In An Old Book
Signed Print

Framed by a thin line a man poses as if in a doorway, his arms bent behind his head in a stiff pose that recalls a photoshoot for a magazine. The background, as with so many of Hockney’s etchings, is blank. The man is young and gazes confidently at the artist/viewer. He is fully nude and appears comfortable with your gaze, despite the stiffness of the pose, which was derived from a photograph, a way of working that Hockney usually avoided over working from life, saying ‘Things like weight and volume are very hard to get from a photograph. You don't get the information you need to be able to do the line'. The work is one of thirteen prints in the series Illustrations For Fourteen Poems By C.P. Cavafy, which accompanied a new translation of the Greek poet's work published in 1967. While Cavafy’s poems keep their homosexual themes concealed however, Hockney’s work proudly celebrates them, liberated perhaps by the fact that 1967 was also the year the British government finally decriminilsed homosexual acts. When asked to comment on the series Hockney said, “I was rather proud of it at the time, and yeah, I would have thought of it as good propaganda .... And [it] probably helped a little bit.”