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Hockney's poolside muse A biography captures the hedonism, sunshine and high-flying social circles that inspired the artist in 1960s California. By Christian House hen David Hockney died earlier this year, tributes praised the Bradford-born painter for achieving that rare art-world hat-trick: he was admired by critics, his works sold for millions and the public adored him. Hockney’s life and work were an endearing collage of colourful stories and artistic mediums. So it is something of a mystery that no new official bio- graphy is being prepared (although at the end of July it was announced that Paul Morley’s David Hockney: An Artist for Life would come out later this year). But we do have The Beverly Hills Housewife by British art historian and novelist James Cahill, a curio that is part forensic pictorial analysis, part charac- ter study of the artist and one of his sit- ters. Cahill focuses on Hockney's friend- ship with Betty Freeman, one of his Los Angeles patrons, a rather unhappy wife of a businessman who would — post- divorce — become a champion of avant- garde classical music. In the mid-1960s, having recently arrived in California from Britain, Hockney painted a striking portrait of Freeman titled “Beverly Hills House- wife” (1966-67), a monumental work executed across two panels that pictured Freeman on the terrace of her modernist home near Sunset Boule- ward. It is a strange composition; less a formal portrait than a still from a col- ourised film noir, a tableau of cocktail hour melancholy. Cahill decodes it in (possibly too much) detail. In the paint- ing, Freeman is dressed in a pink dress, her features unreadable as she looks into the middle distance. Behind her are multiple layers and fragments of sliding doors, windows and rooms, the whole scene punctuated with surreal bour- geois decorations of the period, includ- ing a stuffed antelope head and a Le Corbusier recliner. The subtitle to Cahill’s book — Hock- ney’s Californian Muse and the World Beyond the Pool — hints at its two main strengths: the whimsical, likeable char- acter of the woman in the picture and the hedonistic skinny-dipping West Coast milieu into which Hockney had jumped. The atmosphere is catnip to Cahill: he is the author of two well- received novels Tiepolo Blue (2022) and The Violet Hour (2025) that alsa swelter in the hothouse atmosphere of ‘homosexual artists and their cliques. Cahill delivers a lively depiction of Freeman. Like Hockney, she was not a native Angeleno. Born in Chicago in 1921 into a family of industrialists, she married first, sensibly, to Stanley Freeman, a businessman who liked big-game hunting (hence the taxi- dermy) and secondly, for love, to the Italian artist Franco Assetto. She had originally wanted to be a concert pianist, but later pivoted her musical interests into commissioning contemporary figures such as Philip Glass and John Cage, a scene that she also chronicled in her photography. Freeman's home — where Hockney's painting remained on the living room wall until her death in 2009 — became a salon for experimental recitals. One afternoon, “there was this event which consisted of just one note going on and Above: ‘Beverly Hills Housewife’ by David Hockney (1966-67) Below left: Hockney with Betty Freeman in 1987 Estate of David Hockney Photo Richard Schmidt, UC San Diego Librasy The Bevery Hills Housewife Warne Gans ts se ema The Beverly Hills Housewife: Hockney's Californian Muse and the World Beyond the Pool by James Cahill Thames & Hudson £25/$36.95 271 pages on and on for hours and hours and peo- ple just sat there and didn’t really know whatto do,” recalled Hockney. Cahill also captures a sense of a city in flux. Expanding rapidly, both geograph- ically and in population, Los Angeles allowed Hoclkmey to reinvent himself — or rather embrace his true self. His freshly peroxided hair didn't look out of place and he didn’t have to hide his first great love affair, with the young art stu- dent Peter Schlesinger. It was an unfinished place full of potential. “When Iwas there, they were still finishing up some of the big free- ways,” he recalled. “Los Angeles could havea Piranesi, so herelam.” However, the central premise of the book, that there was a deep bond between Hockney and Freeman and that the Beverly Hills painting provides The book’s main strengths lie in the character of Betty Freeman and the skinny- dipping milieu into which Hockney had jumped a window to their relationship, is prob- lematic. In an art world where everyone isa “friend” — and few connections are as ambiguous as that between artist and collector — the depth of feeling between the two remains vague. It appears from the book's endnotes that Cahill didn’t ever speak with Free- ‘man or Hockney. The painter and his “muse” were clearly fond of one another — they maintained contact for decades and Hockney created other lesser por- traits of Freeman — but from the letters and interviews quoted here there is insufficient evidence to back up Cahill's claim that “for Hockney, Freeman was an object of fascination.” One imagines that future biographers would tell us more, While openly flam- boyant and delightfully opinionated, Hockney was, at least in some areas, enigmatic to the end. This book suc- ceeds in telling a different story, how- ever, one of a singular woman and her sunny city.
- بلد النشر
- المملكة المتحدة
- تصنيف الموضوع
- اقتصادية
- اللغة
- الانجليزية
- رقم الصفحة
- 9
- رقم العدد
- 15082026