Reference: Tokyo 52
Editions Alecto reference: ea 367
Plate size: 35 x 22.5 cm I Paper size: 64 x 51.5 cm

The source for this etching was a photo from an American ‘beefcake’ magazine. In the 50s and 60s such publications, like ‘Physique Pictorial’ and ‘The Young Physique’, enabled the distribution of erotic photos of naked, or scantily-clad men under the guise of an interest in body building or fitness; a clever way to escape censorship before the gay liberation movement. Hockney was fascinated by the magazines and even visited the offices of Physique Pictorial in a seedy area of downtown LA - where he explicitly relates this home of contemporary underground gay culture to his literary hero. He recalled, “It’s run by a wonderful complete madman and he has this tacky swimming pool surrounded by Hollywood Greek plaster statues. It was marvellous! To me it had the air of Cavafy in the tackiness of things.”

The poem chosen to accompany this etching describes a watercolour found pressed between the pages of an old book:

“with chestnut brown deep coloured eyes with the unique beauty of his face
the beauty of fascination with the abnormal with ideal lips for bringing the loved body pleasure with ideal limbs made for those beds
that current morality would call shamelesss.”

In his essay ‘Orientalism and David Hockney’s Cavafy Etchings: Exploring a Male-positive Imaginative Geography’, Dennis Gouws discusses the way in which this etching confronts the viewer by looking them direct in the eye, “Rather than frustrating the gaze, the full-frontal figure challenges the viewer to imagine what participating in an intimate homoerotic relationship would be like. Like the unsettling gaze of the reclining nude courtesan who frankly appraises the viewer in Manet’s Olympia (1863), Hockney’s nude challenges conventional heteronormative scrutiny.”