David Hockney Bedlam (M.C.A.T 27) For Sale

Bedlam is the final of 16 etchings in David Hockney’s compelling, character driven series, A Rake’s Progress. A Rake’s Progress, a contemporary take on William Hogarth’s 1753 series of the same name, Hockney depicts the journey of a young gay artist (loosely based on his own experiences) visiting New York for the first time in the summer of 1961.  Hockney was still a student at Royal College of Art during this time, returning to London, and finishing the series in 1963. Bedlam is the final etching in a series that represents both an intense personal journey of self-discovery, as a young gay man at a time it was still criminalised, and also a crucial milestone in Hockney’s artistic visual language, as he moved from art student, to printmaking innovator and connoisseur of visual storytelling.

Bedlam is a bold composition which represents a dramatic exit to the A Rake’s Progress series: the same figure from the previous plate, Meeting the Other People, wearing the radio station slogan-ed white tee shirt, is here replicated as five men standing in a row with their backs to the viewer. The figures are depicted wearing headsets on their right ears, listening to music, although it appears like they listen to the same song, a form of indoctrination as they face a big red sign, BEDLAM.

Even though Hogarth and Hockney’s A Rake’s Progress differed in the fundamental journeys of their two protagonists, the former an 18^th century inherited wealth man about town, who descends into squalor, and the latter a young gay artist seeking identity and self-expression in a homosexually intolerant society, Hockney’s final etching, Bedlam, draws heavily on Hogarth’s denouement.

Hogarth’s Tom Rakewell ended up in a mental institution, forlorn and destitute, depicted in the rich detail of Hogarth’s whole engraving series, whereas Hockney’s portrayal of his ‘Rake’ protagonist’s end of journey is more abstract in style and subject. The artwork utilises the five renditions of the ‘normal man’ from the Meeting The Other People print, to suggest the uniformity of mass society. They represent a conformity of outlook, mindset and civilisation that doesn’t confer with Hockney’s vision of New York as a place of individualism, acceptance and democratic ideals.

In traversing the series’ 16 print narrative, which included moments of joy and hope amongst his emotional disconnection, in Bedlam, Hockney experiences the ultimate rejection as ‘an outsider’ within this social landscape, being ‘fed’ back to the conformism of the masses.

In Bedlam, Hockney conveys an aura of unease; the Bedlam etching artwork conjures up images of the famous, Allegory of the Cave, by ancient Greek philosopher, Plato and narrated by Socrates, in which prisoners who have spent years chained in a cave, facing a wall, can see nothing else but passing shadows behind them, until they believe them to be a reality. Ironically, The Allegory of Plato’s Cave, as well as Hockney’s critique on the fragility of democracy, in Bedlam, couldn’t be more relevant in a time of social media driven algorithms and binary thinking.