025. Artist and Mode

Following Picasso’s death in April 1973, Hockney made two etchings in the spirit of Picasso’s renowned Vollard Suite (1930−37). In the present one, Hockney depicts an imaginary meeting with the modern master, casting himself as the nude model and using different etching techniques to distinguish the two: for Picasso, the looser “sugar-lift” method—which involves brushing the figure directly on the plate with a sugar-based fluid—and a more densely hatched line for himself. Hockney had been taught the sugar-lift technique that year in Paris by Aldo Crommelynck, the master printer of Picasso’s later etchings.