'Illustrations for Poems from C P Cavafy', etched in 1966 and published in 1967, can be regarded not only as Hockney’s first sustained exercise in line drawing but as one of the most impressive achievements of his naturalist phase.

The Cavafy images arose in three different ways: most of the figures were drawn from life; others, such as the boy frontally posed in In an Old Book were taken from photographs; and the buildings were based on drawings made on a visit to Beirut…Metaphor continues to operate in these prints in subtle and emotive ways. Whereas in his prints of the early 1960s Hockney had treated the paper as the support for a tactile and often heavily textured surface, in these images the white of the paper become both an enveloping atmosphere – all the more physically palpable for being undefined in its limits – and an equivalent for the sensuous smoothness of skin.

Hockney’s originality as an illustrator is amply demonstrated in the Cavafy prints by his decision not to make pictures of particular poems but to capture the general mood in Cavafy’s poetry of a nostalgia for the erotic and then to select the poems to accompany the images.’

Marco Livingstone, David Hockney: Etchings and Lithographs, Thames and Hudson, London, 1988, pp.20-21

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Romancing the Line

A Celebration of figurative art on paper