Shortly after moving to California, in the mid-1960s, David Hockney began his working relationship with master printer Kenneth Tyler. Collaborating with Tyler in all four of his workshops, Hockney found a joyous freedom in the variety of mark making he could produce through experimental lithography. It was with Tyler that Hockney embarked on his ambitious Moving Focus series, where he dove into his enduring concern with the construction of images, the complexities of space, and the assembly of multiple perspectives. The result was a body of work which remains his largest and most pioneering series of colour lithographs, comprising 29 prints of interior views and chairs, still lifes, exterior views of a Mexican hotel, and portraits of some of his most well-known sitters including Celia Birtwell and Gregory Evans. Among these images is the luscious, jewel-toned bouquet, Amaryllis in Vase.
The synaesthetic experience of Hockney’s Amaryllis in Vase - the colour, vibration and scent - pours out of the picture and envelops the viewer. The vibrant hues echo the freedoms that lithography as a medium afforded Hockey. For this still life, Hockney uses reverse perspective, placing the shorter end of the table closer to the viewer in the foreground of the composition, with the longer side at the back of the picture space. By reversing the traditional vanishing point, Hockney exploits the fluctuations of deep and shallow space, pushing everything into the foreground and directly involving the viewer. For Hockney, single-point perspective is a limited, constrictive way of communicating our experience of the world around us, which he likens to "looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed Cyclops – for a split second." Drawing inspiration from the Cubism of Picasso’s 1980 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and works such as Bouquet, 27th October (1970), for his Moving Focus series, Hockney embraced a pictorial structure that could accommodate multiple viewpoints and perspectives as well as time and movement. The series combined the Renaissance tradition of fixed-viewpoint painting, visible in the many still lifes from the era, like Beuckelaer’s Vegetable Seller, with the Eastern aesthetic of multiple narratives within the same picture.
Hockney recognises that we see both geometrically and psychologically and uses that knowledge to create images of sensuous line and colour, through which the eye dances and where edges of viewpoints fold into and across each other. For example, the hazy chequerboard background in Amaryllis in Vase (reminiscent of Persian miniature paintings) bulges and recedes in optical illusion as our eye flits across the surface. The wallpaper appears to melt into the flowers rather than sitting passively behind them and as the table tilts forwards, the eye calculates the possibility of the vase smashing onto the floor. Hockney compared the human experience of looking as a matter of layering – of understanding the present by comparing it with the past, layer upon layer. When we look at his Amaryllis in Vase,we are seeing not only what is in front of us, but all the vases of flowers that we have ever seen.
Joachim Beuckelaer, The Vegetable Seller, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes. Image: Bridgeman Images
Provenance
Christie's, New York, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Prints, 1 May 2002, lot 304 Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Literature
Tyler Graphics 272 Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo 266
David Hockney (b. 1937) is one of the most well-known and celebrated artists of the
20th and 21st centuries. He works across many mediums, including painting, collage,
and more recently digitally, by creating print series on iPads. His works show semi-
abstract representations of domestic life, human relationships, floral, fauna, and the
changing of seasons.
Hockney has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Royal
Academy of Arts in London, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, among many
other institutions. On the secondary market, his work has sold for more than $90
million.
Amaryllis in Vase, from Moving Focus (T.G. 272, M.C.A.T. 266)
1984 Lithograph in colours, on TGL handmade paper, with full margins. I. 116.5 x 82.5 cm (45 7/8 x 32 1/2 in.) S. 127.5 x 92.8 cm (50 1/4 x 36 1/2 in.) Signed, dated and numbered 43/80 in pencil (there were also 16 artist's proofs), published by Tyler Graphics Ltd., Bedford Village, New York (with their blindstamp), 1985, framed.