Viva Lewes Issue #161 February 2020

Alan Davie, ‘Seascape Erotic’, 1955
Early Works
When Hockney met Davie
In March 1958, fresh out
of Bradford Art School, the
young David Hockney visited
an exhibition of the work of an
abstract expressionist, of sorts,
the 39-year-old Scot, Alan
Davie.
“The experience was to have a
profound influence on Hockney’s
early artistic style,” says
Sara Cooper, sipping a coffee
in the Towner Cafe. Cooper is
the Head of Collections and
Exhibitions at the Eastbourne
gallery, and is telling me
about their big winter/spring
exhibition, Alan Davie & David
Hockney, Early Works.
“Hockney, who was shortly to
start his course at the Royal
College of Art, in London, was
liberated by what he saw,” she
continues. “Here was a way
to work that wasn’t tightly
crammed into some pigeonhole.
It allowed him to be a lot
freer with his painting.”
The exhibition was Davie’s
first retrospective, and a lot
of the pieces that were on
show in 1958 will be displayed
at the Towner show. As will
Hockney’s responses to Davie’s
paintings, when he was experimenting
with abstraction,
before turning to the more
figurative style that came to
define his work.
There are parallels between
the two artists that the exhibition
teases out, says Sara. “Both
are producing works of semiabstraction,
in a similar palette.
Both men were influenced by
other art forms: Davie, who
was also a musician, by jazz,
and Hockney by poetry. They
were both influenced by the
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