An Encounter Across Time

Following Pablo Picasso’s death in 1973, David Hockney paid homage to the Spanish artist, acknowledging him as both a great disrupter of art history and a powerful influence on his own practice. Artist and Model (plate etched in 1973 and printed in 1974) presents one of the most defining but symbolic moments of 20th century art; that of an imaginary meeting between the authoritative and experienced Picasso, and a younger Hockney as his model and student. Although the two men never met in real life, Picasso’s late work exerted a profound influence on Hockney during his formative years, and in the summer of 1960, as a student at the Royal College of Art, he attended the Tate’s major Picasso retrospective no fewer than eight times, returning repeatedly to find new sources of inspiration.

Few artists returned so persistently to the theme of the artist and model as Picasso. The subject appeared with particular intensity in the final two decades of his life, a period in which he was increasingly preoccupied with his own artistic legacy. During these years, the studio became an arena in which identity and the creative process were shaped through acts of performance and perception. Central to these works is the shifting power dynamic between artist, model and viewer; a relationship that is continually tested and reconfigured. Picasso’s engagement with the motif drew directly on Old Master precedents, especially the studio scenes of Rembrandt, Courbet and Velázquez, which he reinterpreted through in his lithographs and etchings and linocuts. While Picasso frequently inserted a version of himself into these compositions, he rarely appeared explicitly as the artist himself, instead adopting alter egos, recognisable by the distinctive dress of a harlequin character or his familiar Breton striped shirt.

Hockney has always demonstrated an acute awareness of art historical lineage. In Artist and Model, he deliberately inserts himself into Picasso’s narrative space. Visually, however, the setting diverges from the typical artist’s studio, The calm, refined location instead recalls Hockney’s interior scenes of the late 1960s, such as Cushions (1968), as well as works made during his residence in Paris in the early 1970s. Through the window, French shutters are visible alongside a palm tree, a motif that evokes Hockney’s earlier time in California. If Picasso had seen the work himself, he may also have recognised the palm from his own surroundings at Villa La Californie in Cannes during the 1950s, where large palm trees grew outside the studio windows.

Artist and Model is both playful and reverential, examining artistic inheritance, legacy and creative vulnerability, through the enduring framework of the artist and model relationship. This exchange plays out in an intimate and concentrated meeting between the two artists, yet the work resists any single interpretation. Although sometimes interpreted as containing a homoerotic narrative, this reading is unsubstantiated.  Picasso is depicted in his characteristic Breton sailor’s shirt, while Hockney presents himself nude, laying himself bare for the experienced artist, attentive and ready to take Picasso’s instruction. His nakedness is not eroticised, but rather suggestive of openness, humility and a willingness to be shaped by influence. Although Hockney’s exposed body appears more vulnerable than Picasso’s, he remains an active presence. He offers himself not only as a model, but as a participant in this transmission, absorbing something of Picasso’s creativity through his outstretched hand, as the artistic tradition passes from one generation to the next.