David Hockney, O.M., C.H., R.A. (b. 1937)

Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more

PROPERTY FROM THE PETER LANGAN COLLECTION PETER LANGAN: RESTAURATEUR, COLLECTOR OF PAINTINGS, FRIEND 'It is in a mood of considerable melancholy that I write of Peter Langan and his pictures on the point of their dispersal, for I had much to do with his forming what was less a collection (a term that suggests aesthetic discipline, intellectual restraint and, perhaps, a gloss of scholarship), than a pragmatic accumulation of canvases bought for the square footage that they were to cover, paintings that he likes, and those acquired willy-nilly from their painters in exchange for food. As almost a quarter of a century has passed since his death in December 1988, it is perhaps necessary to recall that he was then the most notorious of London's restaurateurs, for few under fifty will remember the man. Given in his early days to wandering between his tables in a bloody apron, occasionally with a meat cleaver in one hand, always with a brandy glass of Löwenbrau in the other, 'How was the food, what did you order?' he might ask, and once I heard a diner reply 'Oh some kind of shit - shit with gravy, I think.' Later he became very much the owner, the portly man in the increasingly crumpled white suit holding court at the always reserved table by the door, at which brash celebrities were pleased to sit and be insulted, and from which gentler souls would flee when conversation became speculatively lubricious - as it always did, for sex was always on Peter's mind. We met in 1966, when he was only 23 but, heavily built and already soaked in alcohol, looked every year of the 47 that he was to live, looking always much the same, ageing further not at all. He had just become a partner in the first Odin's in Devonshire Street, St. Marylebone, turning it from an unremarkable London café into a fashionable bistro where such words as escargots, meunière and Richlieu (sic) jostled Irish peasant food, and the walls were hung with pictures. These he took from such eximious painters as Hockney, Procktor and Kitaj in exchange for food, and there can be no doubt that though these bargains restricted his cash-flow at the time, he got far the better part of the bargain, not only as investments, but in that their painters' frequent presence in the little restaurant with their wives and friends and catamites attracted other diners - his tables were never empty. Far more paintings came from the scruffy shop next door, The Fine Art Gallery, run by Nicholas Vilag, an engaging Hungarian rogue, where wretched imitators of Monet and Sisley rubbed shoulders with those of Wilson Steer and Augustus John, and all the signatures were false, copied from a lexicon by a leading member of the Croydon School of Art. Eventually, even Peter's untutored eye could see that something was amiss with them and it was then, after an encounter in the gallery, that he turned to me. Peter at that time had no money, but in the Sixties he hardly needed it, for paintings where then plentiful and cheap. I taught him not to be oppressed by the red velvet pomp and splendour of Bond Street dealers, weaned him onto the London auction houses and demonstrated the virtues of the then infant market in earlier 20th century British art, showing him Sickert, Gilman, Gore and their contemporaries, in whom a number of London dealers were already moderately interested, and the even more tempting field (in terms of price) of paintings that were in some sense off-beat in a painter's work, or good examples by painters out of fashion. Of the former, Peter's purchase from Agnew's in 1972 of Harold Gilman's Negro Gardener (perhaps the only finished record of his visit to the United States in 1905) is a daring example, and of the latter, subsequent exhibitions that have included works by Henry Tonks, Mark Gertler, John Lavery, Adrian Stokes and Alfred East have proved the point. The opening next door, in 1973, of the second, much larger and grander Odin's, a fully-fledged restaurant far more formal than the bistro, demanded many more pictures and there was a flurry of purchases, particularly of large canvases, among them the Westall and the largest painting ever executed by Laura Knight, but Peter, seeking intimacy for the smaller tables, also demanded smaller paintings. I introduced him to Eliot Hodgkin, an old friend, from whom he bought four small still lifes of fruit, vegetables and flowers. Quiet, serious and profoundly honest in all his responses, Eliot afterwards said that he found it difficult to believe that anyone so boorish could understand or appreciate his work - or nay paintings, for that matter - and asked that I should not again bring Peter to the house; I could never persuade him to eat in Odin's, and when he and Peter met in my house over dinner, Eliot said, by no means sotto voce, 'I knew I should have asked who else was coming'. I am uncertain that Peter, after two troubled years of digging new drains, installing ventilation shafts and bowing to the conflicting commands of every possible planning and licensing authority, sufficient payment for which was never generated by Odin's I, cared much for Odin's II. As far as paintings were concerned, he achieved perfectly the Langan Look of an eclectic accumulation over many years, the choice idiosyncratic, even whimsical, but the clientele that the restaurant attracted he damned as 'weekend wankers' and, leaving it to run itself (which it did very well), he moved on and in 1976 converted the exhausted and distinctly mephitic Coq d'Or in Stratton Street into Langan's Brasserie. As he had too little money to buy the many pictures required to give it family resemblance to Odin's II, I lent him oddments by Duncan Grant and other Bloomsbury painters, by Orpen, Sickert, Algernon Newton and Philip Naviasky that more or less conformed to his pattern of collecting; these he replaced and returned over a period of years, though one or two went astray - as is always the way of borrowed things. The ground floor of the Brasserie, opened in September 1976, was an immediate success, but Peter could not, at first, decide what to do with the oddly unwelcoming upper room, and for three years it lay dormant, retaining the old stale stinks of the Coq d'Or. Then he decided that Patrick Procktor, close friend for more than a decade, should paint murals of Venice on its walls - not the high summer Venice of the 18th century Grand Tourist, but a Lenten Venice, a February Filldyke Venice, shrouded and glaucous. Patrick was the perfect painter for a Venice misty and mysterious, but he preferred cool clarity and did not give Peter what he wanted; with coats of varnish the colour of tobacco that muted Patrick's vision, vandalism was Peter's furious response. Their long friendship did not survive what Patrick called Peter's 'buggering up'. Peter learned to be, for the most part, a careful buyer, perhaps less careful in Bond Street than with the lesser dealers from whom he bought his bargains. Well before auctions he determined his bids and rarely went beyond them unless on the wrong foot; only twice, as far as I know, did he break this rule, the first when, convinced that he had placed a winning bet on a horse, he bought a pair of beach scenes by John Noble for the then absurdly high sum of £1,240 (the horse came second), the second when, at Sotheby's and profoundly drunk, he paid a bankrupting £40,000 for a ruined 16th century Italian portrait, on both occasions for no better reasons than that he did not wish to be seen publicly outbid. I discovered later that there were no other bidders for the portrait (he was bidding against a preposterous reserve) and Sotheby's were as surprised as he - but they made him pay and for the next restaurant, a forgotten failure, his purse worse than empty, he was reduced to framing exhibition posters flamboyantly signed by himself. Now that his pictures are for sale I wonder how much his ownership is worth in terms of provenance; nostalgia may play a part for those of my generation who knew Peter and his restaurants well, but in half a century will anyone care that these paintings once belonged to him and hung in one of his renowned establishments for the brief pleasure of celebrities and weekend wankers? Perhaps they will: Peter may well survive on his own account as one of the more outrageous figures of the Eighties, a wild Bohemian in Thatcher's decade of middle-class provincial politics, and he will certainly survive as an attachment to David Hockney, playing his part as patron and friend in every honest biography of the painter and every catalogue raisonné of his work - though to me the friendship always seemed one-sided, passionately loyal on Peter's side, but calculated on Hockney's and, in the end, discarded. It is from Hockney's portraits, drawn and painted over two decades or so, that posterity will know Peter's physical looks, but not his soul, and his portrayal of him in 1984 (still in the painter's possession) was a dreadful mocking dismemberment (literally so, painted on eight separate small canvases) of a man who had long been his devoted friend and of whom he had earlier drawn uncaricatural truths of exquisite reality. Perhaps Peter has the last laugh - nothing he bought is worth as much as the paintings and drawings accepted in exchange for food and the famous Glyndebourne picnic/banquet to celebrate Hockney's sets and costumes for The Rake's Progress in 1975: for how many centuries would Hockney have to eat Steak Langan and Colcannon Potato to equal their value now?' Brian Sewell, October 2012.

David Hockney, O.M., C.H., R.A. (b. 1937)

Still life with flowers and lobster at Odin's Restaurant

Details

David Hockney, O.M., C.H., R.A. (b. 1937)
Still life with flowers and lobster at Odin's Restaurant
coloured crayon
18½ x 23½ in. (47 x 59.7 cm.)
Executed circa 1980.

Provenance

A gift from the artist to Peter Langan.

Special Notice

Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.

Brought to you by

André Zlattinger

Check the condition report or get in touch for additional information about this

azlattinger@christies.com +44 (0)20 7389 2074

If you wish to view the condition report of this lot, please sign in to your account.

View condition report

Lot Essay

In 1973 Peter Langan, looking for larger premises for the then successful Odin's restaurant, moved to the next door space on Devonshire Street. It is in this restaurant that the present work was executed circa 1980.

Through the careful choice of subject matter - the empty wine glass, the lobster, the jug of colourful fresh flowers and empty chair - it is tempting to see this work as a metonymic portrait of Peter Langan. A device not uncommon in Hockney's still lifes around this time and he would certainly have been aware of Peter's rather obsessive preoccupation with freshly cut flowers on every table. The overflowing bouquet in the jug is surely a witty reference to this.

From 1978 to 1981 Hockney made extensive use of 'crayon d'ache' which, unlike ordinary crayons, allowed him to incise lines into the drawing. This medium helped him to pursue his interest in the techniques of other influential European masters, 'I thought that the one thing that the French were marvellous at, the great French painters, was making beautiful marks: Picasso can't make a bad mark, Dufy makes beautiful marks, Matisse makes beautiful marks' (U. Luckhardt and P. Melia, David Hockney: A Drawing Retrospective, London, 1996, p. 187).

More from Modern British Art Evening Sale

View All