy, bitchy and very witty – fun to be around but also a huge snob. As a little boy from California, I didn’t get a lot of his attention: as far as Cecil was concerned, if you were working class, you had to be famous.

We went to stay at Cecil’s quite regularly. People would come for dinner, or we would just read and walk in the garden. Cecil and I never discussed photography, but he did let me look through his albums, which dated back to the 1930s. He didn’t like being interrogated about them though; if I asked him about Greta Garbo [with whom he is said to have had an affair], he went completely silent.

There were a lot of parties back in those days. We were always having a good time. We used to dress up as dandies. Now, people talk of the huge significance of that era, but at the time it’s just your life. You don’t think of it in historical terms. Anyway, we thought the 1930s were much more glamorous; we loved old movies and art deco. Cecil’s generation, meanwhile, preferred the Edwardian period, so he dressed that way.

I like the way their poses contrast – they’re doing different things yet they somehow complement each other. It was accidental: I just happened to click at that millisecond and catch a fleeting rather joyous moment. Looking back today, I feel lucky to have known such wonderful people.”

Peter Schlesinger

Before Time Altered Them

Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, David Hockney, 1968

 
 

Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, David Hockney, 1976

 
 

“…The love they felt wasn’t, of course, what it once had been;
the attraction between them had gradually diminished,
the attraction had diminished a great deal.
But to be separated, that wasn’t what they themselves wanted.
It was circumstances. Or maybe Fate
appeared as an artist and parted them now,
before their feeling died out completely, before Time altered them:
the one seeming to remain for the other always what he was,
the exquisite young man of twenty-four.”

Constantine P. Cavafy

But the Wise Perceive Things about to Happen

“For the gods perceive future things,
ordinary people things in the present, but
the wise perceive things about to happen.”

Philostratos

Life of Apollonios of Tyana

 

“Ordinary people know what’s happening now,
the gods know future things
because they alone are totally enlightened.
Of what’s to come the wise perceive
things about to happen.

Sometimes during moments of intense study
their hearing’s troubled: the hidden sound
of things approaching reaches them,
and they listen reverently, while in the street outside
the people hear nothing whatsoever.”

Constantine P. Cavafy

 
 

Portraits of Cavafy by David Hockney, 1966

In Despair

Illustration by David Hockney

 
 

“He lost him completely. And he now tries to find
his lips in the lips of each new lover,
he tries in the union with each new lover
to convince himself that it’s the same young man,
that it’s to him he gives himself.
He lost him completely, as though he never existed.
He wanted, his lover said, to save himself
from the tainted, unhealthy form of sexual pleasure,
the tainted, shameful form of sexual pleasure.
There was still time, he said, to save himself.
He lost him completely, as though he never existed.
Through fantasy, through hallucination,
he tries to find his lips in the lips of other young men,
he longs to feel his kind of love once more.”

Constantine P. Cavafy

In an Old Book

Illustration by David Hockney

 
 

“Forgotten between the leaves of an old book—
almost a hundred years old—
I found an unsigned watercolor.
It must have been the work of a powerful artist.
Its title: “Representation of Love.”
“…love of extreme sensualists” would have been more to the point.
Because it became clear as you looked at the work
(it was easy to see what the artist had in mind)
that the young man in the painting
was not designated for those
who love in ways that are more or less healthy,
inside the bounds of what is clearly permissible—
with his deep chestnut eyes,
the rare beauty of his face,
the beauty of anomalous charm,
with those ideal lips that bring
sensual delight to the body loved,
those ideal limbs shaped for beds
that common morality calls shameless.”

Constantine P. Kavafy

In the Boring Village

 Illustration by David Hockney

 
 

“In the boring village where he works—
clerk in a textile shop, very young—
and where he’s waiting out the two or three months ahead,
another two or three months until business falls off
so he can leave for the city and plunge headlong
into its action, its entertainment;
in the boring village where he’s waiting out the time—
he goes to bed tonight full of sexual longing,
all his youth on fire with the body’s passion,
his lovely youth given over to a fine intensity.
And in his sleep pleasure comes to him;
in his sleep he sees and has the figure, the flesh he longed for…”

Constantine P. Kavafy