Edition, poster, or something else
The question almost every Hockney enquiry turns on, and the one an owner can rarely answer from the wall.
Hockney’s images have been reproduced as exhibition and museum posters for sixty years, in very large numbers. Framed and hung, a good poster looks a great deal like the edition it was advertising — and the difference between the two is not a matter of degree. They are separate markets.
This is not a trap anyone should feel foolish for falling into. Posters were printed to be attractive, they were often bought from the same institutions that showed the work, and the evidence that settles the question lives in the margins, which is precisely what a mount covers.
Five things to check
01Look at the margins, not the image
A published edition is normally signed in pencil and carries a numbering or a proof marking. A poster generally carries printed text — an exhibition title, dates, a venue — even where that has been trimmed away or hidden behind a mount.
02Measure the sheet
Compare it against the recorded size for that edition. A sheet that measures short has been trimmed, and trimming is the one fault that cannot be undone.
03Identify the publisher
Gemini G.E.L., Petersburg Press and Waddington among others. A work that can be placed against its publisher and its catalogue entry is a work a specialist can estimate quickly and a buyer can bid on with confidence.
04Take it out of the frame
Or ask the seller to. Decades behind non-conservation glass on acidic board does real and permanent damage, and none of it is visible while the work is still framed.
05Do not improve it first
Reframing, cleaning or flattening before anyone has seen it destroys more value than leaving it alone. Photograph it as it is.
Four bodies of work, four markets
The name covers more media than almost any of his contemporaries, and they do not price together.
- Etchings and lithographs, 1960s–1980s
- The work that built the reputation, printed with a small number of workshops and documented in the catalogue raisonné of the prints. Scarcity here is often below the nominal edition figure: these sheets are fifty years old and many have been framed badly for most of that time.
- Screenprints
- Flat, saturated colour, which is both the appeal and the condition risk — large even areas show fading and toning far more plainly than busy compositions do.
- Photographic collages
- The joiners. A distinct body of work with its own collectors, and one where the question of what constitutes an edition needs establishing case by case rather than assumed.
- iPad drawings, 2009 onwards
- Issued as inkjet editions with their own sizes, publishers and inscriptions. They are editions in the ordinary sense and are valued as such — but because the images have circulated so widely online and in print, the poster-versus-edition question applies to them more sharply than to anything else.
Where to check an edition
The printed editions are documented in the catalogue raisonné of Hockney’s prints, and that — together with the publisher’s own records — is what a saleroom will want a work placed against. We deliberately do not publish an edition table here: the printed output runs to hundreds of editions across five decades and several media, and a partial list assembled from secondary sources would imply a completeness we could not stand behind.
Common questions
How do I tell a Hockney print from a poster?
By the margins rather than the image. A published edition is usually pencil-signed with a numbering or proof marking, and the sheet matches the edition's recorded dimensions. A poster typically carries printed exhibition text somewhere on the sheet. If the work has been framed for decades, nobody may ever have seen the margins — which is why photographs of the full sheet, unframed where possible, settle it.
Is a signed poster worth anything?
Some are, and they have a genuine if modest market. But a signed poster and a signed edition are not the same thing and do not trade in the same range, and conflating them is the single most common source of disappointment we see.
Are the iPad works real prints?
Yes. They were issued as editions with their own sizes, publishers and inscriptions, and they are collected and traded as editions. They need the same identification work as anything else — arguably more, because the images have been reproduced so widely.
Does Hockney's studio authenticate work?
There is no single authentication body for Hockney of the kind Pest Control provides for Banksy. What the salerooms want instead is the work placed against its catalogue entry, with the publisher identified and the margin inscriptions consistent with the edition. Where that is straightforward no separate certificate is needed; where it is not, establish it before consigning rather than after.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with the artist, his studio, his publishers or any auction house. Nothing here is investment advice.
Send photographs of the full sheet including the margins and we will tell you which of the two you have. Selling a Hockney covers what happens after that.