David Hockney (b. 1937)

Writing about his 1967 painting, A Table, David Hockney explained: 'A Table is actually painted from the photograph in the Macy's advertisement I had used for The Room, Tarzana. The attraction of it was its simplicity' (D. Hockney, David Hockney by David Hockney, London, 1976, p. 149). There is a formal elegance to this painting, with the strangely geometric objects standing on the table; the table cloth recalls the curtains and especially theatre curtains that had featured in other works from this period, while the background, rendered in two tones of grey in order to capture the floor and the wall, appears almost Rothko-like. Certainly, during this period Hockney was experimenting with the colour-staining techniques of the later Abstract Expressionists, the Color-Field Painters. In this picture, Hockney appears to have bent some of their manipulations of acrylic to his own highly figurative purposes, creating an image that has a contemplative air.

Hockney was long tangentially associated with Pop, not least because of his frequent use of found images and photographs as source material. In A Table, he has emphasised the Pop credentials of this advertising image by creating a 'frame,' a light border reminiscent of Polaroid photography. This was a device that he had used in some of his celebrated swimming pool paintings of this period. A Table was actually painted on Hockney's return to Britain from California in 1967, and featured in an exhibition at the beginning of the following year, about which Hockney recounted:

'Then I painted A Table and Some Neat Cushions... I showed these paintings at Kasmin's in January 1968. All the exhibitions I'd had at Kasmin's I'd given a title. The first was called 'Pictures with People in' all the pictures had a figure. The second was called 'Pictures with frames and still-life pictures.' In this one I used the titles of the five paintings in it, and called it 'A splash, a lawn, two rooms, two stains, some neat cushions and a table... painted'' (ibid., p. 149).

Thus in terms of source, content, technique and even exhibition history, this seemingly innocent still life reveals Hockney's playful and versatile subversiveness.