David Hockney - Henry reading the newspaper

Original Lithograph, in black, worked on an aluminium plate with crayon, 1976 on Arches mould made buff paper, signed by the artist in orange crayon, Publishers chop mark lower right

Size: 265 x 245 mms (Paper size)

Note: This was part of a series of Lithographs Hockney made of his American and British friends.  Hockney made many drawings and other prints of the same subject and comes from the 1976 Gemini “Friends” portfolio. The work depicts Henry Geldzahler (1935 –1994) who was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum, New York. Hockney’s portrait of Henry and his partner, Christopher Scott, helped to secure his reputation in 1969. Hockney had met Geldzahler in New York at Andy Warhol’s ‘Factory’ in 1963, the year after he graduated from the Royal College of Art. Geldzahler at the time was a young and successful curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a figure at the centre of New York’s contemporary art scene. Warhol once remarked that Geldzahler ‘gave me all of my ideas’, and made a 90-minute film of him smoking a cigar. The two remained close throughout Geldzahler’s 18-year tenure at The Met and his stint as New York’s Commissioner of Cultural Affairs. He appeared, as himself, in the 1974 David Hockney biopic, “A Bigger Splash” Geldzahler died of cancer in 1994 at the age of 59.

SCAC calls for an edition of 21 but we have found several different editioned proofs in auction which confirm the edition as actually being 71.We believe this work to be correctly editioned.

Edition:  /71

Published by: Gemini G.E.L 1976

Printed by: Edward Henderson in Los Angeles

Provenance: Galere Lelong, 13 rue de Tehran, Paris, France (Their label verso)

Public Collections:

Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

National Gallery of Australia

The David Hockney Foundation.

References:  

Scottish Arts Council Number 197

The David Hockney Foundation webbsite: https://thedavidhockneyfoundation.org/artwork/1599

Condition: In very good condition