etching and aquatint in three colours with collage
50 x 50 cm
edition of 50 approximately
Further information »
My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, 1962
Provenance:
with Susannah Pollen, 2006
Exhibition History:
Woking, The Lightbox, The Ingram Collection: Prints and Printmaking, 1 February – 30 April 2011;
Woking, The Lightbox, The Ingram Collection: Diamond Jubilee Exhibition, 6 March – 15 April 2012;
Woking, The Lightbox, The Ingram Collection: Colourful Lives of Artists, 30 April – 30 June 2013;
Hastings, Jerwood Gallery, Century: 100 Modern British Artists, 23 October 2016 – 8 January 2017;
Hull, Ferens Art Gallery, Reflection: British Art in an Age of Change, 17 August 2019 – 5 January 2020;
Woking, The Lightbox, David Hockney: Ways of Working, 25 January – 19 April 2020
Literature:
D. Hockney, My Early Years, London, 1976 (illustrated, p. 65, p. 57, no. 38);
Marco Livingstone, David Hockney Etchings and Lithographs, London, 1988 (another edition illustrated, no. 4)
In July 1961 Hockney travelled for the first time to New York, where the Museum of Modern Art bought two of his prints. Not yet twenty-five, Hockney was a rising star, but he was also a gay man in an unenlightened world – and a long way from home. This apparently naïve but complex print explores his predicament in a typically humorous way, with the Atlantic Ocean represented as a wild swirl of lines. On the left, ‘Dh’ stands on top of a Manhattan skyscraper, brandishing an American flag. On the right, beside a much smaller Union Jack, an indistinct figure in a bowler hat perhaps represents London, while a man’s face, in profile, wears a pensive frown. The tongue-in-cheek title suggests an absent lover, but is this the man in London, or Hockney himself?
