DAVID HOCKNEY | Celia II

André Emmerich Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1984

Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and London, Tate Gallery, David Hockney: A Retrospective, February 1988 - January 1989, p. 242, no. 108, illustrated in colour, p. 243, illustrated in colour (detail)

Richard Wollheim, ‘David Hockney at the Tate Gallery’, Modern Painters, Vol. I, No. 4, Winter 1988-89, illustrated in colour (as detail on the cover)
Marco Livingstone and Kay Heymer, Eds., Hockney’s Portraits and People, London 2003, p. 178, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is slightly softer in the original. The illustration fails to fully convey the different passages of colour in each brushstroke, particularly around the eyes and nose of the figure. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Over the course of a hugely celebrated career, David Hockney has been a stalwart of painterly traditionalism, combining an academic allegiance to printmaking, drawing and painting with progressive critiques of photography, perspective and colour theory. Portraiture has been a linchpin of Hockney’s creative endeavor that depicts, with characteristic flair, the environments and faces of the artist’s milieu. Painted in 1984, Celia II is an outstanding work from an illustrious period within Hockney’s oeuvre, channeling the impassioned lines of Pablo Picasso’s portraits of Marie-Thérèse Walter into a filigree of intense reds and blues. The artist’s close friend and confidant, Celia Birtwell appears in the present work in Hockney’s distinguished style, evoking the intensity and sincerity of a companionship that has played a central role in the story of Hockney’s life. In a career-long examination of his closest friends and family, art world personalities, in addition to myriad self-portraits, Hockney’s paintings of people form a crucial element of his practice, integrated into his shifting palette, styles, and modes of production. In the present work Hockney’s continually evolving relationship to the medium of paint is captured with charismatic élan. An exuberant portrayal of one of the artist’s most frequent and important sitters, Celia II demonstrates the virtuosity of one of the most prodigious artists of the post-modern period. In Celia II, the influence of Picasso’s portraits of the 1930s is palpable; Birtwell’s captivating, electric blue eyes, weightlessly propped arm, and charming smile reveal both the artist’s adoration for his subject and the stylistic cues that he supplements from the grand master of Cubism. “Like his hero Picasso, Hockney has returned to portraiture again and again as a forum through which he has explored personality and self-image, interpersonal relationships, sexuality, the joys and optimism of youth and the darker realities of illness, frailty and old age” (Marco Livingstone, ‘The Private Face of a Public Art’ in: Exh. Cat., London, National Portrait Gallery (and travelling), David Hockney Portraits, 2006, p. 17). Birtwell has consistently been attendant to Hockney’s stylistic – and romantic – developments since they first became acquainted in the early 1960s; it was in the wake of the artist’s break-up with his long-term partner of the time Peter Schlesinger in 1971 that their relationship intensified. Emerging in a series of portraits of Birtwell in Paris between 1973 and 1975, Hockney developed a much more delicate and tender drawing style that expressed his sitters through an effeminate veil of pencil and coloured crayon. But it was not until the early 1980s that Birtwell would be central to the artist’s exploratory lithographs that instrumentalised Cubist formalities to illustrate his subjects ‘in the round’. In two poignant and elaborate works, An Image of Celia (1984-6) and Walking Past Two Chairs (1984-6), both in the Tate Collection, London, a dynamic inversion of perspective and pictorial shattering synonymous with Georges Braque and Picasso, plays out in an animated staccato.

Hockney’s investigation of the formal intricacies of Cubism reached a crescendo during this period. Whilst influenced by his predecessors, the artist’s ongoing experiments with photography – which combined the singular, static frame into a multidimensional, multifocal amalgam – had motivated the artist to revisit painting and printmaking from a fresh perspective. Previously employing photography as a method of achieving a precision-reproduction in the large-format double portraits of the 1970s, for example the astounding Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy in which Celia Birtwell is depicted with her husband Ossie Clark, in the present work, Hockney unshackles himself from the rigours of documentarian painting from photographs. What his works of the mid-1980s exhibit, rather, is an ineffable synthesis of formal experimentation and intuitive execution, combining the artist’s art historical reference points with the candid and sensitive gaze that defines his remarkable freehand portraiture. Birtwell – one of Hockney’s closest friends and most reproduced sitters – is captured in the present work in an elegant repose, her transfixing stare highlighting the undertones of her glowing visage. Celia II, with its fantastic intensity and luscious coils of brushwork, is an exemplary work of a master portraitist demonstrating his comparable accomplishments to the idols of the genre, and undoubtedly places Hockney on par as one of the most innovative and seminal artists devoted to painting.