Detail

A curtain pulled aside reveals an artist’s studio, where we see the painter, sitting at a table that is made of nothing but colored dots of paint, drawing a picture of a guitar. Opposite him is a chair, constituted only by its outlines. In the background is a sculpture that quotes Pablo Picasso’s bust of Dora Maar; in the foreground is a staircase into the void. These and other elements of the picture seem unwilling to conform to the sense of perspective suggested by its gridlike arrangement of parallel lines. What holds them together is the painted curtain, which is painted in a realistic way so as to reveal the picture to be what it in fact is: a painting, pigment on canvas. It is no coincidence that the jars of paint the artist has used are right in front of us on the table. The painting marks a completely new understanding of reality in Hockney’s work. This break was triggered by his reading a poem by the American poet Wallace Stevens—“The Man with the Blue Guitar”—over and over again. “I wasn’t sure what it was about,” Hockney recalled. “It seemed to me to be about the imagination in some way. But I was thrilled with it.” He continued: “it is also about Picasso, about the imagination transforming things, the way you see.” And finally, after he had made some etchings on the subject, he affirmed: “I got excited and realised that I was breaking out of naturalism …. The first painting that resulted from these insights was Self-Portrait with Blue Guitar.”