Premonitory modernity

The double portrait of a couple of friends

When he painted this double portrait, David Hockney asked his friends, textile designer Celia Birtwell and fashion designer Ossie Clark, to pose at their London apartment shortly after their nuptials. Nothing could be more banal in appearance: we are among friends, we strike a pose in a relaxed way, at home, barefoot, surrounded by familiar objects, a vase placed on a coffee table, a telephone on the carpet. Everything is real here, right down to the couple’s cat, Percy, who is also there. For a bit it looks like a photo: and it is also from preparatory photos that Hockney worked.

The world of the seventies

If the painting has become, over the years, one of the painter’s most famous works, it is because he sought to capture the typical atmosphere of the 1970s. The Bauhaus-style chair, the carpet, the lamp, the colors and clothes of Celia and Ossie are emblems of the taste of the time. Nothing escapes Hockney’s eye, no more the haircuts than the bell bottoms, which are so many real effects in the painting. Everything, right down to the cigarette, which you can’t do without, if only for the time needed to pose in front of the painter, belongs to the signs of the era. Everything seems peaceful here, and self-evident, a cat purring on its master’s lap, the soft light that enters the apartment, the French window whose shutters, half-closed, let in a clear day.

Don’t be fooled by appearances…

And yet, something shows that the image is not just a document: the white cat. A detail certainly, but which immerses the work in an atmosphere of mystery. While the Clarks look in the direction of the viewer, the cat is turned in the opposite direction, towards the window, absorbed by what is happening in the background, and which no one can see. And there, everything becomes clear. The choice of a cat for a painting of a married couple is in total opposition to the classic codes. Since the Renaissance, as we know, it is always a dog that figures in painting to symbolize fidelity in marriage. But then a cat? It symbolizes freedom and lust, let’s understand: sexual freedom (percy is sometimes used to designate the penis in English slang…). Flag of the seventies, then? With hindsight, the work was considered premonitory, announcing the future infidelity of the couple and their separation.

A “modern” painting?

This representation of a married couple renews the pictorial genre. Contrary to what is usually done, it is the man who is seated and the woman standing. The painter ironises the conventional role of the wife, humble and pure, by associating the figure of Celia with a bouquet of white lilies, the flower which is the traditional attribute of the Virgin Mary. Straight as an I, standing with her hands on her hips, the woman has the posture of domination, while the man, slumped more than seated, gives an impression of passivity. Feminist overinterpretation?

The silence of the painting

Above all, it is the lack of communication that strikes between Mr and Mrs Clark. Both look out of the picture, towards the viewer, as if trying to avoid looking at each other. This indifference contrasts with what we are used to finding in a portrait of a couple, such as those found in Van Eyck or Gainsborough, who served as models for the painter. Hockney thereby emphasizes their silent isolation, separated as they are by the vertical side of the French window. Silence, here is the true subject of the double portrait, the silence of the couple which is at the same time that of the world when it yields too easily to the sirens of modernity.

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