SALT OF THE EARTH
Sir Titus Salt created the utopian “Model Village” of Saltaire just outside Bradford in the 19th century to house his millworkers. Today it’s home to the world’s largest private collection of works by artist and former Bradford boy David Hockney, who turns 70 this month IF YOU WERE TRYING to identify an inspiring Victorian utopia, the western fringes of Bradford just a few [...]
Sir Titus Salt created the utopian “Model Village” of Saltaire just
outside Bradford in the 19th century to house his millworkers. Today
it’s home to the world’s largest private collection of works by artist
and former Bradford boy David Hockney, who turns 70 this month
alt="Stephen Hockney and Bradford" class="picright">
WERE TRYING
to identify an inspiring
Victorian utopia, the western fringes of Bradford just
a few miles from Leeds Bradford Airport probably
wouldn’t be the first place to spring to mind. But
that’s precisely what Saltaire is. And, as it happens,
it’s now also home to the world’s largest private
collection of works by former Bradford boy David
Hockney, who celebrates his 70th birthday on 9 July.
The career of the tousled-haired, bespectacled artist
that began by epitomising the Swinging Sixties is still
evolving today. Arguably, his creations have a wider
appeal than those of any other living British artist.
So it’s rather fitting that they are such a central
part of Saltaire. Now a designated UNESCO World
Heritage Site, Saltaire remains one of the finest
examples anywhere of an industrial village. Created
by textile magnate Sir Titus Salt for his millworkers
from 1853, it’s often referred to as the Model Village.
For no dark satanic mill scene was this: all was
sanitation, wellbeing and neat order set in a green
valley, a paradise light years away from the polluted,
overcrowded, disease-ridden Bradford that existed
in the early 19th century.
alt="Stephen Hockney and Bradford" class="picright">Bradford,
of course, has improved and changed
immeasurably with the times, but Saltaire remains an
almost miraculous survival, embodying an industrial
magnate’s good intentions towards his workers. He
housed them in cottages that were far superior to
the back-to-backs of Bradford with running water,
for instance and provided a library, a billiard room,
a laboratory, a concert hall, a gymnasium, allotments
and a park but no pubs (which he saw as potential
centres for social unrest). A stroll around the grid of
streets takes you past the ornate Gothic almshouses,
the Victoria Hall with its astonishing collection of
dozens of Victorian harmoniums and reed organs
visitors are encouraged to play these then around
the imposing United Reformed Church, where Salt
was buried in 1876, and to the vast, almost palatial
Salts Mill, overlooking the Leeds and Liverpool
Canal. The towpath now doubles as National Cycle
Network Route 69.
alt="Stephen Hockney and Bradford" class="picright">
MILL IS THE
heart and soul of the village.
Evoking an Italian Renaissance palace in many of its
details, it opened in 1853, and its austerity and scale can appear
intimidating from the outside. Step
inside, though, and it’s a different world a joyously
busy place. Hockney grew up in nearby Bradford and
attended the Bradford School of Art. Local businessman
Jonathan Silver, a good friend of his, bought the empty
mill back in 1987 and began to fill it with Hockney’s
art. The two had attended the same Bradford Grammar
School and first met in the 1960s, when the 14-year-
old Silver asked Hockney to design a cover for the
school magazine, given that he was an old boy.
alt="Stephen Hockney and Bradford" class="picright">Downstairs,
the 1853 Gallery reveals iron pillars
supporting a vaulted brick ceiling: it’s hugely long,
filled not only with Hockney pictures but also books
on art and design, paints and brushes, interspersed
with the odd anvil and dentist’s chair. Hockney is a
man who sketches constantly: “Most artists work all
the time… especially the good artists… What else is there to do?”
It’s the simple which interests him, and
he experiments with different mediums. His photo
collages made up of normal-sized snaps subtly distort
the perspective and make something extra out of
an ordinary scene, like his mother in a room in Los
Angeles against a background of shag-pile carpet and
a poinsettia, with Hockney’s feet in paint-stained
plimsolls just in view to the fore. Just off the main
1853 Gallery is an exhibition about the development
of Saltaire, with Sir Titus’ silver tea set and a display
of family letters. In fact, Hockneys are everywhere in
this building, dotted between sales areas for outdoor
equipment, antiques and home furnishings. This isn’t
a hushed gallery but more of a space which melds art
displays and meeting, eating and shopping.
alt="Stephen Hockney and Bradford" class="picright">Gallery
Two, on the second floor of the mill, has
some of the most personal Hockneys: drawings of his mother, Laura, in
extreme old age, a glowing
recreation of Salts Mill and the allotments and houses
of Saltaire that Silver asked for when dying of cancer
in 1997, a brilliantly coloured landscape of the route
between Bradford and Bridlington that Hockney takes
to see his family and in black-and-white contrast
the faxed picture Tennis, transmitted to Salts Mill from
his home in California at an artistic “happening” one
evening in 1989 in the mill. Silver put up a stepladder
and assembled the 144 panels according to Hockney’s
instructions as the fax machine spewed them out
downstairs. Each A4 sheet has the transmission details
along the top, just like any office fax.
Up on the third floor Hockney’s opera set designs
include scaled-down versions of his sets for the
Glyndebourne productions of Mozart’s The Magic
Flute and Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. The Rake
was brilliantly conceived loosely around Hogarth’s
satirical engravings, and each successive scene had
less and less colour as the Rake’s soul was gradually
drained out of him by the Devil.
alt="Stephen Hockney and Bradford" class="picright">The
walls of the café are crammed with, as
the
poster nicely understates: “Some local snaps by
David Hockney, a local artist”, his 35mm shots
of the surrounding area and people enlarged and pasted together,
displayed informally among the
plastic high chairs and other café paraphernalia.
A life-sized photo of Hockney, in well-worn cords,
cotton jacket and pullover, bears his handwritten
message: “Welcome to the new show. Sorry I’m
not here I’m busy in LA. Much love, David H.” The
paper napkins and sugar sachets bear the trademark
line drawing of Hockney’s dachshund Boodge.
Hockney moved to California in 1964: seeing the
sun-drenched landscape of swimming pools and
freeways, he declared: “My God, this place needs
its Piranesi [referring to the 18th-century Italian
engraver who depicted the glories of Ancient Rome]
so here I am.” In this new environment he could
express his homosexuality, about which he was
reticent during his youth in Bradford, and famously
depicted gay life in relaxed, domestic settings.
alt="Stephen Hockney and Bradford" class="picright">“
CAN TAKE
the man out of Yorkshire, but
you can’t take Yorkshire out of the man,” Jonathan
Silver’s brother Robin notes about Hockney’s
attachment to his roots. He observes that for
Hockney growing up in Bradford in the 1950s it
would have been like living in a Lowry painting: it
was then much darker and dominated by big,
smoke-blackened mills.
Hockney still paints scenes of Yorkshire, but
recent paintings of his home county, it should be
mentioned, are full of colour and peace.
