Hockney As He Was, Or Seems To Be

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1. Less than a week after David Hockney dies, I am watching him answer questions on the BBC in 1977 on YouTube. My kitten Pliny is sitting next to me on a kantha sprawled on the floor. She has just been spayed. She is high on anesthesia and painkillers and her pupils are the size of saucers.

2. Hockney says he doesn’t just paint things “as they are”—that the whole idea of painting things as they are is an illusion anyway, an illusion of painting as craft. He grins, a boyish grin though he is pushing forty. He tells the interviewer, with a twinkle in his eye, that he dyed his hair bleach blonde because the Clairol ads said “blondes have more fun.” If true, this would, ironically, be an instance of things depicted exactly as they were.

3. Pliny the Elder Who Is Not the Kitten, but the kitten’s namesake, spends many chapters depicting things exactly as he thinks they are. He doesn’t think painting does this either though—rather that it aspires to, but has only almost succeeded as a technology in doing this. He devotes book XXXV of the Natural History to painting. It is from Pliny we get the anecdote of Zeuxis (XXXV.67), who painted grapes so convincingly that birds tried to peck them. Zeuxis then requested a curtain to cover and protect his painting. A curtain appeared and he was briefly mollified, but it turns out that the curtain was itself a hyper-realistic painting by another artist called Parrhasius, who had in turn deceived Zeuxis as Zeuxis deceived the birds. Zeuxis yielded, in turn, to him, the position of supreme realist painter of the time.

4. Pliny the kitten, is Gaia Plinia Secunda, rather than Gaius Plinius Secundus. This is because three hours after she was adopted, the staff of the shelter called to say I had accidentally gotten a girl, and to check if I wanted to keep the kitten. The kitten was purring on my chest. The kitten was perfect. I wanted to keep the kitten. Anyway, she herself was not exactly as she appeared to be, though calicos are 99% female genetically, and I probably should have known. Calicos mostly genetically originate in Egypt, so a version of this Pliny certainly could have existed in her namesake’s world, but the Romans of that period were not fond of cats as pets.

5. Hockney wasn’t terribly fond of cats either. He mostly paints little wiener dogs, his personal pets, in loving and exact strokes. There is one white cat that looks a bit like Pliny in his portrait, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, painted in Notting Hill in 1971.

6. Actually, the cat probably isn’t named Percy. It’s probably the couple’s other cat, Blanche. In the Guardian, when asked about this, Hockney says:

“When she told me that, I told her, well, shut up, because Mr and Mrs Clark and Blanche doesn’t sound as good as Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy,” Hockney told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday. “And it was my title, not hers, anyway.”

7. Pliny the Elder The Not Kitten complains early in book XXXV of the Natural History that portraits no longer represent the likeness of their subjects anymore, but that of their money. 

8. Hockney’s early portraits don’t represent the subjects’ money per se, but they are often monied subjects—though later series make a point of varied ones. He often borrows a technique for his portraiture from Piero Della Francesca, whom he admires. The spaces of the early Hockney portraits depict the subjects as much as the human forms. The homes of wealthy Californians stand in for their marital status, their personalities, their relations to the world. Della Francesca does this with Christ, with the wide terracotta tiled floor and oddly distant portico of the Flagellation. 

9. Hockney talks so much about himself it makes him hard to write about. About Piero Della Francesco, we have comparatively little, but there is a series of microhistories written from documentation by the historian Carlo Ginzburg, who also happened to die this week. It’s like the whole intellectual coating of the past midcentury is sloughing off at once, the last scarred remnants of a flayed skin, a keloid; a callus. The red new, angry part underneath is suddenly visible and raw to the touch, makes you wince as it catches the air. 

10. There are ten red Loebs of Pliny the Elder, one of the largest intact corpora to come out of the ancient world. I bought them all soon after I brought home the kitten. She knocks them off the high shelf where they live with all my dead pointe shoes. When I brought her home, she weighed a little under two pounds, or about as much as two of the smaller volumes of her namesake. She seemed so fragile. I was scared I would crush in her my sleep with my body.

11. Another annoying thing about Hockney quotes is that they are very popular and often bad. One such quote—“remember you can not look at the sun or death for very long”—became a billboard, and then part of an immersive digital exhibition in his own decorative handwriting. Maybe Hockney, like most everybody, got a bit soft when he was older, like an overripe tangerine. Pliny the Elder, who infamously ran into a volcano, is the exception to this rule. He kept his bite until the end under blood-orange red skies. Pliny the Kitten is feisty too. She has a mark shaped like a volcano on her white nose, next to her left eye. 

12.  You can look at the sun for a really long time when you’re under water in a swimming pool, like a Hockney pool, the ones he was famous for in his paintings and lithographs. You can look at death forever too. Or even just the Resurrection of Piero Della Francesca, which even though it’s a resurrection and not the Crucifixion, has a bit of blood dripping from Christ’s side wound just to remind you that every callus was a blister, and every keloid was once a cut. Hockney recounts doing just this as a child, looking at a print of this specific painting in a book for hours, transfixed. The bodies of the sleeping disciples at the foot of the tomb all look like Hockney bodies, almost sculptural, and they’re wearing Hockney’s greens like pesticide LA sprinkler lawns, and oranges, like roof tiles in Brentwood or the Palisades. Hockey’s youth was right after the end of the Second World War. Britain still rationed sugar and bananas. Unlike California, which seems in the 1960s and ’70s golden and untouchable in its perpetual summer, death always touches Piero, and probably the child, turning the page. Every Renaissance cycle of Christ’s life is to some extent a catalogue of the ways in which he was mortally wounded.

13. When I brought Pliny the Kitten home, I started reading her the second book of the Natural History, which covers cosmology. Pliny the Elder Who Is Not The Kitten didn’t know that the stars are dead suns of course, but the 1 lb 8 oz kitten and I stared at death and suns forever together. For the record: Pliny the Elder Who Is Not A Kitten thinks the universe is orbital bodies, but geocentric. Pliny the Elder Who Is A Kitten probably thinks the universe revolves around our Brooklyn one bedroom, with a yellow velvet sofa that looks like an element from a Hockney. She likes to stretch her body against the glass of the window. 

14. It is a little unfair to Hockney to be hard on the iPad painting or the digital immersive exhibition that produced that billboard quote. Hockney had an interest in reproductive technologies his entire life; he researched Renaissance painters’ optical methods and he also made fax machine sketches, for instance. Hockney thinks about space as a methodological tool in the California paintings. In American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman) (1968), painted in Los Angeles, the gridded courtyard tiles approaching the glass-faced box of the low-slung house seem modelled on the use of perspective in Piero’s Flagellation. The collectors and a few select sculptures are outside (a Turnbull and a totem pole), and immediate to the viewer. Between the two figures and the foreground objects, is a Henry Moore sculpture in the background. This sculpture is actually a dark, dun grey, but here Hockney renders it turquoise, as if it has oxidized and time in the perspectival distance runs on an entirely different schedule. Everyone in the painting is dead now, but when you look at it, it is unclear what is being collected and who the collectors are; they become objects in the foreground too. The painting was itself collected by the Art Institute of Chicago. You can see them all standing there deathless, and you in the cool air conditioning of the marble gallery, as casually as a mostly-white kitten stretching her body against the sun-warmed glass of the window.

15. It is this perspective in Piero’s Flagellation that Carlo Ginzburg pins down as part of the painting’s uncanny power in his essays on it; the two planes of three conversing people who could be contemporary portraits, and Christ, being flagellated in the distance, are divided by ontology as much as space. Martyrdom and suffering exist in a separate plane. I return to Carlo Ginzburg’s recent death too. I think of the act of writing history in and of the twentieth century, its central moral problem of fascism and then what to do with the aftermath. There are two cleaved planes of the war in the portico, and post-war in the foreground, the sculpture court and the swimming pools, the new sprawl of construction in the suburbs of America, and the hills outside LA. This included, as a response, the renewal of a careful practice of history and historiography, for which Ginzburg was known. Like Pliny the Elder, he gave significant weight to ordinary things and people, in all their quotidian depth. Now that Hockney’s dead, and Ginzburg, whose mode of history reshaped it to value otherwise small lives to which it was indifferent, it feels like something big is shifting. San Andreas Fault. Pompeii. Polycrisis. A Bigger, Bigger, Bigger Splash.

16. It’s also AIDS. I also think of Isherwood, who Hockney painted in California, and Auden, both who went to Hollywood for mostly queer reasons. I’m in the first generation of queer people who didn’t watch their friends die. AIDS is a chronic and manageable condition now. When Hockney painted Peter Schlesinger’s seemly back half out of a swimming pool in 1967, homosexuality technically wasn’t even legal. In 2026, if a cat tests positive for feline leukemia, one of the treatments is AZT, which was first a frontline trial-only thing in the early ’90s. People lived and died by who got in those trials, but the side effects were also brutal. They still are.

17. I thought about the side effects of AZT a lot one particular weekend when the kitten got a blood test with low neutrophils, a leading indicator for feline leukemia. Kittens with feline leukemia often die within a year. I read about every possible study of the newer anti-retrovirals. I read about cat blood pathology testing, nucleic irregularities and left shift. When you love someone, a kitten or an historian or a beautiful boy in a swimming pool, you try to know everything for them, to see “things as they are” on their behalf. That’s why there are ten volumes of Pliny the Elder sitting in my living room, why I named a kitten for him—I want to love the world as it is, or as it seems to be in bright acrylic delineations. Pliny’s young and enthusiastic vet was infinitely patient with me and agreed to run secondary tests, even though it was likely she had just been malnourished as a young kitten. They all came back normal. She did not have feline leukemia. I had spent the weekend reading veterinary research papers, looking at death, but when I did read Latin aloud to her, we got to a section on water birds.

18. If you know as much of everything as you can maybe you can better write the history of death and the sun and the continual death of a million suns just sitting up there, slurped into the giant black hole in the middle of the Milky Way. Kingfishers, says Pliny the Elder, only breed on especially calm days in winter—these are halcyon days. I actually think Hockney was lying; I think he stared at the sun forever. First in LA and then through LA in Yorkshire in Normandy. I think he always thought about death, particularly after his stroke in 2012 when he only drew in charcoal, and the inquest into the death of one of his assistants in that same year, who drank drain cleaner after all-night bender. He didn’t go back to Bridlington again after that much. He said lots of stuff about joy afterward.

19. I think my favorite Hockney is lots of people’s favorite Hockney. It’s a man in a pink jacket watching another man in swim trunks, underwater. Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) was painted in 1972. It depicts what is probably a young Hockney, watching his muse Peter through the wavering lens of the water. The water is transmuted desire, every beefcake magazine he read and all the swimming pools he saw first from the plane. The background is an ambiguous set of wooded hills. They look lusher than California; they look like a transposed Claude Lorraine. The painting feels like a dream, like a real space made unreal. If you look at the infinite arched colonnade in Piero Della Francesca’s Annunciation it does this too, suggests to the eye what you know isn’t the case but feels like the case, like the world as it seems, even as the mind cannot accept that it is.

20. I show this to the kitten. She is wearing a protective cloth tangerine around her neck as a collar. Maybe it is an orange. Pliny The Elder Who Is Not A Kitten didn’t know about modern oranges, only Median Apples and citrons, which he mentions in Book XII of the Natural History. The sections on gardens and pools respectively are much longer. Suburban villas outside the cities, the ones with long reflecting pools, weren’t that different from the scene in Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). Pliny loved his villa, villa in Tuscis, which had dwarf trees and a long portico. Schinkel, in the neoclassical throes of the German nineteenth century, painted a reconstruction that would not look out of place in the background of a Hockney.

21. I don’t know if blondes have more fun. Pliny the Elder Who Is Not A Kitten was a brunette. I’m a brunette. The kitten is white with a dusting of orange and black on her small head. Carlo Ginzburg was a brunette. And though Hockney dyed his hair his whole life, so it seems like he was a blond, he was actually something else anyway. Maybe he did have more fun? But that’s not generally the work of the best painting, or of history either. I think he knew it, even in 1977 winking at an interviewer at the height of his early fame, back in England with his LA suntan and his midlife bravado.

22. I think again about the cat who looks like my kitten in the portrait being named Blanche instead of Percy. I like knowing this, this fact about a cat that probably died sometime in the 1970s, who looks like my kitten, my kitten Pliny who has only ever known a twenty-first century sun. Neither of us has been to Los Angeles, but both of us have read the list of plants that grow in a Roman kitchen garden. Both of us know the Medes used the citron in their cuisine for their health. Only I know the orange collar comes off on Sunday. The future stretches out like a colonnade that doesn’t exist yet and we live in it.

23. No one dared re-name the painting Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Blanche, though, because what it seemed to be was more important that what it actually was, and what it seemed to be told you about what it actually was in a slantwise way that calling it what it actually was maybe couldn’t. It’s like the way the angle of light changes when it hits the water. 
24. Students largely no longer major in history; most of our new technologies are at their core reproductive ones. People younger than me think about AIDS like a bad dream that happened to a lost generation. The last of the twentieth century is probably being primed or gessoed under right now. These notes are by nature oblique and plural because I cannot locate, as they could, a central moral question. There is no cleavage of perspective in the picture plane, or rather it’s all cleavage, suture, scar, ragged fault line that changes too quickly to be historicized. I don’t know if you tried to pin it down in acrylic if you could, like Hockney could in the impossible moment you hit the pool jumping off a diving board, the way the water splashes up. It took him days to paint just the splash.