From an early age, the theatre had a decisive impact upon David Hockney. As a young boy his father took him to Bradford Alhambra every Saturday, where he was mesmerised...
From an early age, the theatre had a decisive impact upon David Hockney. As a young boy his father took him to Bradford Alhambra every Saturday, where he was mesmerised by the spectacle of such plays and operas as La Bohème. Stage is a precursor to Hockney's full artistic immersion into the world of theatrical performance.
Hockney’s theatre drawings take many forms, some more explicitly theatrical like Stage, or others more similar to a still life framed by a curtain. Hockney once noted how, “if you take the painting off its stretcher, it is like a curtain. When you paint a curtain on canvas, the illusion is that it’s an inch deep at most. If you paint a curtain pulled back, it reveals a picture, as a stage curtain does in the theatre. A curtain in a painting always does that, even if it’s on a window”. In Stage the decorative curtain reveals a platform and what appears to be a window in the distance.
Stage is characteristic of Hockney’s drawing style in the 1960s. During this early period he repeats the same motifs of curtains, pyramids and stairways, to create a visual language that is instantly recognisable. Isolated objects hang whimsically, unrooted in space and the rules of perspective are suspended, with Hockney creating an alternate reality through form and colour. This exuberance and rejection of the artistic norm created a new lexicon within British painting that is more in keeping with American Pop Art of the time.
Two years after creating Stage, Hockney’s professional foray with theatre began when creating costumes for Alfred Jarray’s production of Ubu Roi at the Royal Court in London. This was followed by turning his talents to the many sets and costumes throughout the 1960s, 1970s and more recently.
Hockney’s theatrical stage works are now in many public collections such as Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington (Ordinary Picture, 1964) and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Ur Curtain, 1966).