David Hockney takes two crumpled cigarette butts from his pocket and places them on the lunch table. “You’re disgusting,” says his lifelong friend Celia Birtwell, who has featured in many of his paintings. “Horrible! Horrible!” However, the noxious objects he has placed next to our sandwiches aren’t what they seem. “They’re not real,” says Hockney. “They’re sculptured. They’re from a gallery in Berlin.” He beams.
Hockney, on a brief visit to Britain from his beloved newish home in Normandy, has popped in to see an exhibition of his work at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Hockney’s Eye: The Art and Technology of Depiction is open for him on an otherwise closed day, with select curators and friends awaiting his arrival. The mood is one of waiting for a royal audience, and everyone gathers round in mild awe when he finally makes his entrance, in a wheelchair pushed by his partner, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, known as JP.
