Catherine Cuset

Both books revolve around David Hockney, yet approach him from opposite angles: Catherine Cusset's "Vie de David Hockney" (Gallimard, 2018), a biographical novel, tells the painter's life from within—from his Bradford childhood, where rusty metal turns a brilliant red under his father's brush and "the world changes color," to his late mastery—carried by free indirect discourse that allows the narrator to disappear behind the character and makes Hockney's desires, defiance, and joie de vivre the true substance; Fabrice Gaignault's "Patrick Procktor, le secret de David Hockney" (Séguier, 2022), on the other hand, approaches him from the periphery, as an essayistic investigation into the forgotten friend, rival, and "twin" Patrick Procktor, who was once ahead and ultimately died penniless and forgotten, while Hockney rose to become the world's most expensive living painter. This interpretation contrasts the two books – through narrative perspective, character construction, the relationship between success and failure, the portrayal of creation and homosexuality, ekphrasis, and ultimately the fact that both discuss the same key works, "A Bigger Splash" and "Portrait of an Artist." These identical images reveal how two irreconcilable truths emerge: that of life, experienced from within, and that of posthumous fame, measured from without. The scope of this comparison is outlined by the question of why, of two closely related talents, one ascends to the heights of auction success while the other sinks into anonymity – and what it reveals about writing itself when an apology for joy and an elegy for forgetting both contemplate the same painter.