Panama Hat On A Chair

This signed print by British artist David Hockney was issued in an edition of 100 in 1998. Part of the Chairs series, it takes a domestic object as its principal subject. In the image, a 19th-century chair stands awkwardly; a panama hat and a bow tie lay on its upholstered seat, suggesting the presence of an otherwise absent figure. At the base of the monochrome image, a geometric grid makes an abstracted mirroring of the chair’s shadow. Its rigidity contrasts with the otherwise gestural applications of ink which form the chair’s stile and spat. This work was created by Hockney to appear in the Geldzahler Portfolio: a collection of 10 works by artists such as Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, David Salle, and Frank Stella, created for the first curator of 20th-century art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, Henry Geldzahler. The cigar-toting Geldzahler, one of Hockney’s life-long friends, was present during one of Hockney’s first visits to New York in the early ‘60s and introduced Hockney to the likes of Dennis Hopper and Andy Warhol. Much like Hockney’s Photo Collages collection, and the many other works of the artist’s works which depict chairs (such as Number One Chair from 1985-6, or Vincent’s Chair And Pipe from 1988), Panama Hat On A Chair defies traditional perspective, owing much to the influence of the Cubist movement.