In 1959 the young aspiring artist of 22 years, David Hockney, set off to London to study at the Painting School at the Royal College of Art (RCA). This followed his earlier studies at the Bradford College of Art, in the industrial city of his birth in northern England. While studying painting at the RCA Hockney began making etchings. The cash-strapped young artist had no money for paint but learnt the College’s Print Department provided students with free materials and so he went along, in the process becoming accomplished in the art of etching. In the Print Department, he was fortunate to meet a student of Art and Theatre Design, Ron Fuller, who taught him how to etch: ‘I was a technical assistant in printmaking at the RCA when David came along and wanted to do some etching… I set him up to do this but a lot of the students helped him as well – it was a good, free and easy place.’1 Hockney flourished as an artist under these circumstances.

Shown the rudiments of how to etch and aquatint, it became obvious that Hockney developed a unique style. His prints were a figurative art of the imagination, of fantasy, combined with personal themes. In his early etchings he included the people he admired; his own experiences and surreal juxtapositions augmented with words or coded numbers.  All were produced with characteristic wit and inventiveness. The poetry of the Alexandrian Greek Constantine Cavafy and the nineteenth century American Walt Whitman, both noted for their homo-erotic verse, inspired the artist.  Visual sources also contributed to Hockney’s art. These ranged from labels for Alka Seltzer, a brand of digestive salts for overindulgence, and more significantly, the richly satirical pictorial cycles of the eighteenth century English artist, William Hogarth.

Hockney was one of the Royal College students who exhibited in 1961 at the Young Contemporaries exhibition in London. It was there that they gained a reputation for their combination of both abstract and figurative art styles and the use of every day subject-matter. Hockney, in particular was singled out as an unusual and refreshing talent and won a forty pound prize as the outstanding artist of the show.  It was at this exhibition that Hockney came to the attention of the young gallery director John Kasmin, then working for Marlborough Fine Art. Kasmin went on to become Hockney’s London dealer, further enhancing Hockney’s reputation as a gifted artist, who was now able to supplement his meagre student grant with sales.

After the Young Contemporaries, Hockney received a string of other prizes beginning with five pounds awarded by the Pop artist Richard Hamilton and first prize in the John Moores Junior Section for emerging artists working in Britain. To Hockney’s great surprise he won another award for a print on display in the exhibition Graven Image at Robert Erskine’s Gallery. It had been submitted not by Hockney but by the Head of the Printmaking School, Alistair Gray, who had found Hockney’s etching in the workshop and assumed by the quality of the work that it was done by one of his students.

The unexpected financial bounty from the prizes helped pay for a cheap air fare of forty pounds and enabled Hockney to set off to visit America in the summer of 1961. The young
man found the experience invigorating: ‘It was totally thrilling, an utterly free city, running 24 hours a day. It was totally classless, sexy and free’.2 Hockney could see how such a lively city would be perfect for artists. In comparison London seemed asleep and he felt few ties to that city as all his childhood and youthful experiences had been in provincial Bradford. Instead the New York of the 1960s reminded Hockney of the vibrant eighteenth century London depicted by Hogarth. New York, in the post war period, had become the quintessential modern city, huge in scale, culturally rich, full of life, teaming crowds, noise and danger.

It was Hockney’s summer experiences of 1961 in America which on his return to London and the RCA became the subject for his next innovative print project, the series A Rake’s Progress of 1961-63. For this, Hockney selected an eighteenth century pictorial narrative as inspiration, Hogarth’s A Rakes Progress: ‘What I liked was telling a story just visually. Hogarth’s original story had no words, it’s a graphic tale. You have to interpret it all.’3 What a wonderful source of inspiration for the young artist. Hogarth came to prominence as an artist by painting and engraving moral tales, in doing so he satirised the conceits, fashions and foibles of English society. His Rake’s Progress tells the story in eight scenes of the downfall of Tom Rakewell. After receiving an inheritance, this gauche young man leaves for the city, where he leads a lavish life of excess and debauchery. Indebtedness leads to ‘a marriage of convenience’, but gambling brings Rakewell undone, now ruined, he is thrown into prison. From there he ends up in a madhouse – Bedlam.

Following Hogarth’s example, it was Hockney’s original intention to have a series of eight images. RCA Director Robin Darwin was keen for the Royal College to publish the series under their Lion and Unicorn Press and proposed a much larger production of twenty four plates. The sheer slog of the project and the problem of spreading the story too thinly meant Hockney balked at the proposal. The idea seemed to add a lot of padding to what would be a rollicking visual tale, and the young artist just could not consider the idea as a worthwhile one. Finally, a compromise of sixteen plates was agreed upon. The project dragged on over months and it was nearly abandoned. Even after graduation the series had still not been completed and he was allowed access to the College print workshop.

For this semi-autobiographical series, Hockney took the Hogarthian theme and recounted a story loosely based on his own experiences in New York. The series tells of the young Hockney arriving on a cheap charter flight, ‘Flying Tyger’ [in actuality Flying Tiger] in New York. In The arrival, the artistwho like Tom Rakewell finds a vibrant, crowded city. In Receiving the Inheritance, unlike Tom, the Hockney figure does not inherit his money from his miserly father.  Instead he meets the influential curator, Bill Lieberman, who after haggling over the cost of his prints provides the young artist with eighteen pounds, not the twenty Hockney had asked, for his print, Myself and my Heroes. The Rake then sets off in his adventures in the big city, in this case in Meeting the Good People [Washington] he visits Washington monuments commemorating Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and attends the performance of gospel singer Mahalia Jackson in The Gospel Singing, Good People, Madison Square Garden in New York.
Keen to be fashionable and to stand out amongst the crowd the Hockney figure decides to make himself more attractive like the Hogarthian young man. To this end our twentieth century Rake dyes his hair blonde (something Hockney did while in America) and doors open (following the Clairol advertisement that ‘Doors open for a blonde’). He then sets out on a spending spree. Despite his vanity, his attempts to look dashing fall short of the mark, and the weedy looking artist becomes ashamed of his looks compared to the joggers of Central Park in New York (the title for this print 7 Stone Weakling derived from advertisements for body building found in pulp magazines).

The decline begins in the drinking scene, this time in a gay bar, and as in Hogarth’s narrative, he is forced to try and save his situation my acquiring a rich spouse shown in Marrying an Old Maid. Our Rake’s decline continues in Viewing a Prison Scene (although in Hockney’s version the Rake isn’t flung into prison as a debtor but rather sees the view of the prison in a film).  Like Rakewell, however, the artist loses his money in The Wallet Begins to empty, where the curator and gospel singer send Hockney packing because of his spendthrift ways. In between this sequence is an American scene, Death in Harlem, derived from the work of a photographer in Harlem.  Hockney was open to all kinds of visual sources for his subject matter and this photograph appears in Cecil Beaton’s New York, where the English photographer describes and illustrates the work of the ‘Harlem photographer.’4 Hockney has taken the image of apotheosis signalled by the corpse, the angel and with an added flower instead of the inscription which tells of ‘mysterious realms’ and adds to this composition his own self portrait; a detached head of a detached passer by.

During the process with Hockney making a number of variant proofs and progressive proofs and in order to complete the series Hockney felt the need to return to the States to develop his ideas further and he made two further plates at the Pratt Graphics Center, Disintegration and Cast Aside, which tell of the Rake’s self destruction from excessive alcohol and ultimate rejection. In the final scene in the Rake’s Progress the young man finds himself in Bedlam. Instead of the cacophony associated with the mental asylum, however, Hockney’s Rake finds himself with identical automatons with transistor radios listening to the local radio station. For this image and Meeting other people, he draws from his own experience when he first visited New York and was shocked by the number of deaf youths on the street: ‘When I first saw them I thought they were hearing aids and was horrified by the deafness among young people.’5 Hockney’s ideal of hell now is a line of robotic figures who are all plugged into transistor radios, swinging with WABC. A Rake’s Progress reveal Hockney to be a young artist of immense sensitivity and wit, with great skill as an etcher.

Hockney’s Rake’s Progress was considered an ideal publishing venture for Editions Alecto and Hockney was paid the princely sum of five thousand pounds. Once the final plates were selected, they were editioned by a conventional printer, C.H. Welch, who worked on the series for several months, but who declined Hockney’s generous offer of a set as the printer had no sympathy for Hockney’s series. By 1963 A Rake’s Progress was complete. It was at once witty, innovative in its subject and technically experimental, and it further established Hockney as an important emerging artist of the day. It also funded Hockney’s desire to return to America – a country he felt drawn to. In the future, Hockney’s travels to America provided the young artist with a sense of freedom: freedom to experiment, to explore and freedom to ignore conventions — something he continues to do as an artist to this present day.

© Jane Kinsman                                                     8 December 2005
Senior Curator of International Prints, Drawings and Illustrations
National Gallery of Australia

Images

© David Hockney