David Hockney’s The Blue Guitar portfolio (1976-1977) occupies a pivotal position within his graphic oeuvre, marking a decisive shift away from naturalistic representation towards a more conceptual, imaginative engagement with space, perception, and artistic lineage. Conceived in dialogue with Wallace Stevens’ 1937 ekphrastic poem The Man with the Blue Guitar, and profoundly informed by Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period painting, The Old Guitarist (1903-1904), the portfolio stands as a tribute to both. Through twenty colour etchings, Hockney interrogates the relationship between reality and imagination, and the enduring legacy of Cubist visual language in twentieth-century art.
Picasso had a lasting impact on Hockney, perhaps most notably in his Moving Focus series of the 1980s. Throughout his career, Hockney consistently identified Picasso as a guiding force, crediting him with revealing new ways of structuring pictorial space and representing a lived experience. Picasso’s capacity to fracture, reassemble, and animate form enabled Hockney to envision alternatives to single-point perspective, allowing the image to reflect the movement of the eye and the temporality of perception itself. As Hockney later observed, Cubism’s greatest achievement lay not in abstraction alone, but in its psychological insight and the ability to construct portraits that register both inner life as well as outward appearance.
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The immediate catalyst for The Blue Guitar was literary. In the summer of 1976, while vacationing in Fire Island Pines, New York, Hockney was introduced to Stevens’ poem by his friend, the curator Henry Geldzahler. Stevens’ earnest meditation on transformation, that ‘things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar,’ resonated deeply with Hockney’s own interest in observation. The poem articulates a tension between the visible world and the imaginative act that reshapes it, a tension that Hockney recognised immediately as being central to his own practice. Rather than looking to illustrate the poem directly, he sought to respond to the ideas that it conjured, allowing visual metaphors to operate alongside poetic abstraction.
Picasso’s The Old Guitarist (1903–04), a key work from the artist’s Blue Period, provided a major point of reference. Prior to making the portfolio, Hockney travelled to the Art Institute of Chicago to study Picasso’s painting up close, absorbing its emotional melancholy and monochromatic tonality. Hockney perceived the transformative and expressive power of the guitar as a motif in both The Old Guitarist and in Stevens’ poem. In The Blue Guitar portfolio, the symbolism of Picasso’s guitarist becomes fragmented, reconfigured, and dispersed across multiple scenes, serving less as a visible subject than as a conceptual focal point.
Technically, the portfolio represents a significant moment in Hockney’s printmaking practice. The twenty etchings were produced following a visit to the studio of Aldo Crommelynck, the master printmaker who collaborated extensively with Picasso during the final decades of his life. Crommelynck had developed a colour-etching technique specifically for Picasso, involving drawing directly onto the plate with an immediacy that was comparable to painting. Although Picasso himself did not live to employ this method, Hockney adopted it deliberately it as an act of homage.
Hockney absorbs elements of Picasso’s visual vocabulary, demonstrating its potential for transformation and the shift between reality and imagination. Within the rich, dreamlike imagery of The Blue Guitar, Hockney engages in a sustained visual conversation with many of Picasso’s motifs. Throughout the portfolio we find recurring objects and devices which function as specific citations in Picasso’s work, including pipes, light bulbs and curtains. In Figures with Still Life, Hockney stages a meal between two figures across a dining table, reimagining them from Picasso’s Le repas frugal (1904) in Cubist forms. Elsewhere, in A Moving Still Life, he makes a playful allusion to the high ponytail of the art student and model, Sylvette David, of whom Picasso produced around 60 works during 1954, depicting David with her striking blonde hair tied up. One of the most recognisable motifs in the portfolio is the face of the Surrealist artist and photographer, Dora Maar, in What is This Picasso, borrowed from the Spanish artist’s 1937 painting, Portrait of Dora Maar. Hockney recasts her in a serene green, staged behind a blue curtain. The Blue Guitar portfolio even features a portrait of Wallace Stevens himself, in the work titled The Poet.
The formidable presence of Picasso's The Old Guitarist and the regenerative power of Stevens' poem are felt throughout The Blue Guitar. With this portfolio, Hockney moves towards a more fluid conception of pictorial space and imagination beyond the visible surface. Borrowing elements of fragmentation and multiple-point perspective from Picasso's Cubist works, Hockney embraces the instability of vision, perception, and the lived experience.
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, 'You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.'
The man replied, 'Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.'
And they said then, 'But play, you must,
A tone beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.'
Excerpt from The Man with the Blue Guitar
By Wallace Stevens, 1937
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