Carolin von Massenbach
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Lot 246AR
David Hockney(British, born 1937)Soft Celia
2 May 2019, 11:00 BST
London, KnightsbridgeSold for £10,687.50 inc. premium
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Prints Knightsbridge (UK)
David Hockney (British, born 1937)
Soft Celia
Etching, 1998, on wove, signed, dated and inscribed 'AP IX/X' in pencil, an artist's proof aside from the edition of 35, the full sheet, 1116 x 775mm (43 7/8 x 30 1/2in)(SH)
Etching, 1998, on wove, signed, dated and inscribed 'AP IX/X' in pencil, an artist's proof aside from the edition of 35, the full sheet, 1116 x 775mm (43 7/8 x 30 1/2in)(SH)
Footnotes
The celebrated fabric designer Celia Birtwell first met David Hockney in the 1960s and became a close friend during and after her marriage to the great fashion designer Ossie Clark, with whom she collaborated creatively and with whom she is portrayed in the Tate's highly popular painting Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-71).
Celia has been Hockney's great muse for more than forty years, the subject of some of his most delicate, affectionate and frankly seductive portrait prints and drawings since as far back as 1969. His first etched portrait of her in that year has been followed by other etchings, many on a large scale, by lithographs such as 'Celia Smoking (1973)' and a series made with a free Matissean brushed line six years later, and by some of Hockney's most accomplished coloured crayon drawings.
As the most recent etched portrait of her, Soft Celia occupies a very special place in Hockney's long-term association with a designer whose own creativity is still very much in force. This print, magisterial in scale but marked by a great tenderness and intimacy, is part of a large group of etchings made in Hockney's Los Angeles studio in 1998 with the English printer Maurice Payne, whose close association with Hockney stretches back to the mid-1960s. Hockney has made no further etchings or lithographs since 1998, and so Soft Celia may turn out to be the only etching representing his great friend in her maturity, still radiant in her beauty.
Marco Livingstone