Name: Myself And My Heroes
Brand: David Hockney
Rating: 5 (236 reviews)

Track auction value trend

The value of David Hockney’s Myself And My Heroes (signed) from 1961, an intaglio print, is estimated to be worth between £10,000 and £14,500. This artwork has shown consistent value growth, with an average annual growth rate of 2%. This is a rare artwork with an auction history of 9 total sales since its entry to the market in September 2007. In the past 12 months, the hammer price has ranged from £11,000 to £14,000, demonstrating its current popularity. The edition size of this artwork is limited to 50.

Meaning & Analysis

Myself And My Heroes is a signed screen print by British artist, David Hockney. Released in a limited edition of 50, this print was produced in 1961 at a very early stage in the artist's career when he had just completed his studies at the Royal College of Art. In this period, Hockney was very much a young artist ‘to watch’ and had featured in the hotly tipped Young Contemporaries exhibition, held at RBA Galleries in London, for two years running.

read more about Influences

Evoking the style of the acclaimed painting, We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), Myself And My Heroes depicts American writer Walt Whitman (a source of intertextual reference for the earlier painting) and Mahatma Gandhi, leader of the India’s non-violent independence movement against British rule.

Standing to their right is Hockney himself, depicted with glasses and wearing a cap. Graffiti-like writing surrounds the figures, scrawled in an untutored, child-like style first suggested to Hockney by the work of French surrealist Jean Dubuffet. Identifying the figures in a naïve and didactic fashion which makes use of text, Hockney outlines his reasons for holding the figures to such acclaim – a fact only compounded by their haloes, which recall those of Byzantine icons. Atop Hockney’s superbly gestural etching work is the title of the piece, ‘Myself And My Heroes’.