Hockney's 'Contrejour' Print Before Fragmentation
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- David Hockney died at 88 in June, and a new essay in the September 2026 print edition examines his 1973 print "Contrejour in the French Style."
- "Contrejour in the French Style" depicts a Louvre window Hockney encountered shortly after moving to Paris in 1973, with its shade partly drawn to shut out sunlight while revealing the garden beyond.
- Working from a drawing and some photographs, Hockney rebuilt the found scene—tugging and flattening—with pathways and parterres that streamlines echo of the nearby Tuileries garden.
- The print's two receding diagonals converging at the tree line form an almost perfect diagram of single-point perspective, with the balustrade rendered as a compass-and-protractor enactment of the original.
- Hockney employed three distinct etching techniques across the image: soft mats of color for the window blind, meticulous linear hatching for the floor, and splotchy translucent color for the dappled wall—a nod to Georges Seurat's pointillism.
- Soon after creating the print, Hockney's style shifted toward fragmented space, expressive brushwork, and episodic motion, making the work a quiet farewell to the orderly French-style rules he was about to dismantle.
Why it matters: The print captures Hockney at a precise pivot point: it preserves the single-point perspective, Seurat-inspired dappling, and Renaissance-era formality he was about to abandon for the fragmented, expressive style that defined his later career. For scholars and collectors, the work documents the exact pictorial machinery—three etching techniques, almost diagrammatic geometry—Hockney was preparing to dismantle.
