What Is This Picasso
Signed Print

Featuring a curtain, a still life of flowers, a grid like pattern and clouds of blue ink, this work from David Hockney’s The Blue Guitar series is in keeping with much of the subject matter and style throughout the portfolio. Here though, Hockney has also decided to include a copy of Picasso's head of Dora Maar, in green ink – a nod, along with the title, to the great painter who sparked Wallace Stevens’s imagination with his 1903 work The Old Guitarist. Stevens went on to write ‘The Blue Guitar’ in 1937, a book length poem which Hockney then came across in 1976 while on holiday on Fire Island. He proceeded to make the 20 etchings that make up this portfolio which later became a book. While the works are interesting for their subject matter, and their intention to not illustrate but merely accompany the poem, they are also notable for their technique which saw hockney putting new skills to work. In 1973 he had been invited to Paris to create a print on the occasion of Picasso’s death. There he worked closely with Aldo Crommelynck who had been Picasso’s preferred master printer and learned the sugar lift aquatint technique which allowed him to bring subtle variations of colour to his previously monochrome etchings.