Picture of A Simple Framed Traditional Nude Drawing
Signed Print

Depicting a nude female figure, this 1965 lithograph by Hockney at first appears like a traditional print. However upon closer inspection it becomes obvious that the artist has subverted the genre, and the medium, to create something new. By placing a frame around the image, he adds both surface and depth, creating a trompe l’oeil barrier between the viewer and the image. The nude is part of a series entitled A Hollywood Collection, in which Hockney presents all the key elements of a traditional art historical collection – from portrait, to still life, to landscape to nude – in a series of fictitious frames. Here he uses the medium of lithography to achieve a sketchy style for the drawing as well as a more polished and tonal finish for the simple frame. Hockney is said to have been inspired to create the series while passing a shop window full of frames on his way to the Gemini print studio, where this series was produced. The addition of a trompe l’oeil deception is also said to have been a nod to the artifice of LA where the seemingly unchanging weather and modernist architecture presented a sharp contrast to the ‘greyness’ of the London he had left the year before.