David Hockney

£3,700-£5,500 VALUE (EST.)

$7,000-$10,000 VALUE (EST.)

$6,000-$9,000 VALUE (EST.)

¥30,000-¥45,000 VALUE (EST.)

€4,200-€6,500 VALUE (EST.)

$35,000-$50,000 VALUE (EST.)

¥600,000-¥890,000 VALUE (EST.)

$4,550-$7,000 VALUE (EST.)

8% AAGR

This estimate blends recent public auction records with our own private sale data and network demand.

Meaning & Analysis

Fundevogel is a signed etching by British artist David Hockney from 1969, depicting a serene valley surrounded by mountains. Represented by the view is the common German landscape that inspired the Grimm fairy tales and was used by Hockney as a basis for his illustrations of the titular fable. Before starting to work on Six Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, his first handmade book of etchings published by the Petersburg Press in association with the Kasmin Gallery in 1970, Hockney travelled down the Rhine River to experience the countryside that serves as a background for many of the classic German fairy tales. Alongside Fundevogel, A Wooded Landscape (1969) is another of Hockney’s prints inspired by his encounter with the German landscape.

Although the print relates to Fundevogel, the artist chose not to feature the story’s main characters: a girl, her foundling brother, and a cruel cook who threatens the siblings that he will put the boy in a large pot and boil him to death. The desolateness of the landscape contributes to the spooky atmosphere that dominates the print and defines the very mood of the Grimm fairy tale. In the story, the girl and the foundling run away and transform themselves into a series of objects in order to escape the cooks’ servants.

Similarly to the Cavafy prints, in which the artist experiments with the poem’s subject matter rather than faithfully represents it, the Grimm etchings do not illustrate specific events, but evoke a particular world, atmosphere or trope defining the narrative. Hockney commented in the context of Six Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, “I’d always enjoyed the fairy tales very much and thought I'd like to illustrate them, make a book rather like the Cavafy book, taking some of the stories; I'd read them all, about three hundred and fifty.“