The Brooklyn Bridge

An iconic part of the Photo Collages collection, this 1982 signed print by British artist David Hockney was produced in an edition of 20. Like several other of the images in this series, such as Graffiti Palace, New York (1982) and Sunday Morning Nov 28th 1982 Mayflower Hotel N.Y. (1982), it was initially composed during a trip to New York that Hockney made in November of 1982. An American city with which Hockney had considerable involvement during the 1980s – he acted as a stage and costume designer for numerous performances at the Metropolitan Opera early in the decade – New York, and another of its key landmarks, is here the subject of the artist’s disruptive, multifocal gaze. A wonderful example of one of the artist’s many ‘joiner’ images, The Brooklyn Bridge is symptomatic of Hockney’s unique approach to likeness and photography – a medium he described as ‘small’ and ‘lifeless’. Remarking that photography is ‘easy, really. All you need an eye’, Hockney asserted that its main shortcoming was to do with vision: ‘You never see things like that. It’s just not true’. In The Brooklyn Bridge, therefore, we are given a multitude of different perspectives which show us everything from Hockney’s brogues to the bridge cables high above his head. An artistic trailblazer, this print acts as a precursor to a similar work by one of Hockney’s contemporaries, Andy Warhol, who would go on to depict the bridge in the piece Brooklyn Bridge (F. & S. II.290) 1983, its centennial year.