On It May Stay His Eye

On It May Stay His Eye belongs to The Blue Guitar, David Hockney’s portfolio of twenty etchings made in 1976-77 and published by Petersburg Press in 1977. A lightly drawn interior is organised around two upright panels and a shelf of ordinary objects, while touches of blue, red, yellow and green interrupt the pale surface and a densely worked rug anchors the foreground.

The title directs attention to the act of looking, and the paired vertical panels behave like mirrors or pictures within the picture, catching fragments of the guitar, vessels and coloured marks around them. Hockney lets recognisable objects shift between outline, reflection and abstraction, so the quiet room becomes an enquiry into how the eye assembles space from several competing forms of representation.

Hockney combined etching, soft-ground etching and aquatint on steel-faced plates, allowing incisive drawn lines to sit beside softer textures and transparent fields of red, blue, yellow and green. The plate was proofed by Maurice Payne and printed in New York by Jennifer Melby on Inveresk mould-made paper.

Hockney discovered Wallace Stevens’s 1936 poem The Man with the Blue Guitar while staying on Fire Island in the summer of 1976 with Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Isherwood, and treated it as a starting point rather than a script, using the portfolio’s twenty plates to explore the transformations that occur when experience is remade as art. The portfolio’s frontispiece sets out a chain of inspiration: Hockney responding to Stevens, who had responded to Picasso, particularly The Old Guitarist of 1903; throughout the suite, Hockney borrows, reflects and dissolves different pictorial languages within a single frame, turning his admiration for Picasso into a practical examination of style, invention and the unstable boundary between reality and imagination.

This impression is number 111 from the edition of 200; thirty-five artist’s proofs were also produced. It is signed by Hockney in pencil, lower right, with the title stamped on the verso. Examples from The Blue Guitar are held by major institutions including the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“The etchings themselves were not conceived as literal illustrations of the poem but as an interpretation of its themes in visual terms.”

— David Hockney