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拍品专文
‘Henry and I got along instantly… We realised we shared a love of music, opera in particular, which I had started to go to a bit, upstairs at Covent Garden, and there was painting of course, and we became friends very quickly. He was very, very funny, very clever, and we had the same kind of taste. I thought we had a similar way of looking at life.’
– David Hockney
‘Geldzahler was a man Hockney truly loved, who made him laugh more than anyone else, and who introduced him into the New York art world... With a great eye as well as a vast knowledge of art, Geldzahler was not afraid to criticise, and he became one of the few people from whom Hockney got critical feedback about his work.’
– Christopher Simon Sykes
Gifted to his friend, the renowned curator and critic Henry Geldzahler, David Hockney’s Henry and Christopher, 1973, is a gentle and delicate composition drawn directly from his iconic, large-scale painting Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott, 1968-1969. Described by critic Jackie Wullschläger as a ‘natural draughtsman…second in the 20th century only to Picasso’, Hockney has wholly captured the painting’s essence in spidery, dynamic lines (J. Wullschläger, ‘David Hockney at Tate Britain: an even bigger splash’, Financial Times, February 10, 2017). In the drawing, Geldzahler is seated on a sofa staring resolutely ahead, and his clothing is formed of short, staccato lines which contrast elegantly with the smudgy volumes of the cushions. To his right stands his then-boyfriend; the painter Christopher Scott, rendered in profile and dressed in a trench coat. The setting is simple and the walls are bare: a sofa, the faintest hint of a window, and a glass coffee table upon which rests a vase filled with translucent tulips. Geldzahler and Scott are more fully-realised, and Hockney used the fine crosshatching of an architect’s pen to model and shade the bodies. Even in the unassuming composition, Hockney conveys a palpable sense of uncertainty and reticence.
Hockney first met Geldzahler at Andy Warhol’s studio in 1963. The curator became a frequent subject of Hockney’s and theirs was a friendship steeped in art and travel, including to Lucca, Italy, where this drawing was created; the two remained lifelong friends until Geldzahler’s death in 1994. Although ostensibly a double portrait of Geldzahler and Scott, the real relationship represented is between Hockney and Geldzahler. Placed to the side, Scott is the interloper and this configuration reinforces the undercurrent of ambiguity in the two sitters’ relationship, a feeling mirrored in the emptiness of the room. Hockney’s use of one-point perspective further collapses the divide between image and the real world, a result of what Geldzahler called ‘a close, almost voyeuristic scrutiny of relationships’ that further reinforces the drawing’s intriguing yet unstable charge (H. Geldzahler quoted in J. Siegel, ‘Review: David Hockney by David Hockney by Nikos Stangos and David Hockney’, Art Journal, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Autumn, 1978), p. 70). As Geldzahler never owned the celebrated canvas, Hockney’s drawing serves as a memento of the experience and a token to their camaraderie. Henry and Christopher may be a subjective reality, but as Hockney noted, ‘drawing teaches people to look’ (H. Hockney, quoted in W. Boyd, ‘Drawing from Life’, Harper’s Bazaar, August 22, 2014).
– David Hockney
‘Geldzahler was a man Hockney truly loved, who made him laugh more than anyone else, and who introduced him into the New York art world... With a great eye as well as a vast knowledge of art, Geldzahler was not afraid to criticise, and he became one of the few people from whom Hockney got critical feedback about his work.’
– Christopher Simon Sykes
Gifted to his friend, the renowned curator and critic Henry Geldzahler, David Hockney’s Henry and Christopher, 1973, is a gentle and delicate composition drawn directly from his iconic, large-scale painting Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott, 1968-1969. Described by critic Jackie Wullschläger as a ‘natural draughtsman…second in the 20th century only to Picasso’, Hockney has wholly captured the painting’s essence in spidery, dynamic lines (J. Wullschläger, ‘David Hockney at Tate Britain: an even bigger splash’, Financial Times, February 10, 2017). In the drawing, Geldzahler is seated on a sofa staring resolutely ahead, and his clothing is formed of short, staccato lines which contrast elegantly with the smudgy volumes of the cushions. To his right stands his then-boyfriend; the painter Christopher Scott, rendered in profile and dressed in a trench coat. The setting is simple and the walls are bare: a sofa, the faintest hint of a window, and a glass coffee table upon which rests a vase filled with translucent tulips. Geldzahler and Scott are more fully-realised, and Hockney used the fine crosshatching of an architect’s pen to model and shade the bodies. Even in the unassuming composition, Hockney conveys a palpable sense of uncertainty and reticence.
Hockney first met Geldzahler at Andy Warhol’s studio in 1963. The curator became a frequent subject of Hockney’s and theirs was a friendship steeped in art and travel, including to Lucca, Italy, where this drawing was created; the two remained lifelong friends until Geldzahler’s death in 1994. Although ostensibly a double portrait of Geldzahler and Scott, the real relationship represented is between Hockney and Geldzahler. Placed to the side, Scott is the interloper and this configuration reinforces the undercurrent of ambiguity in the two sitters’ relationship, a feeling mirrored in the emptiness of the room. Hockney’s use of one-point perspective further collapses the divide between image and the real world, a result of what Geldzahler called ‘a close, almost voyeuristic scrutiny of relationships’ that further reinforces the drawing’s intriguing yet unstable charge (H. Geldzahler quoted in J. Siegel, ‘Review: David Hockney by David Hockney by Nikos Stangos and David Hockney’, Art Journal, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Autumn, 1978), p. 70). As Geldzahler never owned the celebrated canvas, Hockney’s drawing serves as a memento of the experience and a token to their camaraderie. Henry and Christopher may be a subjective reality, but as Hockney noted, ‘drawing teaches people to look’ (H. Hockney, quoted in W. Boyd, ‘Drawing from Life’, Harper’s Bazaar, August 22, 2014).