Once-Banned Film on David Hockney Released as DVD

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That is precisely what David Hockney is going to have to deal with, however, as A Bigger Splash, the once-banned movie that Jack Hazan made in 1975, has just been released for the first time on DVD.

Hockney apparently never liked the film, and it is little wonder as he doesn’t come out of it at all well. The film, an uncomfortable amalgam of documentary and fiction, deals with Hockney’s break-up with his model and lover, Peter Schlesinger, and leaves the overriding impression that Hockney and his entourage were—at this point in their lives, anyway—a bunch of hopelessly superficial fashion victims.

This is made worse by the fact that Hazan’s film has many of the rhythms and habits of a serious art movie, but none of the substance.

There is instead a great deal of surface. It’s easy to forget how young and gorgeous Hockney once was. He is clearly delighted with himself, and his manner on camera is flirtatious from the outset.

At one point he treats us to the sight of him showering in what must then have been one of the most expensive showers in London. But like his pals Celia Birtwell, Ossie Clark and Mo McDermott, Hockney comes across as a working-class Brit thrust into the glamorous London art world, and not dealing with it terribly well.

All the more reassuring then to reflect that the art that came out of this chapter in Hockney’s life has fared so much better than this glimpse into its context.

In fact, it is the work of precisely this period that provides the highlights of “David Hockney Portraits,” which is currently approaching the end of its run at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and due to tour to Los Angeles and London.

It is remarkable to think that the same yearning for the good life (which, for a young man from the north of England, is understandably bathed in the sunlight of southern Europe or California) leads in the movie to self-pitying whining.

But on canvas, it leads to the sublime transformation of Celia and Ossie’s London flat (in Mr. And Mrs. Clark and Percy, 1970-71) into a light-filled palazzo in which the Clarks take on the grace and gravity of classical sculptures.

The color-pencil portrait of Warhol, Andy, Paris, 1974 (1974), made at the end of this period, is poignant; for whereas the American out-of-towner had by that time made an oeuvre out of his enchantment with glamour, the Englishman was about to allow his to derail his art.

If Hockney regarded the close study and polished finish of his earlier works as somehow provincial and stuffy—and his abandonment of them at about the time when he decamped for Los Angeles suggests that he did—then it was a bad decision for his work. Starting with the looser paint handling in paintings like his portrait of Divine (1979), it was downhill all the way for Hockney the artist.

His experiment with photography, his paintings of his dog, his opera designs—none of these carry the sharp eloquence or gentle lyricism of his portrait of Celia in a Black Dress with White Flowers (1972). In looking at it though, I just wish that watching Hazan’s movie again didn’t prompt the thought that the slight vacuousness on Celia’s face might fairly reflect her personality.