The Hypnotist

The child-like and cartoonish style of The Hypnotist is typical of David Hockney's works made prior to his move to California. Renowned for his musings on art, Hockney related The Hypnotist's curtains to the modernist ideal of flatness: "A curtain, after all, is exactly like a painting; you can take a painting off a stretcher, hang it up like a curtain; so a painted curtain could be very real. All the philosophical things about flatness…are about reality, and if you cut out illusion then painting becomes completely 'real'. The idea of the curtains is the same thing."