Two perspectives on David Hockney: Catherine Cusset and Fabrice Gaignault

Starting point: the same painter, two methods

Catherine Cusset, Life of David Hockney (Paris: Gallimard, 2018, trans. Maja Ueberle-Pfaff, Freies Geistesleben, 2019). [cited as VDH]

Fabrice Gaignault, Patrick Procktor, the secret of David Hockney (Paris: Séguier, 2022). [quote as PPH]

David Hockney's (1937–2026) defining aesthetic combines a calculated superficial lightness with subtle complexity: his luminous, often flatly composed color worlds—the iconic Californian swimming pools being a prime example—stage a hedonistic, light-filled present that is simultaneously disrupted by perspectival refractions and serial image logics; his "Joiners" (photographic collages) in particular subvert classical central perspectivism in favor of multiple, temporally staggered perceptions. This tension between apparent immediacy and constructive reflection makes Hockney's work a point of reference for intertextual quotations in fashion, film, and design, as it articulates a sense of life characterized by modern, mobile, and visually saturated subjectivity. Biographically, Hockney's path – from British art student in the post-war period to protagonist of Californian pop culture and later to experimental chronicler of digital image media (iPad drawings) – is characterized by a consistent openness to technical and cultural transformation processes; his work alternates between intimacy (portraits, interiors) and expansive landscape depictions, always asserting the autonomy of seeing as an aesthetic experience.

Both Hockney books selected here revolve around the recently deceased painter David Hockney, yet they approach him from opposite angles. Catherine Cusset chooses the center: Hockney himself, from his childhood in Bradford to his late mastery, is presented as a continuous life storyline. Fabrice Gaignault chooses the periphery: Patrick Procktor, the forgotten friend and rival, and illuminates Hockney only as a light source in whose glow another fades. Cusset's book bears the genre designation 'novel' on its title and prefaces it with a programmatic note: 'This book is a novel. All the facts are true. I invented the feelings, the thoughts, the dialogues.' ¹ [VDH]. Gaignault's book is called 'essai' and works with testimonies, quotations, archive photos and a first-person narrator who presents himself as an investigative journalist.

This presents two fundamental poetics, which this study compares in six steps: the narrative stance, the construction of the main character, the relationship between success and failure, the portrayal of creativity and homosexuality, ekphrasis—that is, the linguistic representation of the images themselves—and the ethos of both books toward their subject. The comparison aims to demonstrate that the seemingly related projects—two French-language approaches to a living English painter—diverge at a crucial point: Cusset writes an apology for the joy of life, Gaignault an elegy for failure.

The narrative perspective: interior space versus investigation

Cusset's method is free indirect discourse, which is entirely tied to Hockney's perception. The narrator disappears behind the character; what is reported is filtered through what Hockney sees, feels, and thinks. The opening section already establishes this inner space through the figure of the father.

Il n'avait pas d'argent mais ne manquait pas de resources. The récupéra à la discharge de vieilles poussettes cassées qu'il répara, peignit et rendit comme neuves. After the war, I'm fit with my bike. Petit, David needs to know more about the moment when the pinceau-brosse is in the main part of the son before entering into contact with the cadre of a bicycle. The metal rouillé turns out to be rouge vif, in a second, comme par magic. The world changes color. […] The day you entered the redécorer of the house, the cloua of the planches on the portes and the cover of the couches of soleil. The child does not belong to the contemplators. [VDH]

He had no money, but he was not lacking in resourcefulness. At the rubbish dump, he collected old, broken prams, repaired them, painted them, and made them like new. After the war, he did the same with bicycles. As a little boy, David saw nothing more beautiful than the moment the bristle brush in his father's hand touched the frame of a bicycle. The rusty metal turned bright red in a second, as if by magic. The world changed color. […] The day he renovated the house, he nailed boards to the doors and painted sunsets on them. The child never tired of looking at them.

The passage is partly self-interpreting. The sentence "The world changed color" ² [VDH] accomplishes two things: it captures the childlike moment when rusty metal turns red under the brush, and it simultaneously provides the germinal cell of Hockney's entire aesthetic. Cusset establishes the colorist's origin myth here without commenting on it—the interpretation remains inscribed in the painting. The poor, resourceful father, Ken, who appears elegant despite having no money and paints sunsets on doors, becomes the precursor to the son: scarcity does not create deprivation, but rather improvisation and color. The narrative ties its evaluation to the child's perception ("The child never tired of looking at them"). ³ [VDH]) and avoids authorial judgment. This technique carries the entire book: Hockney's life appears as if it unfolds from within, in the presence of his own experience.

Gaignault, on the other hand, begins with a framing narrative that immediately establishes the research motive. The narrator discovers Procktor by chance, in the window of a Parisian gallery, at the side of a lover, and the discovery immediately transforms into a riddle.

Mais en passant en revue certaines of Procktor's oeuvres visible on the web, L. and my restâmes d'abord interdits. Puis, d'un regard, nous eûmes la même interrogation: Patrick Procktor avait-il seulement existsé? What about a pseudonym of David Hockney, a construction? Assis au bord du lit, nos visages passablement illuminés par l'écran, nous étions comme deux enquêteurs en herbe, pressentant une découverte léonardesque: les ressemblances entre certaines œuvres des deux artistses étaient si extraordinaires, au stufe de l'inspiration, de la mise en scène du modèle, de la technique, des matériaux employés comme du choix des couleurs, que s'ouvrait sous nos pieds un possible mystère. [PPH]

But as we went through some of Procktor's works visible online, L. and I were initially speechless. Then, with a single glance, we had the same question: Had Patrick Procktor even existed? Was he perhaps a pseudonym of David Hockney, a fabrication? Sitting on the edge of the bed, our faces illuminated by the screen, we were like two budding detectives sensing a discovery of Leonardo-esque proportions: The similarities between certain works by the two artists were so extraordinary—in the inspiration, the staging of the model, the technique, the materials used, and the choice of colors—that a potential secret was unfolding beneath our feet.

Here, the narrative stance is the exact opposite of Cusset's interior. Gaignault employs a narrating "I" that doesn't know but surmises, that shares the reader's ignorance, and that stages the investigation as a dramatic movement. The rhetorical question—whether Procktor ever existed, whether he wasn't a figment of Hockney's imagination—is deliberately exaggerated and retracted a few pages later; its function is not to assert, but to generate suspense. The comparison to a "discovery of Leonardo-esque proportions" ⁴ [PPH] and the image of the two “prospective investigators” ⁵ [PPH] at the bedside reveals the genre Gaignault is following: the literary investigation, the investigationA book in which the author himself becomes a character. Where Cusset eliminates the narrator, Gaignault exposes him. This has consequences for the truth of both texts: Cusset's novel claims the truth of experience, Gaignault's essay the truth of the trace – and openly admits its incompleteness.

The main character: Hockney as subject, Hockney as vanishing point

The two approaches result in contrasting constructions of the central figure. In Cusset's work, Hockney is the acting, desiring, suffering subject; in Gaignault's, he is a vanishing point toward which Procktor is diminished in perspective. Cusset's Hockney defines himself through self-assertion against resistance, such as the educational bureaucrat who denies the fourteen-year-old art school admission.

For the bureaucrat to sign this letter, there is no longer a sign, plus the two seconds are available before the signature. What kind of authorization does the man have to wait until he decides to see it again? The mount on the fascination is not capable. The cessa de travailler: its notes dégringolèrent, the avertissements are multiplièrent. Il s'en moquait. [VDH]

For the bureaucrat who had signed that letter, two years were no more than the two seconds it had taken him to type his signature. What gave this man, whom he had never met, the right to decide his own life? He would show the fascist what he was capable of. He stopped working: his grades plummeted, the warnings piled up. He didn't care.

The outrage is Hockney's own, rendered in free indirect speech; the word "fascist" ⁶ [VDH] clearly originates from his internal dialogue, not from that of the narrator. Cusset thus portrays a subject who early on discovers the core of his ethics—the refusal to surrender his own life to external authority—and who translates this ethics into defiance, work, and ultimately, art. The character is consistently constructed from his will. Every episode, from the refusal of art lessons to the trips to Paris and the move to California, confirms the same movement: Hockney asserts his desire against convention.

In contrast, Gaignault's Procktor is conceived from the outset as a vulnerable figure whose origins foreshadow his later downfall. His childhood spent between boarding schools, a father who died young, and a distant mother appears as the foundation for a lifelong sense of rootlessness.

La mort precoce de leur père ajoutée à l'éloignement constant de leur mère piétina une enfance qui s'annonçait, à l'image de toute enfance rêvée, douce, harmonieuse et pleine de chaleur. Non, il était écrit que les deux petits garçons ne connaîtraient jamais ce bonheur-là. Se sentant peu réconforté par des grands-parents aimants mais qui avaient la tête ailleurs, Patrick espérait que sa mère “apparaîtrait d'une manière ou d'une autre par magie et me sauverait [...]. Je n'avais aucune idée d'où je venais et les complications familiales faisaient que je ne me considérais nulle part chez moi”. [PPH]

The early death of his father, coupled with his mother's constant absence, shattered a childhood that—like every dreamed-of childhood—had promised to be gentle, harmonious, and full of warmth. No, it was written in the stars that the two little boys would never know that happiness. Finding little comfort with his loving but preoccupied grandparents, Patrick hoped his mother would "somehow appear as if by magic and save me [...]. I had no idea where I came from, and the family entanglements meant I felt at home nowhere."

The phrase "it was written" is significant. ⁷ [PPH]. Gaignault tells the story backwards, from the known ending: Procktor will die alone, penniless, and forgotten, and his childhood provides the omens. Where Cusset's Hockney draws strength from impoverished circumstances—his impoverished father as the source of color—Gaignault's Procktor draws a wound from his circumstances. Both painters come from humble backgrounds, but the books interpret this scarcity in contrasting ways: in Cusset's as empowerment, in Gaignault's as a lack that is never healed. The insertion of the Procktor quote ("I felt at home nowhere") ⁸ [PPH]) is also methodologically revealing: Gaignault incorporates documentary voices into his text, while Cusset dissolves each source into a representation of consciousness. The main character of one book speaks in their own person; that of the other is quoted, interpreted, and circled around.

Success and failure: the asymmetric twins

At the heart of both books, whether explicitly stated or not, is the same constellation: two young men, born a year apart, close friends in early 1960s London, dubbed the "Dandy Twins" by the press. ⁹ [PPH] labeled – and a lifetime later separated by an abyss. Gaignault makes this asymmetry his theme and gives it form in the final chapter.

C'étaient deux êtres jeunes et fougueux, impatients d'en découdre, persuadés qu'ils allaient conquer the world. Pendant in certain temps, the deux mena la course, can be vit rattrapé and dépassé par l'autre, tortue plus robuste que le lièvre jusqu'au bout travailleur, mais useé par la fete, l'alcool et peut-être surtout le peu de reconnaissance de son immense talent quand celui du frère Now it's time to celebrate the universal event. It's all there, what's happening or not, these Castor and Pollux du Swinging London aux styles and aux universes are both inseparable. [PPH]

They were two young, impetuous creatures, eager to compete, convinced they would conquer the world. For a time, one led the race, then found himself caught and overtaken by the other—a tortoise, more robust than the hare, hardworking to the very end, but worn down by the revelry, the alcohol, and perhaps above all by the lack of recognition for his immense talent, while his rival brother's was celebrated worldwide. But so it is, whether they like it or not: these Castor and Pollux of Swinging London, with their so very similar styles and worlds, will forever remain inseparable.

The fable of the hare and the tortoise is reversed here: This time, it is not the persistent tortoise that wins, but Hockney the hare, because the tortoise Procktor squanders himself on feasting and alcohol. The mythological exaggeration of "Castor and Pollux" ¹⁰ [PPH] – the inseparable twins, one mortal and the other immortal – encapsulates Gaignault's central thesis: the two remain bound to each other precisely because their fates diverge. The expression "hostile brother" ¹¹ [PPH] names the emotional truth of the book, which does not separate friendship and rivalry. Gaignault is interested in the friction at which fame arises and oblivion takes root; his book is an investigation into why, of two related talents, one ascends to the auction halls and the other sinks into anonymity.

Cusset almost completely ignores Procktor – her Hockney needs no antagonist because the book is not about rivalry, but about inner necessity. Success takes the place of the competitor, a temptation that must be resisted. Hockney's relationship to criticism, for example, becomes a lesson in indifference to the judgment of others.

Les critiques qui l'avaient dénigré l'année précédente comparèrent son new travail aux nénuphars de Monet. Rien que ça! Il fallait prendre garde à ne pas prêter plus d'attention à leurs éloges qu'à leurs attaques. This is a pleasure that is available to you in this series. David decided to choose: the pleasure, the work in the world, the unique beauty. Les mêmes critiques qui avaient établi équivalence entre plaisir et superficialité le portaient maintenant aux nues. Leur return paradoxal – or leur manque de cohérence – avait de quoi le satisfaire, mais il ne peignait pas pour eux: il ne desirait rien tant que se surprendre lui-même. [VDH]

The critics who had disparaged him the previous year compared his new work to Monet's water lilies. Nothing less! One had to be careful not to pay more attention to their praise than to their attacks. All that mattered was the joy he had felt while creating this series. David was certain of one thing: pleasure, in work as in life, was the only compass. The same critics who had equated pleasure with superficiality now praised him to the skies. Their paradoxical about-face—or their lack of consistency—had a certain satisfaction, but he didn't paint for them: he desired nothing more than to surprise himself.

The key term is "compass". ¹² [VDH]: Pleasure, not critical judgment, is Hockney's guiding principle. Cusset develops the ethical core of her novel here. Success and failure, praise and scathing reviews are equally external; what matters is solely the self-surprise within the work ("to surprise oneself"). ¹³ [VDH]). Reading this passage in contrast to Gaignault's tortoise fable, the difference between the two books becomes palpable. Gaignault explains Procktor's downfall, among other things, by the lack of recognition for his talent—the absence of praise wears him down. Cusset's Hockney is immune to precisely this weariness because he never made praise his measure of success. Thus, almost as in a controlled experiment, the two books provide two answers to the same question: What distinguishes the one who survives from the one who perishes? Gaignault answers with external circumstances—recognition, discipline, the luck of choosing the right geographical location. Cusset answers with an inner attitude: the decoupling of creation from external judgment.

It is worthwhile to consider both answers side by side, rather than pitting one against the other. Gaignault's Procktor chooses a classicist, unfashionable path and remains in London, while Hockney sets off for California and finds his bright, sun-drenched world there. In both books, the geographical decision becomes a fateful one. In Cusset's work, Hockney's move to Los Angeles appears "absurd" to his New York friends. ¹⁴ [VDH] mocked, in retrospect as "the best of his life" ¹⁵ [VDH]. For Gaignault, Procktor's clinging to Europe, to Venice, Tangier, the Grand Tour, is a noble and futile resistance against his time. The same movement—away from convention—leads one into the light and the other into the shadows. Therein lies the tragedy that Gaignault highlights: It is not the conformist who fails, but a second nonconformist whose stubbornness only falls more tragically.

Creation, desire, image: the double portrait as a common vanishing point

These two painters share more than just biography; they share a visual language in which homosexuality, desire, and portraiture intertwine. Cusset makes the emergence of this visual language the subject of one of her most compelling passages: her love for Peter and its transformation into an image.

You'll be able to see it in these paintings, you'll have a brilliant dream in the sky, you'll want to leave Peter and you'll want to sit on the chair, and you'll have the chance to have another look and to have the sex of the côté and the love of the other, etc Les deux ne pouvaient pas être réconciliés. Ilse rejoignaient que lorsqu'il était devant son chevalet, et il se sentait vivant et plein de désir alors qu'il peignait Le cha-cha-cha dansé aux petites heures du 24 mars 1961 […]. This is a tableau. C'était la vie. [VDH]

That was what he had wanted to put into his paintings: this burning desire within him, the desire for Peter's desire and the desire for his flesh, a desire that tore him apart, for on one side was sex and on the other love, and the two could not be reconciled. They only met when he stood before the easel, and he felt alive and full of longing while he painted. The Cha-Cha-Cha, danced in the early hours of March 24, 1961 painted […]. That wasn't a picture. That was life.

Cusset here formulates a theory of Hockney's art: The painting is the place where the incompatible in life – sexuality and love, "on the one hand sex and on the other love" – are reconciled. ¹⁶ [VDH] – for a moment, everything comes together. The divided desirer finds its unity before the easel. The final sentence: “That wasn’t a picture. That was life.” ¹⁷ [VDH] is the quintessence of Cusset's poetics: art is not a reflection of life, but its most intense form. Remarkably, Cusset places homosexual desire at the center of her work without explaining or justifying it; it is simply the material from which the paintings are made. The double portrait—the format for which Hockney became famous—appears in her work as a method of making a relationship visible, its tension, duration, or fragility, as in the portrait of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, which reveals "the depth of their relationship." ¹⁸ [VDH] reveals.

Gaignault highlights their shared artistic affinity, but interprets it as an indication, not as an inner life. His question is not how a painting is created, but who influenced whom – an art-historical, almost detective-like question. The friendship between the two is therefore described as an encounter between two outsiders, whose mutual recognition is marked by their shared difference.

Leur homosexualité, qu'ils assumaient sans enorgueillir comme d'un étendard et qu'ils avaient décelée l'un chez l'autre au premier regard, signait leur appartenance au clan des exclusive, des hors-la-loi, des différents, des étrangers aux other. Ils resteraient ainsi leur vie durant, solitaires et méfiants quant aux interpretations sémiologiques de leurs œuvres respectives, et aux modes de pensée de leurs temps. [PPH]

Their homosexuality, which they embraced without flaunting it like a banner, and which they recognized in each other at first sight, sealed their membership in the clan of the excluded, the outlaws, the different, the strangers to others. Thus they remained throughout their lives, lonely and distrustful of the semiological interpretations of their respective works and of the prevailing mindsets of their time.

Gaignault interprets homosexuality as a social sign – as belonging to the “clan of the excluded”. ¹⁹ [PPH], at a time when same-sex relationships were illegal in Great Britain. This historical dimension also resonates in Cusset's work, for example, when her young Hockney leafs through American men's magazines and wonders why something so beautiful must remain hidden; but Cusset narrates it as an inner experience, Gaignault as a structural characteristic of a generation. The difference between the two approaches emerges here in its purest form: Cusset depicts desire, Gaignault analyzes its social position. Both books recognize in the double portrait and the shared visual world the point at which Hockney and Procktor intersect—for Cusset, it is a wellspring of creativity, for Gaignault, a piece of evidence in the struggle for priority and influence.

The question of priority that Gaignault poses – “of Procktor or Hockney, who was the predecessor of the other?” ²⁰ [PPH] – is inconceivable in Cusset's work because her book presents Hockney not as one of a relative, but as a self-contained consciousness. Gaignault needs the comparison because his protagonist only exists in relation to others; Cusset avoids it because her protagonist exists for himself. This also reflects the difference in genre: the biographical novel relies on empathy with a self, the essay on comparison and proof.

Ekphrasis: the painted image in the written word

Both books describe paintings – but they do so with opposite urgency and for opposite purposes. Cusset uses ekphrasis to make the creative act visible from within: her descriptions of paintings are workshop descriptions, showing how a painting comes into being in the painter's mind. Gaignault, on the other hand, is forced to use ekphrasis because he lacks illustrations; his words must replace what the reader is not allowed to see. He turns this predicament into a method.

Cusset's ekphrastic highlight is the creation of the water paintings, the series that would make Hockney famous. Instead of describing the finished work, she depicts the technical and intellectual struggle with an impossible subject.

Il peignit l'eau. The movement of the water, sa transparency, has a similar style to the long lines, the water is jailed at the moment of the plunge, the trace of the corps is available from the surface. Comment représenter quelque chose qui était du mouvement pur et ne durait qu'une fraction d'instant, comme l'orgasme ? The servit de pinceaux fins et mit quinze jours de la concentration la plus absolute à peindre toutes les petites lignes de l'éclaboussure. Deux semaines pour quelque chose qui durait deux seconds. [VDH]

He painted the water. The movement of the water, its transparency, its shimmering, which he stylized with undulating lines, the fountain of water that shot up at the moment of immersion, the only trace of the body that had vanished beneath the surface. How could one depict something that was pure movement and lasted only a fraction of a second, like orgasm? He used fine brushes and devoted two weeks of intense concentration to painting all the tiny lines of the splash. Two weeks for something that lasted two seconds.

This ekphrasis is dynamic, not static. Cusset does not describe a given image, but rather the problem it solves: how to capture pure motion, a fraction of a second, within a stationary surface. The splash (“the splash”) ²¹ [VDH]) is the only trace of the vanished body—the image preserves an absence. The comparison to orgasm, succinctly and directly, connects the painterly task with Hockney's recurring theme of desire. And the final point—fourteen days of intense concentration for a two-second event—encapsulates Cusset's entire conception of art in a single proportion: the work is the slowing down, the perpetuation of the fleeting. The description of the painting here is simultaneously a description of creation; the how of painting, not the what of the painted, is central. Cusset proceeds similarly with La chambre, Tarzana, where the composition is taken from a Macy's advertisement and Peter's buttocks are "the center of the screen" ²² [VDH] occupied, or in the double portrait of Isherwood and Bachardy, whose dominant blue, geometric lines, and symbolic corn cob she examines element by element. The description always remains bound to Hockney's eye and hand.

Gaignault rarely describes a single image in detail; rather, he describes a painting technique and its significance. The central passage does not concern a work of art, but Procktor's decision to use watercolor – and, characteristically for Gaignault's documentary approach, it quotes the painter himself.

À la question de savoir pourquoi il avait choisi l'aquarelle comme medium principal, Procktor répondit à un magazine gay: "Il ya tellement de raisons à cela. Je suis fasciné par la télévision couleur. La manière dont la couleur est éclairée par-derrière et le fait qu'une personne, ou an object, reflecting a color plus intense à proximity… I'm also interested in the light – its sources, reflected and irised… And it makes the impression of the watercolor l'action from the ensemble. This is also immediately available. […] Je veux qu'on se souvienne de me comme le meilleur aquarellliste de mon temps. “[PPH]

When asked why he chose watercolor as his primary medium, Procktor told a gay magazine: “There are so many reasons. I’m fascinated by color television. The way color is backlit, and the fact that a person or object nearby reflects a more intense color… I’m also very interested in light—its sources, its reflection, its iridescence… And I like the pressure watercolor puts on me. There’s no time to hesitate because it dries so quickly. Thinking and acting go hand in hand. It’s so immediate. […] I want to be remembered as the best watercolorist of my time.”

Significantly, Gaignault doesn't provide the ekphrasis himself here, but leaves it to the painter's voice. Where Cusset recreates Hockney's inner experience in his own narrative prose, Gaignault lets Procktor lecture on his technique—light sources, reflections, iridescence, the speed of the drying water, the unity of thought and action. This is firsthand poetics, assembled like a piece of evidence. Gaignault then takes over the interpretive description, elevating the watercolor to the symbol of Procktor's entire existence: it is the supposedly obsolete, underestimated medium with which Procktor distinguished himself from his generation, and his watercolors flutter "in the wind like delicate silk banners." ²³ [PPH] – an image that intertwines the transience of technique with the transience of fame. For Gaignault, ekphrasis becomes a form of character interpretation: the delicate, quick-drying, and ephemeral watercolor paint is the material counterpart to a life that also faded. The ekphrastic references to El Greco and Parmigianino as influences serve less to enhance the perception of the image than to provide an art-historical framework – the same logic of comparison that underpins Gaignault's book as a whole.

Thus, the two ekphrastic methods relate to each other in the same way as the books themselves. Cusset's description of paintings is immersive and process-oriented; it places the reader at the easel and makes the painting process tangible. Gaignault's description of paintings is analytical and compensatory; it replaces the missing image with testimony and interpretation, transforming the technical description into an argument about character and fate. A bitter irony intensifies this contrast: Gaignault's book, as the publisher's note states, had to be published without any illustrations of the works—the very book about two painters contains no paintings. Here, ekphrasis is not merely decorative, but the only place where Procktor's paintings still exist at all. What is a literary device for Cusset becomes, for Gaignault, the work's survival mechanism in words.

Ethos and Conclusion: An Apology for Joy Against an Elegy of Oblivion

The two books diverge most clearly in their ethos—in the attitude they adopt toward their subject matter and toward life in general. Cusset's novel is an apology for the joy of living. Her Hockney survives heartbreak, illness, deafness, and grief because he chooses vitality; the blurb, which underpins the entire book, states that no one is attracted to sadness and melancholy, but rather to cheerfulness, strength, and happiness. This attitude even sustains the depiction of misfortune. When Hockney learns that he is going deaf, the book does not turn it into a lament, but rather a gesture of defiance.

Pour David one soul chose comptait: entendre la music avec laquelle il vivait du matin au soir dans son atelier et dans sa voiture. The command of the devices that Gregory has created is sexy after David has a pivoine rouge, but also has a bleu vif. Il n'y avait pas plus de raisons de se cacher d'être sourd que d'être homosexual. This positive attitude is available throughout the sienne and the rest. [VDH]

For David, only one thing mattered: listening to the music he lived with from morning till night in his studio and in his car. He ordered two devices, which Gregory declared very sexy after David had painted one peony red and the other a vibrant blue. There was no greater reason to hide his deafness than his homosexuality. This affirmative attitude had always been his and would remain so.

The painted hearing aid – peony red and vibrant blue – is a symbol for Cusset's entire Hockney oeuvre: what threatens him, he transforms into color and makes visible instead of concealing it. The parallel drawn by the text ("no greater reason to hide his deafness than his homosexuality") ²⁴ [VDH]), connects the rejection of shame over desire with the rejection of shame over disability. Both follow the same attitude to life, which the final sentence marks as permanent. Cusset's book is composed around this affirmation; even the years of the AIDS epidemic, which kill many of Hockney's friends and which the novel does not gloss over, culminate in the assertion that work, friendship, and beauty keep life bearable.

Gaignault's book ends in the opposite key, as an elegy. His last chapter places Procktor alongside Antoine-Jean Gros, David's pupil, who was celebrated, then ridiculed, forgotten, and drowned himself in the Seine; the farewell letter, found in a hat on the riverbank, provides the motto.

Patrick Procktor fut the heroes malheureux d'une amitié with David Hockney, a proximity tendre tournant au duel sans que ce dernier l'ait souhaité. […] À propos de son modèle, Massey avait cité l'écrivaine anglaise Hilary Mantel : “ Dès que nous mourons, nous entrons dans la fiction. Une fois que nous ne pouvons plus parler pour nous-mêmes, nous sommes interprétés. Quand on se souvient, on ne reproduit pas le passé, on le crée. “The vérité that récit s'attache à apporter is another form of reality, but it is also a plausible form. [PPH]

Patrick Procktor was the unfortunate hero of a friendship with David Hockney, a tender intimacy that turned into a duel against his will. […] Regarding her model, Massey quoted the English writer Hilary Mantel: “As soon as we die, we enter fiction. When we can no longer speak for ourselves, we are interpreted. When one remembers, one does not reproduce the past, one creates it.” The truth this account seeks to teach is a different form of reality, but an equally plausible one.

Here, Gaignault openly reflects on the epistemic position of his book. The coat quote—the dead enter fiction, they are interpreted, not reproduced—is simultaneously an admission and a justification. The essayist knows that he is not restoring Procktor, but creating him; his truth is “another form of reality.” ²⁵ [PPH], plausible, not provable. Thus, at the end, on the level of self-reflection, a kinship with Cusset returns: she, too, had declared in the preface that the facts were true, the feelings invented. Both books are aware of their construction. But they draw opposite conclusions from this knowledge. Cusset uses invention to illuminate a life from within; Gaignault uses it to allow a forgotten life to speak once more, in the awareness that it returns only as an interpretation.

Finally, it is noteworthy that Gaignault's book, in its very genesis, reflects the asymmetry it describes. The publisher's preface reports that the rights to the planned reproductions of the works were withdrawn shortly before printing, so the essay on two painters had to appear without a single one of their paintings. Whether one sees this, as the publisher suggests, as an attempt to remove Procktor "from the official history of painting" ²⁶ [PPH] to erase, or simply a legal precaution—the effect doubles the point of the book: Procktor remains invisible, even where one would have wanted to make him visible. Cusset's Hockney doesn't have this problem; his paintings hang in museums around the world, and her book can take them for granted. Even in their material conditions of existence, the two volumes are what their subjects are: one secure and present, the other threatened and dependent on the mere word.

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The most striking confirmation of this entire investigation comes from a finding that only emerges when comparing the specific works mentioned: Both books discuss the same Hockney paintings—and interpret them in opposing ways. Two key works, in particular, are where the books overlap: "A Bigger Splash" (and the film of the same name by Jack Hazan) and "Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)," which Cusset calls "Portrait d'un artiste." Added to this is the double-portrait technique that both books employ in their analysis of the couples Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark, and Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. That two such differently structured books stop at the same paintings is no coincidence: These are the works in which Hockney's art and his love life are most closely intertwined. But it is precisely here that the interpretations diverge.

Let's take "Portrait of an Artist". Cusset tells the story of the painting from the inside, as the wound of the abandoned painter, and she follows his fate as a commodity with indignation.

The apprit que l'homme qui acheté Portrait of an artist à New York en se faisant passer pour un Collecteur privé venait de les revendre en Allemagne trois fois plus cher: ce tableau il avait laissé son âme était devenu the object d'une speculation. [VDH]

He learned that the man who Portrait of an artist Having bought it in New York by posing as a private collector, he had just resold it to Germany for three times the price: This painting, in which he had left his soul, had become the subject of speculation.

For Cusset, the painting is a piece of Hockney himself – “this painting in which he had left his soul.” ²⁷ [VDH] –, and its resale constitutes a violation of intimacy. The pain of the separation from Peter and the disgust with the art market merge into one; the work remains bound to the person.

Gaignault discusses the same image in interview mode – letting Hockney himself speak about the sales record – and transforms it into an economics of numbers.

This table was created for an exhibition in London. Sa vente m'avait rapporté quatorze mille dollars. The table was sold in 2018 plus four millions of dollars […], but it is also available again in the first edition. [PPH]

I painted this picture for an exhibition in London. Its sale earned me fourteen thousand dollars. The painting sold for over ninety million dollars in 2018 […], so you could say I got a crumb back then.

Where Cusset depicts the wounded soul, Gaignault takes stock: fourteen thousand dollars then, over ninety million later. The same painting becomes, for one, a symbol of spiritual dispossession, for the other, proof of the exponential logic of fame and price that Hockney embodies and Procktor never achieves. It is the difference between a book that asks "what a painting means to the painter" and one that asks "what a painting reveals about the painter's position in the world."

The contrast becomes even more pronounced in "A Bigger Splash." Hazan's film shows the same scenes—Hockney, Peter Schlesinger, Celia, Mo, the blue-tiled bathtub at Powis Terrace—but the two books extract opposing interpretations. Cusset reads the film as a betrayal of Hockney's intimacy; the scene in which Peter is seen with another man hits the painter like a barrage of stones, and his reaction is a retreat into the private sphere: "I am not an actor." ²⁸ [VDH]. For her, the film is an intrusion into the inner sanctum, against which the character seals herself off. Gaignault, on the other hand, reads the exact same film as a document of a shattered doppelgänger relationship – one in which not Peter, but Procktor is the real loser.

It is possible to have the act of décès de leur existence commune en visionnant A Bigger Splash, où celui qui fut the premier de cordée n'est plus que l'ombre à peine visible de son acolyte loin au-dessus de lui, grimpant vers les cimes ensoleillées de la renown universale. [PPH]

One can read the death certificate of their shared existence by... A Bigger Splash looks at the man who was once first on the rope, in which he is now only the barely visible shadow of his companion, high above him, ascending to the sunny peaks of worldwide fame.

For Cusset, "A Bigger Splash" is the story of David and Peter; for Gaignault, the story of David and Patrick. The same celluloid, the same images – and yet one book sees it as a betrayal of love, the other as a "death certificate." ²⁹ [PPH] the friendship of two painters, one of whom fades into the shadow of the other. The mountaineering painting – the former “First on the Rope” ³⁰ [PPH], now only shadows – Gaignault sums up his entire book in a metaphor: Procktor was ahead for a time before Hockney surpassed him.

This leads to the conclusion of the text comparison. The overlap between the works discussed is not a minor point, but rather the most precise evidence of the fundamental difference between the two books. Where the subjects are identical, the difference in methods becomes purely measurable—almost like in a controlled experiment where only one variable changes: the perspective. Cusset approaches the painting from within, from the perspective of the experiencing, desiring, wounded painter; the work remains an expression of a soul. Gaignault approaches the same painting from without, from the market, from posthumous fame, from rivalry; the work becomes an indication in a story of rise and fall. For Cusset, "Portrait of an Artist" means: a person has left their soul here. For Gaignault, it means: fourteen thousand versus ninety million. For Cusset, "A Bigger Splash" means: the betrayal of a love. For Gaignault: the death of a friendship. The same Hockney, the same images – and two truths that don't contradict each other, but rather complement one another: the truth of someone who experiences life from within, and the truth of someone who misses it from the outside. It is precisely in this dual legibility of a single body of work that the value lies, a value revealed only by comparing the two books.

Cusset and Gaignault write about the same painter and create two hardly comparable books. VDH is an introspective biographical novel that constructs its subject from the perspective of will, desire, and joie de vivre, culminating in affirmation; art appears as life's most intense expression, color as the answer to every threat. PPH is an essayistic investigation that uses Hockney only as a light source to measure the shadow of a forgotten figure; art appears here as a stage for influence, rivalry, and posthumous fame, and the book ends where its protagonist ends, in elegiac tones.

The most productive aspect of this comparison lies in the fact that both books pose the same question—why one rises and the other falls—and answer it irreconcilably. Gaignault seeks the answer externally, in recognition, discipline, geographical luck, and the wear and tear of celebration. Cusset seeks it internally, in decoupling creation from external judgment, in pleasure as the sole compass. Between the Apology of Joy and the Elegy of Oblivion lies not only a difference in mood, but also in two concepts of truth: the truth of the experienced moment and the truth of the subsequently interpreted trace. Even where both books do the same thing—translating images into language—this contrast diverges: Cusset's ekphrasis allows the reader to experience painting firsthand, while Gaignault's must replace the lost image and interpret it simultaneously. Hockney, the painter who lives while writing, stands between the two—the subject of one book, the vanishing point of the other—and, precisely because he is affected so differently from two sides, defies any single definition.