David Hockney

DAVID HOCKNEY (United Kingdom, 1937).
"What is this Picasso, The Blue guitar series, 1976 - 1977.
Etching and aquatint in color on paper. Copy AP X/XXXV.
Signed and justified in pencil.
Measurements: 34 x 42,5 cm; 37,5 x 45 cm (framed window); 67 x 67 cm (framed).
What Is This Picasso? is an engraving made between 1976 and 1977 by David Hockney and included in the famous folder The Blue Guitar, a series of twenty prints inspired by the poem The Man with the Blue Guitar by the American poet Wallace Stevens, a text that in turn had taken as a reference the painting The Old Guitarist by Pablo Picasso. The series constitutes a complex visual and conceptual dialogue between poetry, painting and printmaking, exploring the relationship between reality, imagination and artistic representation. In this composition, Hockney presents a seemingly simple scene: a greenish-hued sculpture and a small vase placed on a geometric platform, accompanied by a blue curtain and a space constructed by intense chromatic planes. However, behind this apparent simplicity lies a profound reflection on Picasso's artistic heritage and on the constant transformation of images in modern art. The very question of the title, "What Is This Picasso?", serves the artist as an open question about the identity of the image and the influence of the Spanish master on contemporary visual language.
The work was created using etching and aquatint techniques, procedures that Hockney learned in Paris at the Atelier Crommelynck workshop, founded by the brothers Aldo and Piero Crommelynck, Picasso's regular collaborators during the last years of his life. Thanks to these techniques, the artist achieved an extraordinary graphic freedom and a chromatic richness unusual in traditional engraving.
Far from literally illustrating Stevens' poem, Hockney constructed a series of images that visually reinterpret its central ideas: the capacity of art to transform reality and the coexistence of multiple forms of representation within the same work. In The Blue Guitar, and especially in What Is This Picasso? there are continuous references to different stages and Picassian iconographic resources, combined with Hockney's characteristic luminous, modern and experimental aesthetic.
Published in 1977 by Petersburg Press in limited editions, The Blue Guitar portfolio is today considered one of the most important graphic series of Hockney's production and one of the most sophisticated reinterpretations of Picasso's influence on the art of the second half of the 20th century. In fact, there is a copy of this work in the MoMa collection.