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拍品专文
Now that David Hockney, recently honoured with the Order of Merit and with the largest visitor figures for an exhibition by a living artist in recent memory, has acquired the status of elder statesman of art and national treasure, it would be all too easy to forget that he first rose to prominence in his early twenties as a fearless subversive. It was in his series of 'love paintings' initiated in spring 1960, at the end of the first year of his three-year postgraduate course at the Royal College of Art, that he found his voice as an artist. Encouraged by his fellow student R.B. Kitaj to abandon his brief flirtation with abstraction and to paint the things that most mattered to him as a human being, he alluded not only to his then vegetarian regime and to his love of poetry but more importantly to the embrace of his homosexual orientation and experience at a time when sexual acts between consenting men were against the law. Courageously conceived as 'coming out' statements and, even more provocatively, as pro-gay 'propaganda pictures', works such as the Doll Boy series of 1960, Going to be a Queen for Tonight 1960 (Royal College of Art collection), The Third Love Painting 1960 (collection Tate) and We Two Boys Together Clinging 1961 (Arts Council Collection) made clear his celebratory purpose both in their imagery and in the written inscriptions that cover their surfaces.
Oh, for a gentle lover, long hidden in a private collection, has all the attributes of this trailblazing and unequivocally personal series of paintings. The central motif ambiguously describes conjoined figures that embody the sense of longing embedded in the title, their blurred forms still acknowledging the shame and secrecy of 'the love that dare not speak its name'. The appropriations of painterly devices from the work of abstract painters including Alan Davie and Richard Smith, and the allusions to child art inspired by Jean Dubuffet, reveal the intensity of a young artist's search for a pictorial language of his own. In the games of hide and seek proposed by the written words, all the more tantalising for their sometimes fragmentary nature - Quee[n] or Quee[r], [qu]een or [t]een, catc[h] - he expands on the meaning of 'LOVE', a word emblazoned next to the figures alongside the cursorily rendered musical notes on a staff that recall the references in other paintings and etchings made by Hockney at that time to popular love songs including 'My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean' and Cliff Richard's 1959 hit, 'Living Doll'. It would be tempting to find here a reference to the English teen idol, three years younger than Hockney, on whom the artist had a strong crush at the time; the singer is referred to in schoolboy code as '4.2' (for D[oll] B[oy]) in various paintings of that period including We Two Boys Together Clinging, a representation of two young males embracing that was inspired in part by an erotic misreading of a newspaper headline about a climbing accident that briefly excited the young artist's imagination: 'Two Boys Cling to Cliff All Night'. Another song performed by Richard, 'Catch Me (I'm fallin' for you)', would be a contender as a source for the word 'catch', written over a second staff as if hinting at its musical origins, were it not for the fact that the single was released only in 1961.
In its palette of reds and flesh tones, painted as an atmosphere of passionate sensuality and seduction emanating from the grey intertwined bodies, the painting gives form to romantic desire and its physical expression in sex. The self-hatred alluded to in the Doll Boy pictures, in which a single male figure with his head bowed down is depicted as burdened by his sexuality, here gives way to a more uplifting glimpse of the possibility of escape from loneliness. 'Oh, for a gentle lover' - conspicuously written across the upper register of the canvas - has the authentic ring of the confessional gay poetry that so inspired Hockney during the 1960s, though its precise source remains elusive. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is the source of the verses beginning 'We two boys together clinging' scrawled across the painting bearing that title, and of the term appended to a 1960 canvas, Adhesiveness, that somewhat shockingly depicts Hockney (4.8) and Whitman (23.23) as caricatural figures locked into the '69' sexual position, their erect penises eagerly consumed by greedy mouths. Lines from the Alexandrian Greek poet C.P. Cavafy triggered both paintings and etchings at least as early as 1961, culminating in the publication in 1966 of a book of etchings, Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from C.P. Cavafy, accompanying translations by Nikos Stangos and Stephen Spender of some of his favourite poems. The concision and allusiveness of poetry was fully embraced by Hockney in paintings such as these, in which he jumps intuitively from image to written phrase, from the look of things to their sound, revelling in sensation as a way of communicating intimate experience.
Oh, for a gentle lover was purchased by Sir Colin Anderson, Provost of the Royal College of Art when Hockney was a student there, almost certainly at the time that his brother Donald Anderson, Chairman of the P&O Line, was involved in commissioning artists to decorate the S.S. Canberra. Hockney's eventual response to that invitation took the form of a series of jocular figurative paintings in a linear style made with an electric poker on plywood for a games room called the Pop Inn. According to Christopher Simon Sykes in his recently published Hockney biography, these walls proved such an enticement to graffiti-writing teenagers on the ship that they were eventually boarded over to avoid further desecration. Happily for fans of Hockney the enfant terrible, the succulently painted hymn to romantic love between men that he had painted a year earlier, and which helped earn him the commission, has survived unscathed more than half a century later.
We are very grateful to Marco Livingstone for preparing the catalogue entries for lots 12-14 and 16-17.
Oh, for a gentle lover, long hidden in a private collection, has all the attributes of this trailblazing and unequivocally personal series of paintings. The central motif ambiguously describes conjoined figures that embody the sense of longing embedded in the title, their blurred forms still acknowledging the shame and secrecy of 'the love that dare not speak its name'. The appropriations of painterly devices from the work of abstract painters including Alan Davie and Richard Smith, and the allusions to child art inspired by Jean Dubuffet, reveal the intensity of a young artist's search for a pictorial language of his own. In the games of hide and seek proposed by the written words, all the more tantalising for their sometimes fragmentary nature - Quee[n] or Quee[r], [qu]een or [t]een, catc[h] - he expands on the meaning of 'LOVE', a word emblazoned next to the figures alongside the cursorily rendered musical notes on a staff that recall the references in other paintings and etchings made by Hockney at that time to popular love songs including 'My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean' and Cliff Richard's 1959 hit, 'Living Doll'. It would be tempting to find here a reference to the English teen idol, three years younger than Hockney, on whom the artist had a strong crush at the time; the singer is referred to in schoolboy code as '4.2' (for D[oll] B[oy]) in various paintings of that period including We Two Boys Together Clinging, a representation of two young males embracing that was inspired in part by an erotic misreading of a newspaper headline about a climbing accident that briefly excited the young artist's imagination: 'Two Boys Cling to Cliff All Night'. Another song performed by Richard, 'Catch Me (I'm fallin' for you)', would be a contender as a source for the word 'catch', written over a second staff as if hinting at its musical origins, were it not for the fact that the single was released only in 1961.
In its palette of reds and flesh tones, painted as an atmosphere of passionate sensuality and seduction emanating from the grey intertwined bodies, the painting gives form to romantic desire and its physical expression in sex. The self-hatred alluded to in the Doll Boy pictures, in which a single male figure with his head bowed down is depicted as burdened by his sexuality, here gives way to a more uplifting glimpse of the possibility of escape from loneliness. 'Oh, for a gentle lover' - conspicuously written across the upper register of the canvas - has the authentic ring of the confessional gay poetry that so inspired Hockney during the 1960s, though its precise source remains elusive. Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is the source of the verses beginning 'We two boys together clinging' scrawled across the painting bearing that title, and of the term appended to a 1960 canvas, Adhesiveness, that somewhat shockingly depicts Hockney (4.8) and Whitman (23.23) as caricatural figures locked into the '69' sexual position, their erect penises eagerly consumed by greedy mouths. Lines from the Alexandrian Greek poet C.P. Cavafy triggered both paintings and etchings at least as early as 1961, culminating in the publication in 1966 of a book of etchings, Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from C.P. Cavafy, accompanying translations by Nikos Stangos and Stephen Spender of some of his favourite poems. The concision and allusiveness of poetry was fully embraced by Hockney in paintings such as these, in which he jumps intuitively from image to written phrase, from the look of things to their sound, revelling in sensation as a way of communicating intimate experience.
Oh, for a gentle lover was purchased by Sir Colin Anderson, Provost of the Royal College of Art when Hockney was a student there, almost certainly at the time that his brother Donald Anderson, Chairman of the P&O Line, was involved in commissioning artists to decorate the S.S. Canberra. Hockney's eventual response to that invitation took the form of a series of jocular figurative paintings in a linear style made with an electric poker on plywood for a games room called the Pop Inn. According to Christopher Simon Sykes in his recently published Hockney biography, these walls proved such an enticement to graffiti-writing teenagers on the ship that they were eventually boarded over to avoid further desecration. Happily for fans of Hockney the enfant terrible, the succulently painted hymn to romantic love between men that he had painted a year earlier, and which helped earn him the commission, has survived unscathed more than half a century later.
We are very grateful to Marco Livingstone for preparing the catalogue entries for lots 12-14 and 16-17.