David Hockney b.1937
Egypt, 1960
oil and canvas collage on board
50 by 40 inches
signed and inscribed verso David Hockney/Egypt/£ 40

Provenance
Knoedler Gallery, London
Waddington Galleries, London
Private Collection, UK

Exhibited
Jerusalem, The Israel Museum, British Figurative Painting of the 20th Century, British Council, November 1992 - February 1993, p44



Painted in 1960 when Hockney was studying at the Royal College of Art, Egypt marks a turning point in Hockney’s oeuvre whereby he began to actively push artistic boundaries and look for new ways of portraying form and content. As a solution to the fact that figure pictures were considered ‘anti-modern’, Hockney introduced lettering and words into his abstract compositions, explaining them as ‘a little bit of human thing that you immediately read; it’s not just paint.’ A disruption to the picture space, words were used in an attempt to make people look at a picture in an entirely different way:

‘as you walk a little closer to the picture, because you notice a line of type, you read the type first; in a sense this robs the picture of the magic, because you interpret the picture in terms of the written message... My intention was to force you to go and look closely at the canvas itself, and then in that sense it’s naughty because it’s robbed you of what you were thinking before, and you’ve got to look at it another way. That was the intention, if you put a real message on a painting it is meant to be read, and it will be read.’

The influence in this painting of Dubuffet, who had two exhibitions in London in 1960, is apparent. Hockney admired the anonymity of Dubuffet’s sticklike figures, and his use of graffiti and textual painting effect which recalled the roughness of walls; a quality echoed in the scratched and paint-splattered Egypt. It was around the time that this work was painted that Hockney wrote a spoof review of the graffiti in the Royal College men’s lavatories for a student news-sheet.

With graffiti, the identity of the maker is unknown, revealing both a private subconscious and yet a certain sameness, regardless of who made them. Hockney’s concern with the identity and the individuality of the artist is explored further in the word ‘EGYPT’, a country for which he had a deep fascination. Explaining his admiration for ancient Egyptian art, Hockney said ‘the rules were so rigid that there was no individualism in the paintings; whoever painted them, it didn’t matter; they had to obey the rules and so it all looked the same.’

Literary subjects, from poetry to fairy tales, appeared in Hockney’s work between 1960 and 1964. In particular, he was interested in the poets, Whitman, Cavafy and, in the case of this painting, A.E. Housman. The scrawled line ‘Heaven in falling’ is a quote from Housman’s poem, Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries:

These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling, And took their wages and are dead.