It's a Lie

Drawn in 1961 by a young David Hockney, It’s a Lie announces the artist’s burgeoning talent and early affinity with the genre of portraiture. Created while he was still at the Royal College of Art, London, it was gifted to his friend and fellow student Nick Stephens, who went on to become a sculptor. Jeremy Lancaster acquired the work from Stephens in 1985: the two became lifelong friends whilst living next door to one another in Cheltenham during the 1970s, during which time Stephens provided Lancaster with vital introductions to the art world. The drawing presents a solitary figure – hands clasped in prayer – whose face is partially obscured by black hatch marks. The figure’s exaggerated features are rendered in a faux-naïf style, evident in the seemingly unpolished outline and simplified forms. In this regard, It’s a Lie looks to paintings by Jean Dubuffet whose work celebrated the pictorial idiom of outsider and folk art; this liberated and generous aesthetic would prove hugely influential for Hockney in the early 1960s. Portraiture would come to play a central role in the artist’s practice, providing him with a vehicle for imaging the human condition and all its variable subjectivity. Faces, Hockney believes, ‘belong to other people’ and it his role as an artist to coax out and reveal their inner psyches (D. Hockney, interviewed by M. Gayford, The Telegraph, 23 April 2016).