David Hockney’s neglected work

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David Hockney’s prints are much less well known than his paintings – an undeserved neglect, as Sarah Lawson finds at Dulwich Art Gallery

Once again London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery has found a subject that other galleries have neglected: David Hockney’s etchings and lithographs. The earliest etchings date from 60 years ago when he was a student at the Bradford College of Art and was styling himself on Stanley Spencer. The poster for the exhibition features a self-portrait of the period showing Hockney with a Spencer-like dark pudding-basin haircut.

From his earliest work there are sly references to other artists and styles. Always an admirer of Picasso,   Hockney has used Cubism in some of his later lithographs to great effect. The homage to Picasso is explicit, but at the same time the work is uniquely Hockney’s. Somehow Hockney manages to be both traditional and innovative; both original and a great borrower.

Hockney has said that he learned to etch in 15 minutes. He went to the printmaking department at the college when he found that the material there were free, whereas the painters had to buy their own materials. He took to printmaking and for the rest of his life explored its possibilities, moving restlessly from one innovation to another.

As he has made numerous etchings and lithographs during his career, a strictly chronological order would result in a hotchpotch of media, so the curator of this exhibition, David Lloyd, decided to organize the work into three rooms of etchings and three rooms of lithographs, but within those categories the work is chronological.

Artists have always gained inspiration from visiting other parts of the world, and Hockney has used his travels to enormous advantage. The result of an early trip to New York was a witty series of 16 etchings based loosely on Hogarth’s ‘Rake’s Progress’. His long sojourn in Los Angeles was crucially important to his work and gave rise to his best-known studies of swimming pools and their inhabitants. A trip to Japan also resulted in new influences.

In the 1960s Hockney made no secret of his own sexual preference even when it was illegal under the repressive laws of the time. Although he produced some strikingly homoerotic pictures, he didn’t present them as part of a campaign for gay rights. Mid-decade, at about the time when homosexuality was being decriminalised (if not entirely ‘legalised’), Hockney decided to illustrate some poems by the gay Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (English version sadly now out of print). So serious was Hockney about his project that he commissioned a new translation of the poet’s work and travelled to Beirut to catch the louche Middle Eastern atmosphere. Whereas the men in Cavafy’s poems are somewhat furtive, the young men whom Hockney depicts in a series of etchings seem completely comfortable and unapologetic about their relationships. From their first appearance the etchings have been widely regarded as masterpieces, and the Dulwich has a whole wall full of them.

Prominent among Hockney’s work are portraits, but only of people he knew well; drawing faces of strangers didn’t appeal to him. Celia Birtwell is perhaps his best-known subject, as he has produced more pictures of her than of his other friends combined.

When he was asked to make a picture to be given as a prize, the prize-giver realized that a portrait of himself would be rather vain, and so Hockney responded with a ‘portrait’ of the man’s coat and hat on a chair and table respectively – a still-life for some and a portrait for those who knew who the ‘sitter’ was. The portrait as a piece of furniture is a witty little theme that turns up more than once in Hockney’s work.

One of my several favourites in the exhibition is a still-life of flowers in a vase. At the bottom of the picture is a row of coloured pencils showing that, hey, this is a drawing of flowers, not the real thing – another way of saying ‘ceci n’est pas un pipe’ (a reference to the Magritte  painting of that title). Lilies, a lithograph from 1971 with a pencil beside the vase, is a variation on the same theme.

If you’re sceptical of the part serendipity plays in life and art, look at Hockney’s pictures of the courtyard of the otherwise modest Hotel Romano Angeles in the small Mexican town of Acatlán. The artist would have never been in the town or in the hotel if not for the fact that, as he and Gregory Evans were driving from Mexico City to Oaxaca in 1984, their rented car broke down and they had to spend the night in Acatlán. There, Hockney discovered an enchanting interior patio with brightly coloured columns and tiles. He returned later in the year with Mylar sheets – a new technique that amounted to a portable lithograph studio – and spent a week sketching the hotel patio.

This inspiration and his exploration of Cubism led to his ‘Moving Focus’ project and further explorations of a kind of ‘anti-photography’, that is, a concentration on scenes or portraits in which the eye may wander without a fixed viewpoint. In a portrait of Celia Birtwell from this period we see indications that she has moved her position during the sitting (her legs were there but now they’re here). The picture, inevitably a static object hanging on the wall, is nevertheless a portrayal of passing time and changeable viewing angles.

According to the curator, David Hockney is ‘one of the most prolific, diverse and technically astute printmakers alive,’ and this exhibition certainly supports his view.