Man Reading Stendhal July 1986
from Home Made Prints

Medium: Home-made print executed on an office color copy machine on Arches Text paper
Year: 1986
Sheet: 13 7/8 x 8 1/2 inches (35.5 x 21.6 cm)
Edition: 60
Publisher: The Artist
Literature: Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (302)

Signed, dated and numbered in pencil with the artist’s blindstamp

 

Created in 1986 as part of David Hockney’s innovative Homemade Prints series, Man Reading Stendhal demonstrates the artist’s remarkable ability to merge technological experimentation with subjects that had occupied him throughout his career. Produced using a color office photocopier, the work combines portraiture, literature, drawing, and printmaking into a single composition, revealing Hockney’s fascination with both the act of looking and the act of reading.

The composition depicts a seated figure absorbed in a book by the nineteenth-century French novelist Stendhal. Hockney reduces the figure to a series of simplified outlines and bold color fields, creating an image that is simultaneously figurative and abstract. The reader’s face, rendered in dense red marks, dominates the upper portion of the composition, while the black book acts as a visual anchor around which the rest of the image unfolds. Fragments of blue, green, red, and black patterns fill the figure’s body and surrounding space, producing a rhythmic interplay between solid forms and decorative surfaces. The composition is built from layers of texture generated by the photocopying process, creating a vibrant mosaic-like effect that recalls both pointillism and the color separations of commercial printing. Despite its visual complexity, the image retains a sense of quiet concentration. The reader appears entirely immersed in the text, transforming an everyday moment into a meditation on knowledge, imagination, and private contemplation.

The choice of Stendhal is far from incidental. Throughout his career, Hockney maintained a deep interest in literature and often portrayed friends, lovers, and acquaintances engaged in acts of reading. Books frequently appear throughout his paintings, drawings, and prints, functioning not merely as objects but as symbols of intellectual curiosity and personal identity. Stendhal, one of France’s great nineteenth-century novelists, was celebrated for his psychological insight and his exploration of perception, memory, and human desire. These themes resonate strongly with Hockney’s own artistic concerns. Like the novelist, Hockney has spent much of his career investigating how individuals experience and interpret the world around them, challenging conventional ways of representing reality.

By choosing to depict a reader rather than the author himself, Hockney emphasizes the intimate relationship between literature and imagination. The subject becomes both observer and participant, constructing mental images through the act of reading just as the artist constructs visual realities through drawing and printmaking.

Like all works from the Homemade Prints series, Man Reading Stendhal was created using a color office photocopier rather than a traditional printing press. Hockney produced individual drawings and color elements before combining them through successive photocopying stages, building the image layer by layer. The process allowed him to work independently, free from the technical constraints of conventional print workshops. More importantly, it enabled him to explore the visual possibilities of a technology that was still largely absent from fine-art practice. The distinctive grain, color saturation, and patterned textures visible throughout the composition are direct results of the photocopying process and form an essential part of the work’s visual identity. Rather than attempting to disguise the mechanical origins of the image, Hockney celebrates them. The copier becomes a creative instrument capable of generating unexpected forms, textures, and spatial relationships.

Beyond its technological significance, Man Reading Stendhal reflects Hockney’s continuing investigation into the representation of space. During the 1980s, the artist increasingly rejected the fixed viewpoint inherited from Renaissance perspective, seeking instead to represent the fluidity of human vision. The figure appears fragmented into multiple interconnected shapes that flatten and expand across the picture plane. The body is simultaneously described and dissolved, its contours shifting between abstraction and representation. This approach recalls the innovations of Cubism, particularly the work of Pablo Picasso, whose influence on Hockney has long been acknowledged. Rather than depicting a single frozen moment, the composition suggests an accumulation of visual experiences. The viewer’s eye moves continuously across the image, reconstructing the figure through a sequence of observations rather than a single viewpoint.

Man Reading Stendhal stands as a compelling example of Hockney’s ability to transform ordinary moments into complex visual investigations, while simultaneously demonstrating how new technologies can enrich rather than replace traditional artistic practices.

Why Stendhal?

The choice of Stendhal is particularly revealing. Widely regarded as one of the great novelists of the nineteenth century, Stendhal is celebrated for works such as The Red and the Black (Le Rouge et le Noir, 1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (La Chartreuse de Parme, 1839). His novels are renowned for their psychological depth, their exploration of individual perception, and their acute observation of human behavior. For Hockney, whose own artistic practice has long revolved around questions of perception and the subjective experience of reality, Stendhal was a particularly fitting literary companion. Both artist and writer share a fascination with how individuals construct their understanding of the world. Just as Stendhal sought to capture the complexity of human consciousness through literature, Hockney has spent decades challenging conventional systems of representation in order to depict how we actually see.

There may also be a more personal connection. Hockney has always been an avid reader with a deep appreciation for French culture, literature, and intellectual life. Throughout his career, books appear repeatedly within his portraits and interiors, often serving as subtle clues to the identity, interests, or inner lives of his subjects. In Man Reading Stendhal, the book becomes more than a prop; it acts as a symbol of intellectual curiosity, contemplation, and the transformative power of imagination. Interestingly, Stendhal himself was deeply interested in the visual arts and spent considerable time writing about painting during his travels in Italy and France. The dialogue established in this print therefore extends beyond literature alone, becoming a conversation between two creative figures separated by more than a century but united by a common fascination with observation, perception, and the ways in which art shapes our understanding of reality.

 

 

 

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Auction Results

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Rago: 17 February 2021
Estimated: USD 8,000 – 12,000
USD 9,375

DAVID HOCKNEY (b.1937)
Man Reading Stendhal, 1986
Homemade print executed on an office color copy machine on Arches
Signed, dated and numbered to upper edge ’17/60 David Hockney 86′
Published by the artist

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Phillips London: 12 September 2019
Estimated: GBP 3,000 – 5,000
GBP 8,125 / USD 10,020

DAVID HOCKNEY
Man Reading Stendhal, July 1986, 1986
Home-made print executed on an office color copy machine on Arches paper
Signed, dated and numbered 48/60 in pencil
Published by the artist (with his blindstamp)

Christie’s online: 17 July 2018
Estimated: USD 2,500 – 3,500
USD 11,250

DAVID HOCKNEY (B. 1937)
Man Reading Stendahl, 1986
Home made print executed on an office color copy machine on Arches paper
Signed and dated in pencil, numbered 57/60
Published by the artist, with his blindstamp