The last of the fine arts

David Hockney, who died last week aged eighty-eight, kept two packets of Camels at all times on his studio table and a badge on his lapel reading “End Bossiness Soon.” The cigarette was as fixed a part of his public image as the round glasses and the bottle-blond hair: in 2005 he stood at the Labour Party Conference holding a placard that read “DEATH awaits you all even if you do smoke” and last spring the Paris Métro refused to run the poster for his Fondation Louis Vuitton retrospective because he held a cigarette in the photograph. “I just love tobacco,” he told The Times when Rishi Sunak proposed phasing out cigarette sales altogether, “and I will go on smoking until I fall over.”

Slavoj Žižek addresses the habit in his essay Smoking Considered as One of the Fine Arts. Reviving Thomas De Quincey’s old conceit, he argues that smoking survives as one of the modern world’s last available forms of jouissance as an enjoyment that serves no purpose, resists every effort to make it healthy. It insists on its own excess as an ultimate and immediate obedience to the pleasure-seeking id. Hockney, who got through a pack a day and gave it up exactly once, for a boyfriend, told the Sunday Times just as much: “every day I’ve done what I want to do.”

Žižek’s argument is that current culture cannot abide this (as the Fondation Louis Vuitton proved), and substitutes instead a managed pleasure that threatens neither the body nor the social order: coffee without the caffeine, sex without risk, nicotine without smoke. Hockney named the substitution himself: “I smoke for my mental health,” he wrote after the ban came in, “and I certainly prefer its calming effects to the pharmaceutical ones (side effects unknown).” The antidepressant is the decaffeinated cigarette, and he would not take it.

Žižek traces how the warning on the packet hardened from the mild “may seriously endanger your health” into the bare imperative “Smoking kills”; the placard Hockney carried to Brighton took that imperative and trumped it, since death arrives either way and the threat is therefore empty. He had reached the same diagnosis without Lacan, with a cigarette in his hand the whole time.

Hockney’s painting came from the same place as his smoking, an immediate obedience to the id: he wanted the pleasure, and he wanted it at once

Hockney’s painting came from the same place as his smoking, an immediate obedience to the id: he wanted the pleasure, and he wanted it at once. He came out of the Royal College in the early Sixties alongside Kitaj, Boshier, Allen Jones and Caulfield, the generation the 1961 Young Contemporaries exhibition announced as British Pop, although he never took to the label, or to much else he was told to do. His debts were chosen by appetite: Dubuffet and the graffiti of Art Brut, Picasso above all, the Quattrocento (the totality of cultural and artistic events and movements that occurred in Italy during the 15th century) that he loved. His early pictures smuggled Whitman and Cavafy into a Britain where being gay was still a crime.

He painted them because he liked looking at them, and they are useless in the way all the best pleasures are useless

The Los Angeles pools set him the formal problem of painting water, transparent and mobile and reflective at once, which he met with the flat Californian matte of acrylic. He painted them because he liked looking at them, and they are useless in the way all the best pleasures are useless. The double portraits that followed are his Arnolfinis, a cat where the dog of fidelity used to be. The photo-collages and joiners of the 1980s came out of a quarrel with the single vanishing point of Renaissance perspective, which he held to be a tyranny over the moving eye and turned instead to the shifting viewpoints of the Chinese scroll.

His return to East Yorkshire after 2000 turned him back to landscape on the largest scale he could manage: the hawthorn blossom and the back roads of the Wolds. The word that recurs in his titles, from A Bigger Splash in 1967 to A Bigger Picture in 2012, is bigger, and the appetite only grew, well, bigger with age: Bigger Trees Near Warter, fifty canvases joined into one, filled an entire wall of the Royal Academy in 2007. 

And then came the iPad paintings. Hockney was never precious about means: he had worked with Polaroids, office photocopiers and fax machines, as well as spending the early 2000s arguing in Secret Knowledge that the Old Masters leaned on lenses and mirrors. The objection to the iPad should not be that it is a machine, rather that it lifts the risk of oil and acrylic. Every stroke is weightless and reversible; nothing is deposited and nothing is risked. It gave him (and the various art establishments clawing at his name) the pleasure of the gesture, but nothing more. The iPad does to painting what the vape does to smoking. The Arrival of Spring pictures and the ninety-metre Year in Normandie have his colour and his motifs, the blossom and the Woldgate road, but they are made without risk, and what is pleasure without friction?

Hockney died having done exactly what he wanted every day for nearly nine decades, smoking through most of them. He had made his peace with the arithmetic long before. Three doctors told him to stop and all three went before him; he expected, as he put it, “to die of a smoking-related illness or a non-smoking-related illness,” and either way to die. He argued all his life that a pleasure with no purpose is the only kind worth having, and that painting, done properly, was exactly that. A culture that cannot stand the sight of a man enjoying a cigarette has mislaid something vital that it will struggle to paint its way back to. If the British art establishment had any nerve it would let the S in DCMS stand, for once, for Smoking.