Chair with a Horse Drawn by Picasso

Acquired by the present owner in the early 1970s, and unseen in public for almost half a century, Chair with a Horse Drawn by Picasso is a rare work that represents a fascinating chapter in David Hockney’s oeuvre. Together with its companion, Three Chairs With a Section of a Picasso Mural, it represents the artist’s first direct reference to the work of his great hero. The work is based on a photograph taken by Hockney in March 1970 at Château de Castille. The property belonged to the celebrated art historian and collector Douglas Cooper, who was close friends with Picasso and had commissioned him to design a mural for the house in 1962. While Hockney’s visits to Cooper were in many ways the closest he ever came to his idol, the present work wryly eclipses the fresco, focusing instead on the empty chair that had, by this stage, become one of his own distinguishing motifs. Picasso died three years later; Hockney, by contrast, was at the height of his early career, enjoying his first major retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and immersing himself in his landmark suite of double portraits. In an image of stark, poignant clarity, the present work captures a virtual meeting of titans, and a poetic passing of batons.

Hockney had long admired Picasso. As a student, he had returned to the artist’s 1960 retrospective at the Tate Gallery eight times, astounded by the range and diversity of his practice. The present painting and its companion represent the first in a line long of direct references to his work: from the posthumous 1973 tributes The Student: Homage to Picasso and Artist and Model, to his 1977 suite based on Wallace Stevens’ Picasso-inspired poem ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’. That year, Hockney also painted the landmark Self-Portrait with Blue Guitar, featuring a bust of Dora Maar in the background. In 1980, the Museum of Modern Art’s Picasso retrospective reignited his imagination: his designs for the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Eric Satie’s Parade drew heavily upon Picasso’s 1917 sets and costumes, while his portraits, landscapes and photo-collages of this period engaged deeply with the legacy of Cubism. Underpinning these various acts of homage was a broader revelation: Hockney believed that Picasso, in all his versatility, had uncovered the secrets of human vision. His works taught that we do not see the world from just one angle, or through just one lens; rather, we experienced it as a series of simultaneities. This, in turn, would become the keynote of Hockney’s own oeuvre.

Hockney had first been to Château de Castille in 1967, while touring Europe with his lover Peter Schlesinger. It was the first of a number of visits over the years, and the start of a friendship: Cooper would feature as a subject in Hockney’s portrait practice, and the two shared many long debates over the merits of Picasso’s late work. Cooper’s immersion in the European avant-garde, evidenced by the extraordinary collection that graced the walls of his home, was fascinating to Hockney. Cooper’s partner was Picasso’s biographer John Richardson, and the Spaniard himself had been a regular guest of the couple, even requesting to buy the house on several occasions. After Cooper expressed an interest in some of his engraved drawings in Barcelona, Picasso had exclaimed ‘Give me a wall!’ His drawings for the mural were inspired by Jacques-Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) and Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862-63), and were etched into the wall of the château’s eastern veranda by the Norwegian artist Carl Nesjar. Hockney’s painting, with its purple sun lounger partially obscuring Picasso’s creation, conjures a vivid sense of a life lived among art, the mundane and the extraordinary sitting side by side.

For Hockney—a lover of theatre and illusion—the act of painting pictures within pictures would become central to his practice. 1970s masterworks such as Looking at Pictures on a Screen (1977) would extend the revelations of the present work, placing snippets of art history in dialogue with the props of everyday life. Here, however—as in the latter painting—it is the quotidian that takes centre stage. In both pictures, the empty chair becomes a startling, anthropomorphic presence, its fibres aglow with life and light. In this, the work demonstrates the lessons of the double portraits: Hockney was working on the monumental Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-71), in which the table, chair, vase of flowers and telephone seem as potent and alive as the couple themselves. This sense of hyperreal clarity would also be borne out in a series of mournful still-lifes painted in the wake of his break-up with Schlesinger in 1971: canvases such as Beach Umbrella (1971) and Two Deck Chairs, Calvi (1972) share the present work’s haunting sense of absence and solitude. Though Picasso and Hockney would never meet, the empty chair nonetheless seems to await his arrival, the shadows of his art whispering silently in the background.