Shortly after moving to California in the mid-1960s, David Hockney began his working relationship with master printer Kenneth Tyler. At Tyler's various workshops, Hockney found a joyous freedom in the variety of markmaking he could develop and explore through lithography. Collaborating with Tyler, Hockney embarked on his ambitious Moving Focus series, diving deep into his enduring fascination with image construction, spatial complexity, and the assembly of multiple perspectives. The result was a body of work that stands as his largest and most pioneering series of colour lithographs, comprising 29 prints of interior views and chairs, exterior views of a Mexican hotel, and portraits of well-known sitters, including Celia Birtwell and Gregory Evans.
Pablo Picasso, The artist's dining room, rue de la Boeti, 1919, Musée Picasso, Paris. Image: © Photo Josse / Scala Archives, Artwork: © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2024 For Hockney, single-point perspective is a limited, constrictive way of communicating our experience of the world, which he likens to “looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed Cyclops – for a split second.” Inspired by the Cubism of Picasso’s 1980 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, particularly works like The Artist's Dining Room, rue de la Boetie (1919), Hockney embraced a pictorial structure accommodating multiple viewpoints, perspectives, time, and movement. The Moving Focus series combines the Renaissance tradition of fixed-viewpoint painting, evident in many Last Supper scenes, with the Eastern aesthetic of multiple narratives within a single picture.
In Tyler Dining Room, Hockney captures his host’s intimate home life using reverse perspective, placing the smaller end of the table closer to the viewer in the foreground and the wider end further back in the pictorial space. By reversing the traditional vanishing point, Hockney exploits the fluctuations of deep and shallow space, making room in the foreground to directly involve the viewer. The artist balances the darker wooden tabletop and wishbone chairs with a large Cubist painting hung on the left-hand wall. Set against the pastel blues and pinks of classic 1970s interior design, Hockney juxtaposes the old and new, opening a cross-generational narrative for the scene. Combining these elements, the viewer is drawn into the space to be part of the conversation, to look at the world through multiple lenses.
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. He compared the human experience of looking to a matter of layering, understanding the present by comparing it with the past—layer upon layer. When we look at Tyler Dining Room, we are not merely seeing the scene before us; we are also glimpsing a mosaic of all the dining spaces we have ever encountered, intertwined in a vibrant tapestry of memory and perception.
Provenance
Private Collection, California, circa 1980
Thence by descent, Private Collection
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2020Literature
Tyler Graphics 278
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo 261Artist Biography
David Hockney
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.
26
Tyler Dining Room, from Moving Focus (T.G. 278, M.C.A.T. 261)
1984
Lithograph in colours, on TGL handmade paper, with full margins.
I. 74 x 95 cm (29 1/8 x 37 3/8 in.)
S. 81 x 102 cm (31 7/8 x 40 1/8 in.)
Signed, dated and numbered 18/98 in pencil (there were also 18 artist's proofs), published by Tyler Graphics Ltd., Bedford Village, New York (with their blindstamp), 1985, framed.
Estimate
£40,000 - 60,000 ‡♠
Sold for £40,640
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David Hockney
London Auction 19 September 2024
