The Marriage

This signed print by much loved British artist David Hockney is from 1962 – a year marked by the artist’s graduation from London’s prestigious art school, the Royal College of Art (RCA). Like The Hypnotist MCA Tokyo, a print study for a larger painting named The Hypnotist, this work is a study for the painting First Marriage (A Marriage Of Styles 1). Depicting a couple in profile, the work makes use of the child-like and cartoon-esque style characteristic of Hockney’s depiction of the human form during this period. The female figure wears earrings which echo the concentric forms of her headband and Hockney’s caricature-like rendering of her breasts. Behind the couple is a simplistic portrayal of a palm tree – a recurring feature of Hockney’s 1960s etchings, as in Pacific Mutual Life (1964). The inspiration for this work came from a visit to Germany in the summer of 1962. Accompanied by an American friend, Hockney looked around East Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, where he saw his friend stand next to a seated Egyptian figure crafted in wood. One of the chief inspirations for this work is that of French Dadaist, Jean Dubuffet. Commenting on Dubuffet’s influence on his cartoon-like works of the early ‘60s, Hockney once said: ‘it was his style of doing images, the kind of childish drawings he used that attracted me.’