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Lot Essay
Filled with eccentricity and eclecticism, David Hockney's works from the first half of the 1960s provided the artist with an arena both for experimentation and for his sense of humour. Painted in 1963, the Camouflaged Man has been rendered with swirling, energetic brushstrokes that are deeply gestural. This appears in part to be a tribute to Pablo Picasso only a few years earlier, Hockney had seen a retrospective of his works, and this had acted as an affirmation of his desire to experiment in his pictures. Indeed, the vigorous paintwork in Camouflaged Man recalls Picasso's works from precisely this period.
Hockney's sense of humour and his desire to explore the nature of the act of seeing are evident in the fact that these swirling brushstrokes extend to some of the background. The wiggling lines that surround the camouflaged man of the title prefigure the snaking lines with which Hockney's celebrated pool paintings convey the sense of rippling water. They also serve to parody, as does the camouflage itself, the gestural works of the Abstract Expressionists-- Hockney has taken elements of their visual idiom and has slyly squeezed them into a new and all too figurative context. At the same time, the fact that the strokes in the background echo, albeit with less density, those of the clothing hints at the effectiveness of the man's camouflage, as he appears to be blending in with the scene around him. However, the fact that what appears to be a shirt or a dressing gown is hanging in the background implies that his choice of clothing is not a reflection of any military content, but that instead he is lounging around in some domestic context, perhaps on a bed or by a pool. The fact that this painting uses acrylics implies that it is one of the earliest of his California pictures-- it was after his arrival there that he essentially converted from the use of oils. Perhaps, then, this character is one of Hockney's early acquaintances in his sunny, relaxed and permissive new home.
Many of Hockney's earliest and most experimental works were works on paper. It was perhaps with an eye to this that Camouflaged Man mimics to some extent the visual appearance of a watercolour, with its sparse pale background. At the same time, there is an immediacy to this character, looming from the unarticulated background, that hints at the visual intensity of Pop, a movement to which Hockney had already been exposed, not least when he met its guru Andy Warhol in the year that Camouflaged Man was painted.
Hockney's sense of humour and his desire to explore the nature of the act of seeing are evident in the fact that these swirling brushstrokes extend to some of the background. The wiggling lines that surround the camouflaged man of the title prefigure the snaking lines with which Hockney's celebrated pool paintings convey the sense of rippling water. They also serve to parody, as does the camouflage itself, the gestural works of the Abstract Expressionists-- Hockney has taken elements of their visual idiom and has slyly squeezed them into a new and all too figurative context. At the same time, the fact that the strokes in the background echo, albeit with less density, those of the clothing hints at the effectiveness of the man's camouflage, as he appears to be blending in with the scene around him. However, the fact that what appears to be a shirt or a dressing gown is hanging in the background implies that his choice of clothing is not a reflection of any military content, but that instead he is lounging around in some domestic context, perhaps on a bed or by a pool. The fact that this painting uses acrylics implies that it is one of the earliest of his California pictures-- it was after his arrival there that he essentially converted from the use of oils. Perhaps, then, this character is one of Hockney's early acquaintances in his sunny, relaxed and permissive new home.
Many of Hockney's earliest and most experimental works were works on paper. It was perhaps with an eye to this that Camouflaged Man mimics to some extent the visual appearance of a watercolour, with its sparse pale background. At the same time, there is an immediacy to this character, looming from the unarticulated background, that hints at the visual intensity of Pop, a movement to which Hockney had already been exposed, not least when he met its guru Andy Warhol in the year that Camouflaged Man was painted.