Beautiful And White Flowers

Opening with a young man’s declaration that he wants to abandon his long-term lover, Cavafy’s poem deals with the crisis of a romantic relationship between two men. What propels the motif of abandonment is the male figure’s desire to break away from the life in austerity by starting a relationship with a much more affluent man than him and his current lover. Although it finishes on a dramatic note, culminating in the image of the young man’s death and the abandoned lover’s longing, Hockney strives to extricate a positive dimension from Cavafy’s poem. Beautiful And White Flowers presents the viewer with a static, surprisingly lighthearted scene, in which one man is seen lying down on a sofa while the other stands behind with his hand tenderly touching the cushion. Through such a representation, the artist seems to move beyond the moment in time described in the poem and imagines the relation in its early, innocent phase.