The Beginning
Signed Print

Following a dominant theme in Hockney’s Illustrations For Fourteen Poems By C.P. Cavafy, The Beginning shows two youths in bed, naked but for the rumpled sheets covering their legs. The men appear to be the same figures from In The Dull Village and One Night, one distinguishable for his fair curly hair and the other for his dark mop. Here they are shown half sat up in bed, returning the gaze of the artist and viewer. Their bodies appear stiff as if they have been asked to pose and yet the intimacy and immediacy of their erotic encounter lingers. The background, as with so many of the prints in this series, is blank, offering no insight into the setting and pulling all the focus onto the bed with its many creases which are echoed in the body hair of the young men. Unapologetic in their nudity and their desire, the men offer a stark contrast to the original subject of the series, the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy’s poems, which were written at the turn of the 20th century when this desire was still illicit. In Hockney’s 1967 version queer love is celebrated in the open rather than hidden behind suggestion, as in Cavafy’s verses, reflecting the changing attitudes of the times.