Books from David Hockney

Journal of Delacroix

This journal is one of the great documents in art history, a magnificent work of literature as well as a vital documentary source for scholars and students. Its unselfconscious spontaneity and freshness give the work its unique quality.
David Hockney
Artist
And I read Delacroix’s journals, which I’d only ever read in bits before, which was fantastic. Normally, I read loads of trash all the time. Once you get into it you think, “Oh, it’s so much better than television.”
Books from David Hockney

The Complete Works of Gustave Flaubert: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Memoirs and Letters

This carefully crafted ebook: “The Complete Works of Gustave Flaubert: Novels, Short Stories, Plays, Memoirs and Letters” is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) was an influential French writer who was perhaps the leading exponent of literary realism of his country. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary and for his scrupulous devotion to his style and aesthetics. The celebrated short story writer Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert. Table of Contents: Introduction: Gustave Flaubert: A Study by Guy de Maupassant Novels: Madame Bovary Salammbô Bouvard and Pécuchet Senitmental Education The Temptation of Saint Anthony Short Stories: November The Dance of Death Three Tales: A Simple Heart Saint Julian the Hospitalier Herodias Plays: The Castle of Hearts The Candidate Memoirs and Letters: Over strand and Field Aboard the Cange The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert Selected Correspondence and Intimate Remembrances of Gustave Flaubert Literary Writings: Rabelais Preface to the Last Songs Letter to the Municipality of Rouen Biography: The Life-Work of Flaubert Original French Texts: Madame Bovary Salammbô L’éducation Sentimentale Bouvard et Pécuchet Trois Contes La Tentation De Saint Antoine Le Candidat Le Chateau Des Cœurs Par Les Champs et Par Les Greves Literary Essays on Flaubert: Extract from 'Essays in London and Elsewhere’ by Henry James Extracts from Virginia Woolf’s diary Extracts from 'Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers’ by D.H. Lawrence Extract from 'Figures of Several Countries’ by Arthur Symons
David Hockney
Artist
I read all the long Flaubert novels. Re-read every one of ’em here, which were terrific. I’d read most of them before.
Books from David Hockney

W.H. Auden's Poetry

W. H. Auden is perhaps the most important English language poet of the 20th century. He produced marvelous poems-even in his last days.However, critics and reviewers not only have not recognized the aesthetics of the poetry Auden wrote after 1965, but they have ignored or made prejudiced and disparaging remarks about it, thus diverting subsequent critical (and popular) attention from its remarkable virtues. The aim of W. H. Auden's Poetry: Mythos, Theory, and Practice is to clarify Auden's career-long interest in poetic theory and, above all, to show how his changing thoughts about poetry impelled him towards the production of the last three volumes of his verse.Because it links the poet's biographia literaria and his aesthetic vision, this book will appeal to poets as well as to students of writing-particularly those interested in the creative process and its correlation to artistic forms. Students of 20th-century American and British literature will find in these pages a comprehensive survey of Auden's thoughts about his art and the poetry of his predecessors as well as of his contemporaries. Teachers of Auden's works will appreciate the strong light such a survey casts on Auden's poetic practice. Engineers and architects, physicists and biologists, cultural critics, social scientists, philosophers, and especially Gestalt psychologists might well enjoy reading about the ways their fields have intersected and influenced the thinking of one of the twentieth century's most brilliant and courageous poets.
David Hockney
Artist
He berates what he calls the “professional non-smokers” who offend his sense of adventure. Perched on the edge of the sofa, he begins to recite W.H. Auden: Give me a doctor partridge-plump, Short in the leg and broad in the rump, An endomorph with gentle hands Who’ll never make absurd demands That I abandon all my vices Nor pull a long face in a crisis, But with a twinkle in his eye Will tell me that I have to die.
Books from David Hockney

The Prose of Oscar Wilde

This collection brings together some of this much-loved writer's prose work. In it, Oscar Wilde touches on a wide range of topics as only he can. He discusses the decay of lying, the critic as artist, and the truth of masks. He provides criticism of productions of works of Shakespeare and other theatrical concerns, such as stage scenery, stage morals, and "plays that are meant to be read, not to be acted." He also devotes his attention to women's issues, such as novels and stories written by women and women's achievements. Taken together, readers will discover the incisive wit and unique observations for which Wilde was renowned.OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900) was a celebrated Irish-born playwright, short story writer, poet, and personality in Victorian London. He is best known for his involvement in the aesthetic movement and his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as his many plays, such as Lady Windermere's Fan, The Importance of Being Ernest, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and Salom . During his imprisonment for gross indecency, he wrote De Profundis, and later, The Ballad of Reading Gao.
David Hockney
Artist
Hockney receives no proceeds from auction sales in America and bats away talk of money. “You know what Oscar Wilde said?” he asks with a note of bitter bemusement: “The only person who likes all kinds of art is an auctioneer. It’s a madness, that.” Right now, with an hour spare before checking the installation, he’s more interested in sharing his greatest passion outside painting.
Books from David Hockney

The Man with the Blue Guitar & Other Poems



David Hockney
Artist
Further homage came in his series "The Blue Guitar", inspired by Wallace Stevens's long poem "The Man with the Blue Guitar", itself inspired by Picasso's The Old Guitarist. In the poem, Stevens meditates on the relationship between art and reality. "Poetry is the subject of the poem," Stevens writes, a line that Hockney steals and reworks as Etching is the Subject, for the title of one of his Blue Guitar etchings.
Books from David Hockney

City of Night

“[Rechy’s] tone rings absolutely true, is absolutely his own. . . . He tells the truth, and tells it with such passion that we are forced to share in the life he conveys. . . . This is a most humbling and liberating achievement.”—James Baldwin When John Rechy’s explosive first novel appeared in 1963, it marked a radical departure in fiction, and gave voice to a subculture that had never before been revealed with such acuity. It earned comparisons to Genet and Kerouac, even as Rechy was personally attacked by scandalized reviewers. Nevertheless, the book became an international bestseller, and fifty years later, it has become a classic. Bold and inventive in style, Rechy is unflinching in his portrayal of one hustling “youngman” and his search for self-knowledge within the neon-lit world of hustlers, drag queens, and the denizens of their world, as he moves from El Paso to Times Square, from Pershing Square to the French Quarter. Now including never-seen original marked galley pages and an interview with the author, Rechy’s portrait of the edges of America has lost none of its power to move and exhilarate.
David Hockney
Artist
John Rechy, whose novel City of Night was published in 1963, the year Hockney first visited LA. Excited by Rechy's descriptions of downtown hustling, Hockney set off on a bicycle to find the action, not realising – till he reached Pershing Square 17 miles later – what a vast sprawl the city was.
Books from David Hockney

The Selected Poems of Cavafy

C. P. Cavafy is one of the most singular and poignant voices of twentieth-century European poetry, conjuring a magical interior world through lyrical evocations of remembered passions, imagined monologues and dramatic retellings of his native Alexandria’s ancient past. Figures from antiquity speak with telling interruptions from the author in such poems as ‘Anna Comnena’ and ‘You did not understand’, while precise moments of history are seen with a sense of foreboding, as in ‘Ides of March’, ‘The God Abandoning Antony’ and ‘Nero’s Deadline’. And in poems that draw on his own life and surroundings, Cavafy recalls illicit trysts or glimpses of beautiful young men in ‘One Night’, ‘I have gazed so much’ and ‘The Café Entrance’, and creates exquisite miniatures of everyday life in ‘An Old Man’ and ‘Of the Shop’.
David Hockney
Artist
t took another poet, CP Cavafy, to make it explicit. Hockney was no less obsessed with his work than he had been with Whitman's, and before embarking on his etchings to 14 of Cavafy's poems he met his ageing English translator, visited both Cavafy's native Alexandria and (a better model for the atmosphere he wished to evoke) Beirut, and commissioned new translations from Stephen Spender and Nikos Stangos.
Books from David Hockney

Leaves of Grass

In 1855, Walt Whitman published — at his own expense — the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a visionary volume of twelve poems. Showing the influence of a uniquely American form of mysticism known as Transcendentalism, which eschewed the general society and culture of the time, the writing is distinguished by an explosively innovative free verse style and previously unmentionable subject matter. Exalting nature, celebrating the human body, and praising the senses and sexual love, the monumental work was condemned as "immoral." Whitman continued evolving Leaves of Grass despite the controversy, growing his influential work decades after its first appearance by adding new poems with each new printing.This edition presents the original twelve poems from Whitman's premier 1855 publication of Leaves of Grass. Included are some of the greatest poems of modern times: "Song of Myself," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "There Was a Child Went Forth," works that continue to upset conventional notions of beauty and originality even today.
David Hockney
Artist
But the first writer to appear in his art was Walt Whitman. He read him in the summer of 1960, between terms at the Royal College of Art. And in the 1961 etching Myself and My Heroes, Whitman appears as one of the two haloed figures standing beside the young Hockney (the other is Gandhi), along with the words "For the dear love of comrades" from Whitman's poem "I Hear It Was Charged Against Me". Another Whitman line is daubed across his oil painting We Two Boys Together Clinging.
Books from David Hockney

Grimm's Fairy Tales

Twenty tales collected from German folklore and immortalized by the brothers Grimm.
David Hockney
Artist
Grimms fairytales were part of his childhood too, and he later illustrated them in a series of etchings, the darkness of the subject matter brought out by the use of cross-hatching.
Books from David Hockney

The English Poems of George Herbert

George Herbert (1593-1633) is widely regarded as the greatest devotional poet in the English language. His volume of poems, The Temple, published posthumously in 1633, became one of the most widely read and influential collections of the seventeenth century. Almost 400 years after they were first published in Cambridge by the 'printers to the Universitie', Cambridge University Press is pleased to present the definitive scholarly edition of Herbert's complete English poems, accompanied by extensive explanatory and textual apparatus. The text is meticulously annotated with historical, literary and biblical information, as well as the modern critical contexts which now illuminate the poems. In addition to the lively introduction and notes, this edition includes a glossary of key words, an index of biblical quotations, and the authentic texts of Herbert's work.
David Hockney
Artist
I'd always been interested in water, glass I remember George Herbert's poem : On it may stay his eye; Or if he pleaseth, through it pass, And then the heav'n espy which is a terrific thing about looking on glass and not through it. (4 m 20 s)