David Hockney

Summary

In 1964 Hockney returned to lithography after a gap of ten years. This lithograph is inscribed with the title and the words 'PERSHING SQUARE'. Depicting an insurance office building in downtown Los Angeles, it is related to the painting Building, Pershing Square, Los Angeles of the same year (private collection), one of the first Hockney made in California. When Hockney first arrived in the city, he cycled from Santa Monica, on the ocean, to Pershing Square, downtown, not realising the distance was eighteen miles. He was attracted to the Pershing Square area as the setting of John Rechy's homosexual novel City of Night (1963), which provided much of the sexual imagery from which the artist formed his first impressions of Los Angeles.

Further reading:
Nikos Stangos (ed.), David Hockney by David Hockney, London 1976, pp.14, 97, reproduced p.112Marco Livingstone, David Hockney: Etchings and Lithographs, exhibition catalogue, Waddington Graphics, London 1988, [p.9], reproduced pl.6

Terry Riggs
November 1997

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