Warhol’s screenprint, ‘Sidewalk’, was based on a photograph he took of the pavement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre (now called Mann's Chinese Theatre) in Hollywood, California. Since 1927 film stars have been invited to leave their mark in the wet concrete - signatures, footprints and handprints – a physical realisation of their celebrity, an idea which undoubtedly appealed to Warhol. Warhol chose the piece of the sidewalk featuring Cary Grant, Judy Garland, Jack Nicholson and Shirley Temple.

Hockney embarked on a longed-for U.S. trip at the end of December 1963, flying first to New York. Hockney stayed with Mark Berger and visited the Pratt Institute where he completed and sold two etchings, 'Edward Lear' and 'Jungle Boy’. ‘Jungle Boy’ portrays a very hairy man under a palm tree staring at a large snake, the figure was again inspired by Mark Berger, who was extremely hirsute and kept pet snakes. The exotic tree encourages the viewer to imagine this as a garden of eden scene, with the naked man the forbidden pleasure.

A portrait of performance artist Leigh Bowery. Freud was introduced to Bowery in 1988 by the artist Cerith Wyn Evans, having been impressed by Bowery's performance at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery that year. Bowery went on to pose regularly for Freud over the four year period leading up to to his sudden death in 1994. Freud said of Bowery, ‘I found him perfectly beautiful’ and that ‘the way he edits his body is amazingly aware and amazingly abandoned’. Bowery said of Freud: ‘I love the psychological aspect of his work – in fact I sometimes felt as if I had been undergoing psychoanalysis with him ... His work is full of tension. Like me he is interested in the underbelly of things.’ Freud made four large paintings and three etchings of Bowery: 'Head of a Man' (1992), 'Large Head' (1993) and 'Reclining Figure' (1994).

This lithograph, ‘Pool made with Paper and Blue Ink for a Book’, was produced for a 1980 book about David Hockney’s ‘Paper Pool’ series of 29 paper pulp pieces created in 1978, while Hockney was visiting his friend, the printmaker Ken Tyler, at his studio, Tyler Graphics, in upstate New York. On this trip Ken was thrilled to show Hockney some recent works by Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Noland, produced using an innovative new process he had developed, moulding and pressing dyed paper pulp. Hockney, a great lover of new mediums, was highly impressed by the technique which fused mass and colour, and the meeting stimulated an intense period of creativity for the artist, which resulted in his ‘Paper Pools’ series. Hockney chose as his subject Ken Tyler’s own pool, also the subject of this lithograph, he recalled, "Ken had a swimming pool in the garden and every day we would have lunch by the swimming pool, every lunchtime I would have a swim. I kept looking at the swimming pool; and it's a wonderful subject, water, the light on the water...every time you look at the surface, you look through it, you look under it…”. He meticulously studied the pool, at different times of the day and night, noting the light and colour in drawings and photographs. Stangos wrote in the preface to the ‘Paper Pools’ book, “Hockney’s fascination was in using a watery medium for the representation of a watery subject, bringing together many of the themes he most loves: the paradox of freezing in a still image what is never still, water, the swimming pool, this man-made container of nature, set in nature which it reflects, the play of light on water”. Lithography, like the paper pulp process, also uses water as an inherent part of the technique, making this comment equally applicable to the print. Hockney was inspired by Monet’s water lilies as well as Matisse’s masterpiece in paper cutout, ‘La Piscine’.