ILLUSTRATIONS FOR FOURTEEN POEMS BY C P CAVAFY, 1967
signed David Hockney and numbered A.P on the final page in pencil
fourteen poems by C P Cavafy chosen and illlustrated with twelve etchings by David Hockney translated by Nikos Stangos and Stephen Spender
34.6 x 22.5cm (first etching); (47.5 x 33.6cm folio)

Provenance:
Acquired by the present owner circa 1980

Twelve etchings were published by Alecto in 1967, in a book of 500 with several loose portfolio editions, printed by Maurice Payne and Danyon Black; the first 250 copies included a thirteenth plate, Portrait of Cavafy II, not enclosed here. These etchings remain among the most affecting works which Hockney, arguably the 20th century's greatest draughtsman, ever produced.

Hockney became aware of the work of Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933) while still a student. He was so transfixed with the poems and their sexually liberated exoticism, that he took it upon himself to permanently liberate a copy from his local library in Bradford. Cavafy, a Alexandrian Greek who had passed some of his youth in Liverpool, wrote two kinds of poem: reconstructions of the Hellenistic past, and intimate accounts of desire between men in the modern city. He was among the earliest writers of the twentieth century to treat homosexuality openly, and the effect on the young Hockney was enormous. Alongside Whitman, Cavafy gave him the confidence to be himself. As he later put it, he had found a bohemian world of art, poetry and music, met the first homosexuals unafraid to say so, and resolved to live accordingly, to leave tired, grey Bradford behind.

Early responses followed quickly, among them the 1961 prints Kaisarion and Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, and A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style, shown at Young Contemporaries in 1962. The suite properly began when Hockney proposed the project to Paul Cornwall-Jones of Editions Alecto, who told him to start at once. In January 1966 he travelled to Beirut, then known as the Paris of the Middle East and the nearest surviving equivalent to Cavafy's cosmopolitan Alexandria, making pen and ink drawings of street life there.

Returning to his house in Notting Hill, with the acid bath out on the balcony, Hockney worked up some twenty plates of Beirut from his drawings and photographs. The Middle East supplied the architecture and the framework, but it was Notting Hill that supplied the texture as he populated the images with scenes drawn from friends and lovers in London. During the period of production homosexuality was still illegal in the UK, and poignantly the books publication coincided with decriminalisation in 1967. Hockney simply saw the work as a defence of his world.