Tidied Up Beach
Tidied Up Beach
Signed Print
David Hockney
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21 x 30cm, Edition of 80, Photographic print
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Meaning & Analysis
Tidied Up Beach (1982) is a chromogenic print on Kodak photographic paper that belongs to David Hockney’s Twenty Photographic Pictures series. The picture depicts an empty beach in Viareggio, the Italian seaside town visited by Hockney with his lifelong friend and influential museum curator, Henry Geldzahler. A white gate with a name Excelsior on top occupies the forefront of the picture, separating an empty concrete square and, what appears to be a summer boarding house, from the street. A view of the sea stretches far in the back, a few tones darker from the colour of the sky that expands majestically above the horizon. Seen through the white gate, the sea, empty square, and beach umbrellas far in the back, are all infused with melancholy.
In 1976, Sonnabed Gallery exhibited photographs taken by Hockney during the several years of his travels and published them as a single portfolio. Apart from paintings and prints his name is most strongly associated with, Hockney created photo collages and took pictures of friends with his polaroid camera in casual situations, often speaking of photography in terms of an ‘experiment becoming a new art form.’ What distinguishes Twenty Photographic Pictures is not only Hockney’s recourse to photography as a medium but also the candid character of pictures and casual context, in which they were taken.