Self-portrait with blue guitar, David Hockney
"Literature has been a mainspring of some of his most important and
interesting pictures: in the 1960s he made a series of etchings inspired
by Cavafy’s poems, and one of his most complex self-portraits, Self-Portrait with Blue Guitar
(1977) came out of etchings he produced to illustrate Wallace Stevens’
poem ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’. This wonderfully self-referential
portrait shows how many levels Hockney’s work can have: the Stevens poem
itself was inspired by Picasso’s The Old Guitarist (1903), and
the layers of inspiration are represented here by the realistic blue
curtain which is pulled aside to reveal the artist, working at a table
to produce a Picasso-esque outline of a blue guitar, while sitting on a
cartoon-like outline of a chair, poised inside a child’s outline of a
house, watched over by his own signature tulips and a bust of Dora Maar."
J. Flanders
.
