David Hockney and Me: In Search of Lost Time In the Fish and Chip Shop
This is a story about David Hockney, his first art dealer, a fish and chip shop in Bradford, desire, insomnia, financial conflict and marital jeopardy — and it begins in the coffee bar of a London auction house.
To accompany the previews of its big sales, Christie’s in St James’s sometimes offers free coffee to its staff and clients. It’s always expertly made, and anyone may walk in off the street to enjoy this hospitality before perusing the works in upcoming auctions. Last September, suitably caffeinated, I toured a display of highlights from its imminent print sale, a gallery brimming with wonders: Picasso, Warhol, Haring, Freud, Hockney. There were six Hockneys in all, and one of them affected me like no other artwork ever had before. It wasn’t a particularly great piece; it wasn’t even in great condition. It was a lithograph Hockney made in 1954 while a student at Bradford School of Art, titled “Fish and Chip Shop”. Black and greenish-yellow; about 17 x 15 inches; one of probably five or six copies in existence. The lithograph was in a thin, silvery frame. The estimate was £15,000 to £20,000.
This wasn’t the sort of Hockney you’d easily recognise; it was closer to the early-20th-century French school than to anything made around a Los Angeles pool. But to me it was the only Hockney worth bothering with, and I found it utterly, magically transporting. Specifically, it transported me to a warm afternoon 32 years before, a day tinged with both joy and regret. The regret was deep and lasting, and at Christie’s the wound was reopened.
In July 1992, the art dealer John Kasmin was holding his last show in Cork Street, the gallery row behind the Royal Academy of Arts. Like much else that year, the art world was in the doldrums. Kasmin’s decision to pack up and sell from home marked a symbolically momentous occasion, and I had made an appointment to visit him.
Kasmin had been on the scene for 30 years, starting out in New Bond Street in the early 1960s. He had promoted and represented a great array of famous and brilliant artists in this time: Francis Bacon, Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella. More than that, he was himself a starry fixture, hanging out with London’s most fashionable and travelling with Bruce Chatwin; in 1992, he was spending an awful lot of time at funerals for those who had died of Aids. But he’d always be linked with one name above all others: David Hockney, whom he had championed as an unknown. Kasmin held Hockney’s first ever solo exhibition, too, where you could pick up a large painting for low hundreds.
For his final show, Kasmin had decided to offer a single work by each of the key figures he’d heralded over the years. The Hockney he had chosen was one of his earliest prints, a lithograph showing a young boy, probably the artist himself, leaning on the edge of the counter of his local chippy, The Sea Catch in Eccleshill. A man called Hayden Smith is at the fryer, while his wife, Janet, is busy with her hands in the middle of the counter, possibly wrapping a takeaway in newspaper. It was, of course, “Fish and Chip Shop”. I thought it was wonderful.
“I thought, in a rather kinky show, why not have a kinky Hockney?” said Kasmin. “I don’t expect anyone to just walk in off the street and buy it. It’s very difficult to know how to price it. It’s just a schoolboy work. You can’t say it’s great. It’s mostly enjoyable in the light of what he later became.”
He then settled on a price and, with a blue Bic, he wrote £6,000 on a card that he stuck to the wall.
Kasmin has always loved kinky. A small man, punchy and fit at 57, he was doing his final hanging bare-chested and shoeless. I was 32, precisely half my current age. I was an ambitious journalist, and the ambition was to get as many good stories as I could into The Independent on Sunday’s exemplary Review section. I asked Kasmin about the early years. He said, “There was nothing else to do but screw in those days. Certainly little business. If you sold one picture a week you were doing well.” He told me he’d miss having a place where people could drop by and see what he had to offer. If he got bored, he thought he might open a café. We chatted like this for a while. What was looking like a standard piece of reporting turned into a much better one when an unexpected visitor arrived to pay his respects.
Hockney looks like Hockney: beige suit, red tie with green shirt, light-blue raincoat, lime-green umbrella, tortoiseshell glasses, a hearing aid that was half bright-blue and half bright-red. He is over from LA for three weeks to see his mother and receive an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art.
“Being a doctor is not that much use really,” he reasons. “You still can’t write prescriptions for your own drugs. Someone asked me how it felt. I said, ‘Take two aspirins and call me in the morning.’”
They move into Kasmin’s office. Hockney pours himself a mineral water and apologises for being too tired to attend the private view later in the day. The two old friends catch up on matters both substantial and quotidian. I can hardly believe my luck.
David Hockney (patting Kasmin’s stomach): You’re exercising, are you?
John Kasmin: I’ve just been fed up by an old friend.
Hockney: You should exercise.
Kasmin: I’ve taken up ice cream since I gave up smoking and drinking.
Hockney (horrified): You’d be better off smoking than having ice cream.
Kasmin: I like the ice cream, thank you.
Hockney: It’s very bad for you.
Kasmin: I only eat it every now and then.
Hockney: It’s solid fat!
Kasmin: I was just staying with Linda Adams, the Deputy Chief Whip’s wife. She fed me up like crazy. Ice cream, summer pudding. So I’m looking fatter than usual.
Hockney: You ought to look after yourself.
Kasmin: Do you look after yourself in Los Angeles?
Hockney (lighting another cigarette, a Camel): Well… these are vegetarian cigarettes.
They talk about the dramatic rise in prices for Hockney’s art, and I ask Kasmin whether there’s any of his work he doesn’t like.
Kasmin: Of course. I go through periods when I don’t like some of the stuff at all. But I don’t actually hate it. Sometimes, David doesn’t like it, but he only doesn’t like it afterwards. David changes so much… it would be impossible for one person to like everything he does.
Hockney: The only person who likes all kinds of art is an auctioneer.
Kasmin: Or your mother.
Hockney: Oh, yes, my mother.
They wander from the office and Hockney settles by “Fish and Chip Shop”.
Kasmin: I always wondered, was that boy meant to be you, David? An idealised you?
Hockney: Kind of. Yes, I’m always leaning like that. It was always the husband who did the frying and the woman who did the serving. When I was younger, I used to go into fish and chip shops late at night and say, “Got any chips left?” and when they said “yes”, I’d say: “Well, it’s your own fault for cooking too many.”
Kasmin (examining print): You don’t get vinegar shakers like that any more.
Hockney: You do in Bridlington.
Kasmin: The whole thing has a Vuillard feel to it.
Hockney: Any student doing a print like that in those days made it look like Vuillard.
Kasmin: Have you got a copy of it?
Hockney: I think so. Had to buy it, though.
Before he leaves, Hockney takes one last look around the gallery and shakes his friend’s hand. He says, “Goodbye, Kas. I hope you sell something.”
One of the things that Kasmin could have sold that day was “Fish and Chip Shop”. To me. I could have afforded it; that is to say, I could have put it on my credit card and paid for it slowly. But I left empty-handed. When I went back a few days later, there was a red dot beside it.
The cruellest thing about regret is that it haunts you in unusual places at unexpected times, an aspect it shares with heartbreak and grief. Over the years, I have thought about that picture often. Whenever I looked at “Fish and Chip Shop” online, I felt the same combination of joy and sadness. I had followed its fate at various auction houses over the years. One of the prints came up for sale every few years, the hammer prices rising by a few thousand each time. Some of the sales I only learned about after the event, but on the two occasions I had the chance to bid, I had always declined. There were always the usual priorities: children, mortgage, holidays. The money for art just wasn’t there, and each time I regretted it.
Why was it so important to me? I’d never been to Bradford; I wasn’t even mad for fish and chips. The picture reflected the passing of time — Hockney’s and mine — so melancholy played a part. Clearly, it was my association with both the artist and the dealer, and my presence at that precise moment when both of them were talking about the thing I could have bought and loved and lived with for more than 30 years. Others who saw it would have loved it, too. I have interviewed Hockney at length twice since then, and I never mentioned the print (lithography had long been supplanted by oils and his iPad). But my failure to buy it at Kasmin’s — my combined lack of judgement and courage — was always on my mind. I had failed the Eminem test: “If you had one shot…”
Of course, it being a print — and Kasmin thought that rather than five or six, Hockney may have made as many as 10 of them — that shot would come again. And now, here I am in Christie’s, wondering. Fate had once again decreed that I’d be led to it — would fate once again decide its destination? I ask Ben Smith, a technician at the auction house, to take a photo of me standing beside the print. I send it to my wife, Justine, with the text: “The story continues…” She messages back: “Intriguing.”
A few days later, I’m standing in front of the print again, this time in the company of Alexandra Gill, a senior specialist in Christie’s print department who is overseeing the sale. I tell her the story of Kasmin and the one that got away, and she says that she too remembered things she had missed out on over the years. “A little dining-room table and an artist’s self-portrait. I was too young to afford it.”
Smith removes the print from the frame — it’s the first time I’ve seen it naked. Gill mentions that this particular copy has been in private hands for a while; she had also handled the sale, in 2017, of a copy that used to hang in The Sea Catch itself, a gift from Hockney to the owners. That one had sold for £18,750. “They’re all slightly different,” she says. “They do vary in colour. This is a particularly good one, a strong olive-green.”
Fish & Chip Shop (1954) Poster
It is indeed a vivid impression. The edges of the print have been trimmed a few millimetres on three sides, presumably by the artist, and there is some pale-brown staining in the left and lower sections. Gill’s official condition report also describes a little flattened creasing across the sheet, three small repaired incisions that were possibly the result of registration in the printing, and a little paper tape at various places along the back. But it was “in generally good condition”, and certainly within the acceptable range of something produced while Hockney was still a student. I wonder whether this was the exact same copy I’d seen at Kasmin’s gallery 32 years before.
For Gill, the print represents an exciting insight into a young artist at the beginning of his career. “What is really clear is that he already had an affinity with print-making. You can see the personalities. He’s playing around here, look, with the design on her dress, and the graininess here, and these little square tiles are absolutely superb. It’s pretty masterful at a young age.”
I tell her I intend to bid on it at the starting price of £14,000, although I imagine it would go for a lot more than that. She wishes me good luck; she hopes — for her client’s sake — that I am right.
I place my bid online the following day. The auction will be conducted online only, ending a week later. In other words, there will be no drama with an auctioneer and a gavel, and no chance for me to see whom I may be up against. Surely there can be no one who would want “Fish and Chip Shop” more than me, although there would be many collectors and dealers for whom the financial commitment wouldn’t be such a stretch.
With a week to go, I am feeling confident. Confident, alas, that I will be outbid; that with the buyer’s premium and VAT on top, making a total of £17,600, the cost will be more than I can really afford to spend on art. But wouldn’t that always be a good excuse not to get it?
It was still about priorities. Among the many things competing for attention, there is a small leak in the roof that requires fixing, especially with winter coming; there is a wooden deck to make less treacherous; there is all the other mess of bills and holidays and life. And then there is the priority of my wife. Justine likes the print, but not as much as me (without the personal connection, how could she?). She is supportive but realistic. She thinks that spending £18,000 on art at the present moment is complete folly, hubris born of nostalgia and ego. I know that I would never forgive myself if I let it go again without trying, but I also don’t want to create the sort of financial fissure between us that will make any enjoyment of looking at “Fish and Chip Shop” in our home impossible. I tell her that it is 99 per cent certain I will be outbid. That conviction is genuine; the percentage is pure conjecture. I also say that when someone outbids me, I will not bid again.
With six days to go, I’m still the highest bidder on the piece (or, as it says on the website, “the bid is with you”).
With five days to go, I’m still the highest bidder. So, I decide, with three days to go, to visit the print again. I consider that, although it is still hanging on the wall at Christie’s, near a Hockney swimming pool and Lucian Freud’s etching of a dog named Pluto, it will soon be mine, or ours, as I am still the highest bidder. That night, I will lose a little sleep.
With two days to go, there is still only one bid registered, and that is mine, so I’m still the highest bidder. The 99 per cent guarantee is edging closer towards 50:50, which is both wonderful and unnerving at the same time.
With one day to go, the same. The sale will end on Thursday 26 September at 2.12pm. It is Lot 11 in a 110-lot sale. One of the other pieces, a set of Warhol screenprints of Mao Zedong, already has a bid of £300,000, which helps me regard my possible acquisition as a bargain. It’s now 60:40 in my favour, I think. I have a conversation with Justine that begins: “How do you feel about owning a Hockney?”
When I wake up on the day of the sale, after four hours’ sleep, the bid is still with me.
I’m on a train when I receive an automated text: “You are outbid on Lot 11.” Then an email lands, inviting me to bid again. There are about three hours to go. I email Justine and she replies: “Phew. And disappointed. And phew. So complicated!!” If I do place another bid, then the total cost, including buyer’s premium and VAT, will exceed £21,600.
For the remainder of the journey, I think about what the print means to me. I imagine a teenage Hockney in Bradford, spreading the ink ready for the press. I think about the roof that still needs to be retiled. I think about my marriage. I think about the ending of this story. I check the Christie’s website and find a descending digital clock. I take a screenshot that shows 16 minutes and six seconds left on the countdown, and beneath it the incessant reminder: “You’ve been outbid.” In red.
It is too much. I can’t do it. I’ll have to let it go again. A little over three hours later, “Fish and Chip Shop” sells for £18,900.
It has taken me a while to process it all, but my wife was right — phew, disappointed, it’s
complicated. Other truths have also emerged.
Hockney is 87; Kasmin is 90; I’m 64. The shop where Hockney went for late-night chips has long gone, but “Fish and Chip Shop” just gets better and better with age.
There’s always next time, if I live that long and the world doesn’t explode.
I am still married, happily.
And finally: you can try to buy a print by a famous and hugely popular artist, and you can admire it for its beauty and all the prodigious technical skill that created it, but, no matter the cost and the outcome, you can never be 32 again in the middle of a special London summer.
A new retrospective, David Hockney 25, will open at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, from 9 April to 31 August 2025
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