Parade (acrobat)

Appearing on 111 billboards in the vicinity of the opera house, this screen print is constituted by bold colours and suggestive movement which draw in the onlooker. The Harlequin figure references the work of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, who designed the stages for its original 1917 performance as part of Serge Diaghile’s Ballets Russes. During his time spent developing the play’s costumes, Picasso worked alongside the likes of Jean Cocteau and Guillaume Apollinaire, original writer of the play Les Mamelles de Tirésias. This was then adapted into an opera by Francis Poulenc, another composer whose name features in Hockney’s piece,A Souvenir Of A Triple Bill For Andrea Velis (1982).

The Harlequin figure balances on a bookcase in an allusion to the many other plays Hockney was involved with during the 1970s and ‘80s, following his first appearance as a costume and stage designer for a 1975 adaptation of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, performed at the world-famous Glyndebourne Festival. Hockney involvement with the play would spark a retrospective exhibition at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum in 1981, a poster of which, An Exhibit Of Costumes (1981), also features in the Hockney And The Stage collection of works.