205: DAVID HOCKNEY, The Buzzing of the Blue Guitar (from The Blue Guitar portfolio) < Prints + Multiples, 14 February 2024 < Auctions

Prints + Multiples

14 February 2024

Prints + Multiples

205

David Hockney b.1937
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The Buzzing of the Blue Guitar (from The Blue Guitar portfolio)

1976-77
etching and aquatint in colors on Inveresk mould-made image: 16¾ h × 13⅝ w in (43 × 35 cm) sheet: 20⅝ h × 17⅞ w in (52 × 45 cm)

estimate: $2,500–3,500

result: $3,024

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Signed and numbered to lower edge ‘164/200 David Hockney’. This work is number 164 from the edition of 200 published by Petersburg Press, London and New York.
literature: Scottish Arts Council 206 | MCA Tokyo 185

This work will ship from Lambertville, New Jersey.

David Hockney

The Blue Guitar Portfolio

During the summer of 1976, David Hockney became enamored with Wallace Stevens’s 1937 poem The Man with the Blue Guitar while vacationing on Fire Island. The resulting ten drawings and twenty prints inspired by the text displayed Hockney’s reverence for Pablo Picasso (an interest shared by Wallace) and visually communicated the poem’s themes of transformation and reality versus imagination. The imagery tells the story of Picasso’s stylistic journey through the use of color and iconography, often juxtaposing the artist’s phases within a single image. Ultimately, with the help of master printer Aldo Crommelynck, the drawings were converted into mixed media intaglio prints through a color-etching process originally created for Picasso’s use.

In the end, nobody knows how it's done — how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic of creation. Nothing can.

David Hockney

David Hockney b. 1937

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David Hockney is considered one of the most influential artists of the 20th century and of the British pop art movement. A painter, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer, his unmistakable style breaks boundaries both in the rules of art and across multiple artistic movements. Born in 1937 in Bradford, England he studied at the Royal College of Art, but did not graduate on account of declining to submit an essay along with his final work. In the 1960s, his bright, figurative paintings of Los Angeles swimming pools accompanied by Californian landscapes as wells as personal subject matter including portraits of friends ignited his career. In 1963, at the age of 26, he had his first one-man show and in 1970 the White Chapel Gallery exhibited his first retrospective.

In the early 1980s, he began working in photocollage, or “joiners” as he called them, exploring movement and photography. In a recent 2016 exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, Hockney debuted a series of works created on the iPhone and iPad exhibiting his love for technology.

Hockney is a highly celebrated artist receiving the First Annual Award of Achievement from the Archives of American Art, Los Angeles in 1993, the Lorenzo de’ Medici Lifetime Career Award of the Florence Biennale, Italy in 2003, and appointment to the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II in 2012 among many others. His work is also held amongst some of the most distinguished collections around the world including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Art Institute of Chicago, Tate Gallery London, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. David Hockney lives and works in the Hollywood Hills, California.

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