Life of the artist: David Hockney in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist

Hans Ulrich Obrist: You’ve done a lot of portraits of people in your entourage and friends and wider family, but you were never like Warhol, who did commissions of the rich and famous. Why was this was the case? Was it a conscious decision?

David Hockney: Yes, it was a decision. I deliberately didn’t want to do any commissioned portraits, because it’s not a problem I want to spend time on. Meaning, if you don’t know someone very well, how do you know if you’ve got a likeness? Andy’s portraits were done as a means of keeping his magazine [Interview ] going; it didn’t make any money, so he basically maintained it by painting German industrialists’ wives. Around the same time he was doing those, he did a portrait of me...

What was your relationship with Warhol like? Friendly?

Yes, we got on. I first met him in 1963. When he did the portrait, I did a drawing of him. My friend Henry Geldzahler [curator at Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York] didn’t like the portrait Andy had done, so he said to him, ‘Well, you’ve left something out, Andy’, and Andy was like, ‘No, what?’ And Henry replied, ‘You’ve left the art out!’ And Andy just said, ‘Oh well, I’ll do another’, which Henry liked.

There are quite a lot of references to [American poet] Wallace Stevens in your work ... so I was wondering about his work and its links to nature and in turn the links to your work...

I illustrated a poem of his called ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ about thirty years ago. It’s a terrific poem. Wallace Stevens is fascinating. Do you know he used to buy paintings in Paris through an agent without looking at them? Not by very good artists, but it was an odd way to get pictures, to trust someone like that.

You have always had a strong link to poetry.

I’ve done a lot of paintings over the years that were inspired by poetry. I haven’t for quite a while, but I still read poetry. There are certain things that I am not that acquainted with – one of them being lyrics of pop songs – so a lot of contemporary poetry I have some difficulty with because I don’t know all the allusions. Pop music, after a certain date, I know nothing about, nor care much about.

But certainly in the past, poetry played a big role in your work, notably with your piece We Two Boys Together Clinging [1961 ], which was named after the Walt Whitman poem . . .

Yes, Walt Whitman. I always loved the poem ‘I Saw in Louisiana a Live- Oak Growing’. It’s a bit like the Wallace Stevens line ‘I placed a jar in Tennessee . . .’ I’ve always known that the poet knows more . . .

Why do you say that?

Very early on I came across a poem called ‘Delight in Disorder’ and I thought, ‘I love that idea.’ It’s by Robert Herrick, the last lines are: ‘A careless shoe- string, in whose tie / I see a wild civility: / Do more bewitch me, than when art / Is too precise in every part.’ I read that when I was about ten years old and I thought, ‘Poets know more . . .’ Delight in disorder is something I think I have. It means you have a higher sense of order, actually. I’m a bit of a slob, I’m not that tidy, and I used to say it’s because I have a higher sense of order and I can see order where others can’t. And that was my excuse for being a slob.

And what about your link to Walt Whitman? I’m thinking specifically about your incredible 1961 print Myself and My Heroes, which features yourself, Walt Whitman and Mahatma Gandhi . . .

I admired Whitman when I was younger, but I also saw that he had serious flaws. He was certainly an interesting man but he was not quite the saint I thought at one time. He didn’t always take into account others’ fragility. When I first went to America I thought every schoolboy would be able to quote Walt Whitman, but most had never heard of him. I should have known! It was very American writing, it felt free, it seemed to me to be very fresh; I read the whole of Leaves of Grass, and it’s a vast thing. And then you realize the Americans have always been a little bit dubious because of their gayness; ‘for the dear love of comrades’, as Walt Whitman would say. He was one of the first great American literary figures who were taken seriously in England. They realized how good it was. It’s full of images, his poetry.

I always thought there should be a book of your writings, almost like a manifesto.

Well, I defend myself, that’s all I do.

Don’t you write every day?

No, I write when I get annoyed! Like when I get fed up with the anti- smoking campaigns. I think that writing ‘Smoking Kills’ on a packet of cigarettes is just part of the ‘uglification’ of Europe. You know what? Life’s a killer! So what? We don’t need to plaster it on everything, everywhere. I would certainly protest against the ‘demonization’ of smoking, which I think has been terrible. I’ve smoked for fifty- two years and, frankly, I’m fine. And I don’t intend to stop. Actually, I think I’d find it incredibly difficult to work without it, to be honest. It keeps you calm; and I’ve pointed out what will happen in the future if you think you can get rid of it... It’s exactly what’s happening in California right now: about forty per cent of the adverts on television in California are for prescription drugs. That is what will replace tobacco. The pharmaceutical industry will make the tobacco industry seem like Sunday- school teachers with what they’ll do to us. I remember seeing the death of Kennedy on television and the newsreaders were all smoking. It was a different world! I really loved New York when you could smoke anything, anywhere.

You should really bring together all your writings and publish a book.

Anything I write these days tends to be about one of my three keen interests: photography, perspective or smoking!

On the subject of books, I wanted to ask you about the beautiful illustrations you did based on things like Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

That was in 1968. I remember arguing with Francis Bacon about the word ‘illustration’. He’d use the word ‘illustrator’ as a put- down, as in ‘How’s your illustrating friend Mr Kitaj?’ [R. B. Kitaj, American painter] I knew Bacon a little bit, not much, but you could have a great argument with him. I’d tell him that some of the best artists were illustrators: Rembrandt, Bible stories, Hogarth...

And what did Bacon say?

We’d argue just for the sake of it! I pointed out to him once that I knew a painting in California of some tulips in a vase that was as profound as anything he’d done. It was by Cézanne and it was in the Norton Simon Museum. I was just trying to tell him that it wasn’t the subject matter that made images profound but the way they were treated. There was a period in the mid 70s when Bacon and I both lived in Paris and we’d see each other. Gregory used to go drinking with him...

It’s intriguing to think that, coming from the world of painting, how immersed you’ve been in all these other worlds: theatre, opera, illustration, art history...

As I said, I’m interested in images; I think that’s the thread always... I’ve always been interested in physics as well. Ultimately, the moment rules.

What do you mean by that?

The moment rules: for instance, I was painting these pictures of the countryside, but the moment the hawthorn blossom went, I stopped. We only had it for four days: after that the rain came and took it all away, so the moment has to rule, especially if you’re involved with nature because, after all, I’m living in Yorkshire, a place, unlike California, which changes throughout the year. Remember, for twenty-five years I didn’t see springs and summers in California, it was always the same weather.

So being here is the reintroduction of the seasons into your life.

Yes, that’s one aspect. Let’s go out for a drive so I can show you what I’m talking about.

Lives of Artists, Lives of Architects by Hans Ulrich Obrist, is available now, published by Allen Lane.

David Hockney, Painting and Photography is at Annely Juda Fine Art, London, from 15 May – 27 June 2015.