A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [245]
It is one of a series of etchings inspired by the poems of the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, on which Hockney began work in 1966, while the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, was drafting the legislation to decriminalize homosexuality in England and Wales ; and it was published in 1967, just as Parliament passed Jenkins’s Sexual Offences Act. Hockney’s image was shocking for many then, and for some is still shocking today, even though there is nothing at all explicit about it – the blanket covers both men up to the waist. Yet it raises perplexing questions about what societies find acceptable or unacceptable, about the limits of tolerance and individual freedom, and about shifting moral structures over thousands of years of human history.
One of the constants of this history of the world, not surprisingly, has been sex – or, more precisely, sexual attraction and love. Among our hundred examined objects, we have the oldest-known representation of a couple making love, a small stone carved 11,000 years ago near Jerusalem, we have harem women, voluptuous goddesses and gay sex on a Roman cup. Surprisingly, given this long tradition of representing human sexuality, David Hockney’s relatively decorous print was nonetheless a courageous – indeed provocative – act in the Britain of his day.
The young men in Hockney’s etching could be American or British; but they inhabit the place of the picture’s title, which matches that of Cavafy’s poem – ‘In the Dull Village’. The poem is about a young man trapped by his circumstances, who escapes his dreary surroundings by dreaming of the perfect love partner. So perhaps Hockney’s dozing boy is gently fantasizing his ardent companion, who is imagined, rather than actually present in the longed-for flesh.
He lay in his bed tonight sick with what love meant,
All his youth in desire of the flesh alight
In a lovely tension all his lovely youth.
And in his sleep delight came to him; in his sleep
He sees and holds the form and flesh he wanted …
The cosmopolitan family of Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933) had moved between Turkey, Britain and Egypt and was part of the huge Greek diaspora that for 2,000 years had dominated the economic, intellectual and cultural life of the eastern Mediterranean. He lived in a broad, Greek-speaking world, which defined itself essentially less in terms of mainland Greece than in the twin centres of Constantinople and Alexandria. It was a world created by Alexander’s conquest of Egypt in the fourth century BC and which ended only in the middle of the twentieth century – a world we have encountered several times before in our history, notably in the Rosetta Stone, where the languages of Greece and Egypt appear side by side. Cavafy was very aware of this rich inheritance, and his Alexandrian poetry has a deep sense of ancient history, and of a Greek world in which love between males was an accepted part of life.
The world of Bradford as experienced by the young Hockney was a very different place. In Yorkshire in the 1950s, homosexuality was an unmentionable subject and for an artist a risky one. So the poems of Cavafy, which Hockney found in the Bradford library, were a revelation.
I read more of his poems and I was struck by their directness and simplicity; and then I found the John Mavrogordato translation in the library in Bradford in that summer of 1960, and I stole it. I’ve still got it, I’m sure. I don’t feel bad now because it’s been redone, but you couldn’t buy it then, it was completely out of print. Mind you, in the library in Bradford you had to ask for that book, it was never on the shelves.
The fourteen poems that Hockney later chose for his series of etchings, poems of longing and loss, of the first meeting of future loves and intoxicating, passionate encounters, were both exciting material that he could use for his own art and an example of how an artist