Gretchen And The Snurl

This signed print by British artist David Hockney was completed by the artist in 1961, during his second year at London’s Royal College of Art. Whilst at the Royal College of Art, Hockney met his contemporary, American painter R.B. Kitaj. This particular print is the product of another of Hockney’s university contemporaries, Mark Berger. Illustrating one of his stories, which sees a boy named Gretchen venture out into the big city only to be befriended by Boorp the Snurl, a large round-shaped creature with a human head, it confronts the interplay between narrative and images. The print recalls the storyboard-like form of 18th-century English artist William Hogarth’s painting series The Rake’s Progress, which in 1963 Hockney adapted for his print series of the same name, and comprises a series of 5 individual etchings. A miniature evocation of one of Hockney’s so-called ‘Love’ paintings, We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961) - also produced during his second year at the Royal College of Art (RCA) - is the last image in the narrative sequence. Gestural in style and parodical in subject matter, this cryptic print appears to reference the issue of sexual orientation, one of the anthropomorphic characters it portrays - ‘Snatch’ -being a visual metaphor for heterosexuality.