Beautiful And White Flowers
Beautiful And White Flowers
Signed Print
David Hockney
POA
This estimate blends recent public auction records with our own private sale data and network demand.
Etching, 1966
Signed Print Edition of 75
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Critical Review
Beautiful And White Flowers (1966) is a signed etching by David Hockney that belongs to Illustrations For Fourteen Poems By C. P. Cavafy - a series of prints illustrating or loosely evoking the scenes and motifs from the Alexandria-born Greek poet’s works.
Opening with a young man’s declaration that he wants to abandon his long-term lover, Cavafy’s poem deals with the crisis of a romantic relationship between two men. What propels the motif of abandonment is the male figure’s desire to break away from the life in austerity by starting a relationship with a much more affluent man than him and his current lover. Although it finishes on a dramatic note, culminating in the image of the young man’s death and the abandoned lover’s longing, Hockney strives to extricate a positive dimension from Cavafy’s poem. Beautiful And White Flowers presents the viewer with a static, surprisingly lighthearted scene, in which one man is seen lying down on a sofa while the other stands behind with his hand tenderly touching the cushion. Through such a representation, the artist seems to move beyond the moment in time described in the poem and imagines the relation in its early, innocent phase.
