David Hockney

Kasmin Gallery, London

Sale, Christie's London, 25 October 1995, lot 119, where acquired by the present owner

Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld, David Hockney Zeichnungen, Grafik, Gemälde (David Hockney: Drawings, Graphics, Paintings), 25 April - 30 May 1971 , no. 30, illustrated in the exh. cat. p.22

The present work is an intimate and careful line drawing of the Artist’s lover, the model Jack Kennedy, in the late 1960s. While the body, clothes and background setting are all visualised in almost a single line, it is Kennedy’s face which feels the greatest preoccupation for the Artist. Here, Hockney has marked out the different textures and surfaces of the model’s hair, nose and facial structure through cross-hatching-like movements of the pen and ink.

Kennedy and Hockney first met in the mid-1960s in London, Kennedy was an aspiring model while Hockney was already an established artist in a growing international art world. It was however a significant relationship for both parties, artistically and personally, as Kennedy served as a muse in a number of paintings, drawings and prints in this time.

By the 1960s, Hockney was living and working between both London and the West coast of the United States. He moved to the states in 1963, and in 1966, Hockney began teaching painting at U.C.L.A., where the drawing is set. Hockney did quite a few drawings, particularly of Kennedy, in the dormitory rooms of the university, and it is perhaps this experience that affirmed his love affair with the sun-kissed state. His famous pool paintings followed later that decade and early into the next. It was during this seminal time that Hockney became much more stylistic in its portrayals of figurative subjects.