Beschreibung:

PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT AMERICAN COLLECTION David Hockney Steps with Shadow F (Paper Pool 2) 1978 Unique hand-coloured pressed paper pulp, on white TGL handmade paper, the full sheet. S. 128.3 x 85.1 cm (50 1/2 x 33 1/2 in.) Signed with initials and dated in white ink on the front, annotated '2-F' in pencil on the reverse (one of 16 variants), published by Tyler Graphics Ltd., Mount Kisco, New York (with their inkstamp), framed.
Provenance Tyler Graphics Ltd., New York Literature Tyler Graphics 237 Nikos Stangos, David Hockney paper pools, Thames & Hudson, London, 1980, pp. 26-27 Catalogue Essay David Hockney Paper Pools by Marco Livingstone David Hockney’s Paper Pools, a sustained series of works made from coloured and pressed paper pulp, were made between August and October 1978 during six weeks of feverish activity at Tyler Graphics Ltd, the studios near Mount Kisco, NY, run by the master printer Kenneth Tyler; the artist had previously worked with him on lithographs at his Gemini workshop in Los Angeles. During this brief period he produced 29 separate images, some in multiple versions, beginning with single-sheet images such as those presented here before eventually expanding to the 12 conjoined sheets of Le Plongeur (Paper Pool 18, in the collection of Cartwright Hall, Bradford) and A Large Diver (Paper Pool 27), each of which measures 183 x 434 cm overall. The entire group of pictures, in a medium recently devised by Tyler and used by Hockney only this one time in his life during an extraordinary burst of creative energy, came about spontaneously, almost by chance. Stopping off in New York City en route from London to Los Angeles, where he was about to resettle after years of absence, Hockney was persuaded to make a detour to visit his old friend and was soon seduced into trying his hand at a medium with which three American abstract painters admired by Hockney, Ellsworth Kelly Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella had already experimented. As on other occasions when he has stopped momentarily working in isolation in his painter’s studio and engaged in a collaborative effort, as he has when visiting print workshops or designing for the opera, the conviviality of the working situation and the creative input and encouragement offered by others also proved decisive factors in drawing out the best from him. Having suffered from several years of creative block in the mid-1970s, when his dedication to a more naturalistic style appeared, to him, to be leading to a dead end, Hockney had begun to find a way forward to a more expansive vision through his stage designs for two opera productions at Glyndebourne in West Sussex – Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in 1974-5 and Mozart’s The Magic Flute in 1977-8 – that encouraged him to engage in a greater simplification and to work on a much larger scale that completely immersed the spectator. Those intense interludes in the theatre proved decisive in preparing him to paint with a new vigour. Hockney was immediately delighted by the possibilities offered by the unconventional paper pulp medium – not quite printmaking in a conventional sense, but also distinct from the tradition of oil painting – to return to a freer and much more spontaneous way of making images. (On the artist’s official website, the Paper Pools are reproduced not in the graphic section but as paintings.) Working with vats of wet pulped rags immersed in different dyes, which were then ladled liberally or applied with a variety of other tools into galvanised sheet metal moulds (corresponding to the artist’s full-scale outline drawings) onto still-wet surfaces of newly fabricated paper, he was encouraged to compose bold, simplified designs that released him from the constraints of a detailed fidelity to appearances. The moulds were removed and final adjustments made by hand before the resulting sheets, heavy with liquid pulp, were squeezed and flattened in hydraulic presses. The patterns or marks applied over the top of the base image, particularly in the swimming-pool pictures, subtly transform the different versions made with the same moulds into unique variations, each with its particular qualities of light, hue, surface and implied movement. The necessity for extreme simplification of form and economy of expression led to the most spirited group of pictures he had made in years. As with Matisse’s late paper cut-outs, which he admired, the di