Riding Around On A Cooking-Spoon
Signed Print

Against a dark background of thickly hatched marks, a man is shown riding a wooden spoon. He is dressed in a kind of fuzzy overall that resembles a hairshirt. His face is darkened and his eyes closed as his feet dance over the fire below. Tongues of flame are rendered with fierce scribbles, white heat is shown by an absence of ink and the man appears like a mystic walking over hot coals. But this is 'Rumpelstilzchen', the anti hero of one of the most famous of the Brothers Grimm stories, and he is shown here in the moment of his escape. While later versions of the story have him merely running away or, more gruesomely, stamping his foot so hard into the ground that he tears himself in two, or creates a hole through which to fall, in the original fairy tale, told orally before it was recorded by the Brothers Grimm, Rumpelstiltskin is said to have picked up a ladle and flown out the window. Hockney published his Illustrations For Six Fairy Tales From The Brothers Grimm in 1969; commenting on why he was drawn to the stories as subjects he said, “They're fascinating, the little stories, told in a very very simple, direct, straightforward language and style, it was this simplicity that attracted me. They cover quite a strange range of experience, from the magical to the moral.”