David Hockney Was One of Us: His West Hollywood Story

David Hockney kept an office on Santa Monica Boulevard. He drove to it most days from his home in the Hollywood Hills, down through what would one day become our City, and he painted what he saw. He painted West Hollywood.

This prolific, world-famous artist found in West Hollywood the same charm of the village we all feel and know. The same colors and light that leave us feeling lucky to live here. Hockney painted the boulevard. He captured the light hitting the palm trees, the storefronts, the swimming pools, and the streets of a community finding itself and feeling free for the first time. Hockney also fought, in his way, for the buildings he thought were worth fighting for and made no secret of his contempt for the ones he thought weren’t worthy of a city he’d proudly adopted as his own.

Hockney died Thursday in London. He was 88.

As it goes when an icon such as David Hockney passes, tributes filled galleries and front pages around the world. The swimming pools, the Yorkshire landscapes, the iPad drawings, the $90 million auction record — those are the stories most are telling. Fewer are telling the story of the man who showed up for friends fighting to stay alive during the height of the AIDS epidemic. The same one who showed up to West Hollywood City Council meetings to argue about public art and architecture. That story belongs to us. His fellow villagers.

The Office on Santa Monica

From the 1970s on, Hockney’s office and storage workspace sat near the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and Gardner Street, in what is now West Hollywood, and he used 7508 Santa Monica as his official mailing address for years — the same return address on his own letterhead, the address on exhibition schedules he sent to museums in Cologne and Lausanne and Cardiff.

His daily drive to the office from his home on Montcalm in the Hollywood Hills became paintings. “Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio,” finished in 1980, mapped that commute across one of the largest canvases he ever touched, and LACMA owns it now. It’s a panoramic record of a drive through our streets.

The boulevard he painted was not just sun and storefronts. Santa Monica Boulevard in that era was also where male hustlers worked the sidewalk — a reality Hockney painted without flinching. The pennant flags of a used car lot strung overhead, the figures below doing what figures on that block did for decades. It was an area on the eastside that depicted the kind of liberating street life that drew men from across the country to this stretch of West Hollywood. Hockney knew it. He had come to Los Angeles partly because he was searching for a similar kind of liberation, hoping it would offer a less repressive world for a gay man than England did. He found it here — in the swimming pools of West Hollywood and on Santa Monica Blvd. and painted what he saw.

“Santa Monica Boulevard,” painted on an unstretched canvas somewhere around 1978 to 1980, got rolled up when he was done with it. The David Hockney Foundation stored it away for nearly three decades and it was almost never seen. He painted this street and put it in a drawer.

Before he ever had the Santa Monica address, Hockney lived at 1145 Larrabee Street from the summer of 1966 into early 1967. The building belonged to his friend Nick Wilder, an art dealer. The pool in the courtyard is where Hockney painted “Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool,” one of the iconic works of his career. He painted it right here, on this street, in this city.

The Pacific Design Center Fight

When the Pacific Design Center was proposed, the city was against it. That was the default. New development, unusual building, fight at city council — West Hollywood doing what it does. 

Hockney went the other way.

Joel Rothschild a West Hollywood resident and one of Hockney’s closest friends for more than four decades, was there for most of it. “David shifted the fight,” Rothschild told WEHOonline. “It was really negative against that building. It didn’t go from totally negative to totally positive. But at least it got enough people saying, wait a second, this might be beautiful. David thinks it’s great. Maybe it is a pretty building.”

Hockney wrote letters. He went to city council. He put his name behind a building most people around him wanted dead, and after it was built he painted it. “Hancock Street, West Hollywood I,” finished in 1989, showed the Pacific Design Center in the bold colors that were his signature, and the City of West Hollywood later cited that painting by name in its own landmark designation language for the building. Hockney kept a print of it hanging on the wall of his studio on Santa Monica. “He thought the building was beautiful,” Rothschild said. “And he put his mouth behind it. He did what he believed in.”

Former West Hollywood Mayor Steve Martin still has a framed copy of that poster. The West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce presented it to him in March 1998, when he became the first mayor to deliver a state of the city address to the Chamber. “Considering it was David Hockney,” Martin said, “he might have had an opinion that mattered.”

The Public Art Program

He was considerably less kind about what the City did next.

West Hollywood’s requirement that developers put public art on condo sites produced, in Hockney’s view, some of the worst work he’d seen anywhere. He and Rothschild drove around West Hollywood together and looked at it. “We drove around and we saw it,” Rothschild said, “and we were talking about the city council imposing these art restrictions with no basis, no taste, no experience, no art history background.” Hockney wrote letters about that too and went to meetings and nobody much paid attention. The art stayed up. Some of it’s still there.

Martin said the problem never got fixed. “The Arts Commission basically rubber stamps whatever the developer puts up there,” Martin said, “and this art, this quote unquote art, really looks like something that you had your brother-in-law do and paid him a lot of money, just because you had this requirement with the city.”

At the same time the midcentury buildings he’d spent years painting were coming down, and the stuff going up in their place didn’t meet any standard he recognized. Rothschild said Hockney’s measure for architecture was consistent across everything. “Does it look good when you drive by?” Rothschild said. “Does it look good when you walk by? Does it invite you in?” The Sofitel and the Beverly Center failed on every count. He believed it had absolutely no redeemable qualities. “He wouldn’t go in it.” Rothschild said Hockney was loud about all of it for years and that none of it moved anyone. “There’s so many that he was pissed off about, and so was I.”

The Twin Sisters sculpture at Santa Monica and Doheny — installed years after Hockney had largely gone back to England — came up unprompted. “David would roll in his grave,” Rothschild said.

Why West Hollywood 

He loved driving these streets and Rothschild made it clear just how much so. “He fucking loved West Hollywood,” Rothschild said. “We would just go in the car and go for drives just to take it all in.” He loved everything about this place, not just the drives. “He loved the cruising that was going on. It was amazing. My God, what wasn’t to love.”

When he first came here in 1964, a young painter from Bradford England, he found a quality of light in Southern California that captivated and captured him. The light and the colors would become his muses. David would never leave LA, not really. He kept the building on Santa Monica Boulevard and the house on Montcalm, even after eventually moving back to England in his later years.

Hockney called himself “an English Los Angeleno.” He would tell people that LA was the first city he’d ever loved, the first city he’d ever painted — that he hadn’t painted London, hadn’t wanted to. He came here partly for the light and partly, as he said himself, for what he hoped was a less repressive world when it came to being gay. What he found on our streets was both.

He left a record of West Hollywood. It hangs in museums on several continents.

Hockney is survived by his longtime partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, his great-nephew Richard Hockney, and his brothers Philip and John.

A remembrance of David Hockney by his friend of four decades, West Hollywood’s Joel Rothschild, continues in Part Two on Tuesday.