David Hockney Meeting the Other People (M.C.A.T 26) For Sale

David Hockney’s Meeting The Other People relates back to his earlier etching, Meeting The Good People, both from the innovative A Rake’s Progress series. A semi-autobiographical, narrative across 16 prints, which depicts the life experiences of the ‘Rake’ a young gay artist, largely based on Hockney himself, as he visited the Big Apple for the first time in the summer of 1961.

Meeting The Good People depicted Hockney’s visit to Washington and the memorial statues of those who had served the country, in which Hockney mockingly portrayed the hero worship towards an establishment, built on a history of enslavement and social injustice. In contrast Meeting The Other People depicts Hockney’s encounter with the ‘ordinary people’ of the city, represented by a figure standing next to the ‘Rake’ wearing a tee shirt from a popular radio station.

The same set of stairs depicted in The Wallet Begins to Empty, a metaphor for the Rake’s downfall from society as a gay outsider, features in Meeting the Other People. At the bottom of this descent, the Rake is standing next to the normal man in the white tee shirt, someone whom the gay artist can at least find some companionship with.

However, in Meeting the Other People, Hockney preludes his final artwork, Bedlam, where the Rake’s journey comes to an end: the ‘Rake’ or young gay artist came to New York, looking for liberation and acceptance, from a constrained and gloomy post war Britain where homosexuality was still criminalised. He has found some joy and comfort along the way (The Gospel Singing, The Drinking Scene) he even got married (Marries an Old Maid) but societal conventions won’t accept his outsider status or individuality and inevitably he is ‘fed back’ to the masses and the societal constructs of a sexually intolerant landscape.