The Blue Guitar

Price Realised USD 81,900

Estimate

USD 40,000 - USD 60,000

Closed: 19 Jul 2023

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DAVID HOCKNEY (B. 1937)

The Blue Guitar

Price Realised USD 81,900

Closed: 19 Jul 2023

Price Realised USD 81,900

Closed: 19 Jul 2023

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DAVID HOCKNEY (B. 1937)
The Blue Guitar
the complete set of twenty etchings with aquatint in colors, on Inveresk mould-made paper, 1976-1977, each signed in pencil, with their stamped titles on the reverse, numbered 163/200 (there were also 35 artist's proof sets in Roman numerals), published by Petersburg Press, London and New York, 1977, loose (as issued), together with the title, table of contents and text pages, lacking the original portfolio case, each with full margins, in very good condition, framed
Each Image: 16³⁄₄ x 13⁵⁄₈ in. (426 x 346 mm.)
Each Sheet: 20⁵⁄₈ x 18 in. (524 x 457 mm.)

Scottish Arts Council 199-218; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo 178-197

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Lot Essay

(Hockney) (Gert Schiff, , exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Thames & Hudson, London, 1988, p. 41).

Hockney first encountered Picasso's work on a visit to London as an art student in 1954, and when an important Picasso show was mounted at the Tate in 1960, Hockney, then a student at the Royal Academy of Art, visited the exhibition eight times. Yet in spite of this early enthusiasm it was not until the 1970s that the first pictorial references to the Spanish master started to appear in his paintings and prints.

When Picasso died in 1973 Hockney was invited to contribute a print to the portfolio . Deciding to make an etching he went to the studio of Aldo Crommelynck, Picasso's master printer, in Paris. It was under Crommelynck's tutelage that Hockney learnt about the sugar lift aquatint, a method used extensively by Picasso, as well as color etching techniques which he would use later in to great effect.

Having long intended to experiment with Cubism, it was the discovery in 1976 of a poem inspired by Picasso's painting (1930) by the American poet Wallace Stevens which would lead to Hockney's great early homage to the Spanish master's art, The Blue Guitar.

"I read Wallace Steven's poem in the summer of 1976. The etchings themselves were not conceived as literal illustrations of the poem but as an interpretation of its themes in visual terms. Like the poem, they are about transformations within art as well as the relation between reality and the imagination, so these are pictures and different styles of representation juxtaposed and reflected and dissolved within the same frame." (Artist's statement on dustjacket of the catalogue documenting the publication of The Blue Guitar portfolio of etchings, Petersburg Press, London and New York, 1977).