The works on paper include images that deal with the artist’s homosexuality, created at a time when it was still a criminal offence in the UK. Cha Cha Cha (1961), for example, was inspired by an unrequited infatuation with fellow RCA student Peter Crush. The drawing includes the inscription I will love you at 4.15 on Tuesday.
“The cha-cha was a real event,” the artist said in the book Hockney’s Pictures (2004). “A very beautiful boy who was a student at the Royal College of Art danced the cha-cha especially for me because, although I didn’t know him very well, he knew I thought he was stunningly beautiful.”
Also available is Erection (1959), a work complete with phallic symbols in a version of the Abstract Expressionist style then prevalent at the RCA.
A number of portraits are also included, recording Hockney’s family life and other intimate moments. Artist’s Father (1973), for example, is a line drawing of a well-dressed Kenneth Hockney. George, Blanche, Celia, Albert and Percy, London, January (1983) evokes one of his best-known portraits (Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy), but in an innovative photographic collage.
Works range in price from $50,000 for photo collages to $815,000 for paintings. This is Offer Waterman’s first appearance at the annual US fair which runs from May 3-6.
