Figure by a Curtain
Medium: Lithograph printed in black and grey with screenprint in white on BFK Rives wove paper
Year: 1964
Sheet: 19 5/8 x 25 7/8 inches (50 x 65.2 cm)
Edition: 75
Artist’s Proofs: 16 AP
Publisher: Editions Alecto, London
Literature: Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (37)
Signed, dated, titled and numbered in pencil with the publisher’s blindstamp
Figure by a Curtain is based on the painting Play within a Play from 1963.
Play within a Play, 1963
‘The figure is a portrait of John Kasmin [Hockney’s dealer].
Kas had always wanted me to paint him but I never got round to it as I couldn’t really decide how to do it. Now it seemed appropriate to trap him in this small space between art and life’.
Hockney was inspired by Domenichino’s painting Apollo Killing Cyclops in the National Gallery, London, in which a dwarf is depicted standing before a tapestry depicting the mythological scene of the painting’s title.
‘It wasn’t the subject matter from Greek mythology that interested me, but the fact that they really seemed like trompe l’oeil painting. They were paintings made to look like tapestries made from paintings, already a double level of reality’.
The effect of Kasmin’s nose and hands pressed up against the real glass of the glazed picture is suggested in the print with areas of screen-printed opaque white, which appear flat on an otherwise lithographic surface.
Auction Results
Sotheby’s London: 15 November 2023
Estimated: GBP 7,000 – 10,000
GBP 13,970 / USD 17,453
DAVID HOCKNEY (b. 1937)
Figure by a Curtain (Portrait of Kasmin) (S.A.C., MCA Tokyo 37), 1964
Lithograph printed in black and grey with screenprint in white on BFK Rives mould-made paper
Signed in pencil, dated, numbered 20/75 and inscribed by the sitter For my old buddy Ken Noland, Kasmin 65
Christie’s London: 28 March 2018
Estimated: GBP 7,000 – 10,000
GBP 8,750
DAVID HOCKNEY (B. 1937)
Figure by a Curtain, 1964
Lithograph printed in black and grey with screenprint in white on BFK Rives wove paper
Signed and dated in pencil, numbered 71/75
Christie’s New-York: 25 October 2017
Estimated: USD 5,000 – 7,000
USD 15,000
DAVID HOCKNEY (B. 1937)
Figure by a Curtain, 1964
Lithograph and screenprint in colors on Rives BFK paper
Signed and dated in pencil, numbered 30/75