Love In the Time of Intolerance

Two Boys Aged 23 or 24

C. P. Cavafy was a Greek poet who was born in Alexandria in 1863. He was one of the earliest modern authors to address homosexuality in his writing and was discovered by Hockney when the latter was a student at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s.  
In 1966 Hockney began work on a series of etchings based on a selection of Cavafy's work – each print corresponding to a poem. The illustrations were etched directly onto copper plates (you can see this in the video below) using a simple, spare style which matched the unadorned yet powerful language of the poetry.
Though a number of the prints display direct reference to the middle eastern world of Cavafy’s poems (To remain, set outside a dry cleaning shop and The shop window of a tobacco store both have Arabic shop signs), other illustrations are based on drawings of Hockney’s friends in his bedroom in Notting Hill. 

The prints are not literal translations of a narrative, but rather Hockney’s interpretation of the sentiments explored in the poems: the passion of chance encounters, the familiarity between lovers. 

Portrait of Cavafy in Alexandria

The suite was published in 1967, the same year in which legislation to decriminalise homosexuality in England and Wales was passed. Therefore, this set of prints represents an important public statement: one which is told through the most intimate and personal aspects of love.

To view the prints alongside the poems which inspired them, click here and flick through our online catalogue.  

The Arts Council made a film about the creation of the engravings entitled Love’s Presentation. Watch an extract in the video below or view it here:

See Celia

Celia Birtwell, celebrated textiles designer, has been David Hockney’s muse since 1968. Hockney was one of the two guests present at her wedding to the famous fashion designer Ossie Clark: a marriage which, though brief, fuelled a stylistic partnership which helped to define the culture of 1960s couture. 

It was during the early ‘70s that Hockney painted Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy which today remains one of the most viewed paintings in the Tate Britain gallery. In 2005 it was short listed for the title, ‘The Greatest British Painting’ on the BBC’s Today programme. After Celia and Ossie divorced, Celia worked as a paid model for Hockney in Los Angeles and came to be called “the face that launched a thousand prints”.

The etching we have is entitled Soft Celia and dates from 1998. It carries something of the warm and lasting friendship that exists between the artist and his subject.
 

For Soft Celia’s soft furnishings click here.
 
For Hockney’s cushions, take a seat here.

A Slippery Subject

Queues are forming for the David Hockney exhibition which is currently running at the Royal Academy. It is the first major exhibition of new landscape works by Hockney featuring intensely coloured paintings inspired by the Yorkshire landscape.

Here we have a print from our Hockney collection, where the artist is concerned not by colour, but by the transparency of this very particular imaginary landscape: The Glass Mountain.  It forms part of his series of illustrations for the Brothers Grimm fairy tales (dating 1969) - stories that had long enchanted him.

Peter Webb, author of Portrait of David Hockney (1988) tells us that “Hockney chose Old Rinkrank because it starts with the words ‘A King built a glass mountain’, and he was fascinated by the problem of drawing a glass mountain. He made various attempts, even smashing a sheet of glass and drawing the ragged pieces piled up in a big heap, before finding the solution: he depicted a tree and a house with a glass mountain in front which distorts their reflection.”
 

Hockney considers this series to be one of his major successes.


Follow the links to see how he dealt with Rapunzel and Rumpelstilzchen.