Hockney David 

Bradford (England), 1937

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A student at the Royal College of Art in London from 1959 to 1962, Hockney was able, from a very young age, to articulate a pictorial language that was striking for its renewal of figuration. In September 1963 he made a trip to Egypt for The Sunday Times newspaper and, when it was proposed to him two years later to work on some engravings for the poems of Cavafy, he found the idea especially interesting as he tried to leave behind the period of formalism in his painting.

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He knew that the Alexandria of Cavafy did not exist, and he felt that he could find some of his graphic elements in Beirut instead. 

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Even if he watched and drew Beirut through decoding and confusion, his drawing curiously met with those of Dadd, from the 28th October 1842, and of Montfort, more than a century after. But we must not forget that Hockney came to Beirut because the Alexandria of Cavafy no longer existed. To draw Beirut while thinking of Alexandria is to close the cycle of gaps generated by Beirut, blurring all perception of time. 

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Nostalgia itself is destroyed. 

 

Hockney spent the last two weeks of January 1966 in Beirut, walking everywhere, making sketches of the city and gathering different elements that he used in his etchings. In Portrait of Cavafy, we can see the Circle of Officers of the Lebanese Army in Zeitouné in the background. The etching Shop Window of a Tobacco Store is an on-site drawing of the Avenue des Français, and To Remain captures the storefront of a drycleaner’s on Bliss Street. The Portrait of Cavafy resumes a view of the Avenue des Français towards the Bassoul Hotel.

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It is clear that this series of etchings result from a montage, and within it one finds as much traces of Californian palm trees as transfers from magazines. But what is most astonishing is that, despite everything, none of the painters of the time had painted this city, or even looked at it in this way.

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In Lebanon, Hockney was a regular member of the English and American circles of Broumana and Beirut. He lived in a furnished apartment near the American University, and found elements of inspiration in Beirut’s scenery. The articulation between him and the city could not have been simpler or more straightforward: it was enough for him just to look at the city, and he would paint in an epiphany that did not only express all the elements of Alexandria, but also those of Beirut – even its most banal details – that were expressed with the astonishment of one who looks around him and draws. 

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No one had done this before him and, after him, the naivety was so mannered, so forced and on the lookout for what flattered it, that it became folklore. Hockney asked the question of how to paint in Beirut, in a masterful manner. It was no longer about the machinery of representation, like in the great canvases of Srour at the beginning of the century, or of Galentz in the early 1940s. In fact, he was an anti-Carswell, in his way of looking. For him, producing was the contrary of enjoying. Carswell tried to distance himself from England but without freeing himself or “Orientalising” himself, and did not find any other way of decoding the Orient than through cinema posters and popular artefacts. In his eyes, Zghaib’s painting was one of these popular paintings, with, at the other extreme, paintings of trucks.

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To different degrees, Hockney, Carswell and Zghaib questioned – with some variations – places and signs. They questioned semantics and the construction of the painting beyond signs while shifting their purpose. Hockney knew he was at a crossing-point. Carswell stepped outside time and had a blurry version of it : his reality became a nostalgia for England, a sticky fog that prevented him from seeing what surrounded him, and made him turn towards the unresolved aesthetic problems that he had been dragging around since the end of his tuition at the Royal College of Art. 

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Carswell’s great preoccupation was with a reality that he no longer painted. His apprehension and understanding of Pop Art as popular art did not allow him to go further. He always had the distinguished know-how of the archaeological draftsman, at a time when suburban Englishmen were in the process of conquering, by their presence alone, London’s artistic circles.

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Carswell lived, with detachment and culture, a nostalgic expatriation. His pretext was the quest for sun, with the elegance of the English in the colonies. All the faults without any qualities will never meet all the qualities without the faults. He was astonished that reality did not burst into his desire and conform to his most secret wishes. Hockney painted what an Englishman could perceive about the experience of Beirut, while Carswell would travel to Tabarja for long bucolic sojourns, only woken up by the sound of cars going over the speed bumps that regularly blocked the road, as another way of measuring time. Hockney entered into a slumbering Orient,  not that of Kipling, but that of Durrell – a hybrid and remote transfer of Alexandria.

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The question remains: how could one pretend to be perpetually astonished by Beirut – a bay without mosquitoes? Could the enjoyment of living be found there, without the difficulty or suffering of creation? Was it too easy a world? Even without any judgement, it is undeniable that Hockney, with his etchings and series of Lebanese drawings, disappoints us because of this simple observation : he was in a perfect position to paint the country – and did nothing of the sort. America was the place of his dreams, and not the Mediterranean.