Driving around Los Angeles, David Hockney tells documentary filmmaker Bruno Wollheim that all gay men like California because people there are generally fit and wear fewer or tighter clothes. (And you, innocent lamb, thought he moved there for the light.) The director adds that those famous nude pool pictures gave the false impression that David lived some brilliantly debauched bacchanal, but in fact it was only the boys who partied all night; David missed out and was up early painting, while they napped in the early sun. Either way, you won't see any poolside performances because Hockney relocates back to his birthplace. There, he begins painting en plein air landscapes, giving the director a three-year shoot in shifty Yorkshire weather and a very different film than he envisioned. The canvases grow monumental but the movie stays a crisp 60 minutes. It makes clear that Hockney's handsome French assistant is also his boyfriend of more than fifteen years, but Jean-Pierre isn't interviewed. Of course the great joy is Hockney himself, who manages to be just as watchable when he's working silently as when he's holding forth about photography being dead and, later, back again. Caught in contradicting himself he simply tells the camera, "Never believe what an artist says." As he's made evident for fifty years, the truth is in seeing.
Friday night's one-time screening at Columbia's Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America was hosted by Rick Whitaker, author of The First Time I Met Frank O'Hara: Reading Gay American Writers and Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling.
Hockney fans unable to get to London before April 9 for the Royal Academy's retrospective can console themselves with the book David Hockney: A Bigger Picture. Three weeks from now is the American release of Christopher Simon Sykes' David Hockney: The Biography
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