David Hockney

DAVID HOCKNEY (United Kingdom, 1937–2026).
“What is this Picasso?”, The Blue Guitar series, 1976–1977.
Color etching and aquatint on paper. Copy AP X/XXXV.
Signed and numbered in pencil.
Measurements: 34 x 42.5 cm; 37.5 x 45 cm (frame opening); 67 x 67 cm (frame).
What Is This Picasso? is an engraving created between 1976 and 1977 by David Hockney and included in the famous portfolio 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 drawn inspiration from Pablo Picasso’s painting “The Old Guitarist.” 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 sculpture and a small vase placed on a geometric platform, accompanied by blue drapery and a space constructed through intense chromatic planes. However, behind this apparent simplicity lies a profound reflection on Picasso’s artistic legacy and on the constant transformation of images in modern art. The very question posed by the title, “What Is This Picasso?”, serves as an open-ended inquiry into 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, processes that Hockney learned in Paris at the Atelier Crommelynck, founded by brothers Aldo and Piero Crommelynck, who were regular collaborators with Picasso during the last years of his life. Thanks to these techniques, the artist achieved an extraordinary graphic freedom and a chromatic richness rarely seen in traditional printmaking.
Far from literally illustrating Stevens’s poem, Hockney constructed a series of images that visually reinterpret its central ideas: art’s capacity to transform reality and the coexistence of multiple forms of representation within a single work. In *The Blue Guitar*, and especially in *What Is This Picasso?*, there are continuous references to different stages and iconographic resources of Picasso’s work, combined with Hockney’s characteristic luminous, modern, and experimental aesthetic.
Published in 1977 by Petersburg Press in limited editions, the portfolio The Blue Guitar is today considered one of the most important print series in Hockney’s oeuvre and one of the most sophisticated reinterpretations of Picasso’s influence on art in the second half of the 20th century. In fact, there is a copy of this work in the MoMA collection.