Medium: Photographic collage mounted to green wove board
Year: 1982
Sheet: 25 x 20 7/8 inches (63.5 x 53.3 cm)
Edition: 20

Signed, titled, dated and numbered in white ink on lower edge

 

Influenced by two major Picasso retrospectives that were held at the Museum of Modern Art and the Walker Art Center in 1980, Hockney began to search for a way in which he could convey multiple viewpoints within one image. Surprisingly, it was the medium of photography that Hockney selected for his experiments – a medium he had previously criticized for relying on a fixed-perspective. To emulate the Cubist master, Hockney started to create composite Polaroid works: one subject shot from varying viewpoints with the photographs then assembled into one final image. Moving from a Polaroid camera to a Pentax 110 to avoid the white borders produced by the former device, Hockney utilized photographic collages to portray his muse, Celia Birtwell.

In Celia Making Tea, approximately twenty different photographs are taken, printed, and reconstructed into a fragmented portrait. They depict Celia dipping a tea bag into a cup in a yellow-lit room in New York while she engages in conversation with a friend. As Hockney hoped, the format of the photographic collage encourages the eye to move around the image, replicating how we experience scenes visually. Simultaneously, the arrangement encourages the viewer to dwell on each individual photograph in an attempt to understand how the final work is constructed. In doing so, tiny details that would otherwise have gone unnoticed suddenly come to the fore, such as how the folds of the curtains line up, or the pattern of the bedspread. In a complete break with the traditional convention of portraiture, Celia’s face is barely visible.

Left: Pablo Picasso, Girl with a Hoop, 1919. Bridgeman Images, Artwork: © Succession Picasso / DACS, London 2022.
Right: David Hockney, An Image of Celia, from Moving Focus, 1984-86. © David Hockney / Tyler Graphics Ltd.

Celia Making Tea is Hockney’s declaration that a successful portrait of someone should convey to the viewer how they would experience seeing the person in front of them if they were in the same room. Inspired by the multiple perspectives he could condense into one image, Hockney created the lithograph An Image of Celia (1984-86) – a homage to Picasso and a cumulation of his own experiments using composite photographs. In both Celia Making Tea and An Image of Celia, Hockney uses Celia’s likeness to challenge the concepts of accurate portraiture.

Source: Phillips

 

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Auction Results

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Phillips London: 13 September 2022
Estimated: GBP 10,000 – 15,000
GBP 30,240 / USD 35,350

DAVID HOCKNEY
Celia Making Tea, New York, Dec, 1982
Photographic collage, mounted to green wove board
Signed, titled, dated and numbered ‘#18’ in white ink, from the edition of 20