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.