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David Hockney
Shirley Goldfarb + Gregory Masurovsky, 1974

Artwork Info

Artwork title
Shirley Goldfarb + Gregory Masurovsky
Artist name
David Hockney
Date created
1974
Classification
painting
Medium
acrylic paint on canvas
Dimensions
45 1/8 in. × 84 in. (114.62 cm × 213.36 cm)
Credit
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Copyright
© David Hockney
Permanent URL
https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/FC.679
Artwork status
Not on view at this time.

Audio Stories

Theater director Mark Jackson dissects this scene

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MARK JACKSON:  

My name is Mark Jackson, and I’m a theater maker based in the San Francisco Bay Area.  

 

When I look at this painting by Hockney, I immediately see a set design for a show of some kind. 

 

The combination of the platform and the curtain instantly gives it a theatrical feeling.  

 

As a theater maker, you can’t control where the audience is going to look any more than you can control where they’re going to look on the painting; but you want to draw their attention to sort of the main thing about the moment. And so for me in this painting, the main thing is this woman in the chair. Second to her is the dog, and maybe third is the fellow to the left because he is standing out against his background less than she is.  

 

They’re positions are not natural. What room actually looks this way? It’s a very surreal space.  

 

Hockney has stripped away a lot of emotionalism from the positions and given these two people very strict, simple formal positions.  

 

As I stare at it more, I think they may be lonely or they’re an estranged couple. She’s with the dog and not him. He’s, you know, holed up in this little room…  

 

In a theater piece, you could use that scenic design to emphasize this character has more freedom — the woman in the chair. And this character, the man at the desk, has less freedom — or at least they think they do.  

 

They have these private chambers in one sense; but they’re totally breachable. They can easily just walk around that wall and see each other. They could easily connect; but they choose not to.  

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Audio Description

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NARRATOR:

We’re standing in front of David Hockney’s painting Shirley Goldfarb + Gregory Masurovsky, from 1974. Measuring 45 inches by 84 inches, this painting of a man and woman in their home is almost twice as wide as it is high. The home is presented like a diorama that we stare into through a missing wall. On the left edge of the painting, a floor-length yellow curtain hangs from a steel rod that spans the length of the house. The curtain has been pushed to the side, revealing that the house sits upon a green platform, like a stage. On the left side of the painting, the man occupies a dimly lit gray-walled room. He sits at a drafting table facing out, a pen in hand, a piece of paper in front of him. Instead of a chair, he’s sitting on a bed covered in a striped blanked. Light falls from a lamp hovering above him, casting his face partly in shadow. Moving to the right, a pink wall divides him from the next room, where a brown-haired woman sits in a plain wooden chair, in profile, with her back to the man. She wears a long sleeve shirt, blue jeans and boots with a high, thick heel. Her hands rest on her knees. She stares forward into the middle distance.  At her feet, a small furry terrier gazes in the same direction as the woman. Just above the dog, hanging on the room’s otherwise empty pink wall, is a framed painting made up of daubs of blue, red and green. To the right of this painting, the pink wall ends with an open view to the yard: a sapling planted in a patch of grass, a covered metal garbage can, a smooth stone patio, and a brick structure the size of an old phone booth. In the painting’s upper right corner, a high brown wall borders the yard, above which is a patch of partly cloudy bright blue sky.  

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Hockney’s portraits provide glimpses into the lives of those in his inner circle. For this picture of artists Shirley Goldfarb and Gregory Masurovsky, painted in his Paris studio, Hockney deployed an unconventional stagelike setting that recalls linear perspective paintings from the Renaissance. The pulled-back curtain reveals Masurovsky sitting at a table below two bookshelves, pen in hand, perhaps in an allusion to his work as a printmaker and typographer. Goldfarb, center stage in her signature beatnik stylings, appears to be in a separate space with the couple’s Yorkshire terrier; one of her paintings hangs on the wall behind them.

Gallery text, 2016

Other Works by David Hockney

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