For the last couple of years, I would ask my husband, Calvin Tomkins (his friends called him Tad), if he would write about David Hockney. He had written profiles about so many of the giants of contemporary art in his life at The New Yorker, starting out in the late 1950s. Tad told me he was finished with writing profiles; it was too much reading and research and interviewing for someone who had been declared “legally blind.”
“Why not just have a conversation—two old guys shooting the breeze, talking about art and life and life and art and life in the art world over the last 60 or more years?” I’d nag. (Tad told me a story about sitting next to David at a noisy dinner one night long ago, where they both had trouble hearing each other. The only thing Tad remembered was David’s declarative sentence on photography: “It’s a one-eyed man looking through a little ’ole.”)
That wasn’t to be: David Hockney died yesterday at his home in London and Tad died a couple of months earlier. But they did have an hour or so together last spring on Zoom, while I interviewed David for a story timed to his monumental exhibition “David Hockney 25” at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. That wasn’t David’s last show; he continued to paint landscapes and portraits of family and friends, and had a show, “Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings Not Yet Shown in Paris,” last November in London at the Annely Juda Gallery through February of this year.
What do I remember most about my interview last spring? David’s turquoise sweater and bespoke plaid suit made by his favorite tailor in Cannes; him lighting one cigarette, then another from the end of that one—no matches needed, no letup—and Tad observing.
I remember asking him about the pin he had on the lapel of his suit jacket: “End Bossiness Soon.”
“I was going to put ‘End Bossiness Now,’ but then I thought that is in itself too bossy,” he told me and Tad. “There’s lots of bossy people around now, more than there used to be,” he informed us, inhaling more defiantly. Fast forward to that April, and David’s Paris show opened with great fanfare at the Fondation.
Tad did not write about David, but instead wrote a diary about his hundredth year that was published in The New Yorker. It received more attention than anything he had ever written—so much so that Tad exclaimed with a kind of childlike wonder on his birthday, “I’m back, it’s a new century, and I’m famous.”
Tad died on March 20, working right up to the last day of his sentient life, finishing his book Centenarian, which will be published in February.
Just last night, an artist friend in town from Dublin came to visit me, and we were talking about who was the most famous living artist. Of course, David Hockney dominated the conversation.
The conversation between David and Tad, two old guys talking about life in the art world, never happened—but I like to think they’re having it now.
