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Lot Essay
Executed in 1965, the present work marks one of the earliest depictions of what would soon become the defining image of David Hockney’s oeuvre: the swimming pool. Travelling to California for the first time in 1964, a trip which would spark a long-term love affair with the city of Los Angeles, Hockney became intoxicated by the sunshine and heady optimism of the West Coast, and would settle there permanently three years later. Epitomising the leisure and luxury of the Californian good-life, the swimming pool quickly became a recurring subject of the artist’s sketchbook drawings from the mid-1960s, marking a period of almost obsessive exploration of water’s unpredictable ebb and flow. ‘I did a lot of drawings there, including ones of the squiggly things in swimming pools’, Hockney has remarked on his first visit. ‘I had become interested in the more general problem of painting the water, finding a way to do it’ (D. Hockney, quoted in N. Stangos, David Hockney, New York 1976, p. 100). Swimming Pool, Los Angeles represents a product of this experimentation, its meticulously rendered surface capturing Hockney's formalist preoccupations of the period. Held in the same private collection since 1971, the work has been widely exhibited, featuring in solo shows at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld (1971), the Overbeck Gesellschaft, Lübeck (1971) and the Takashimaya Art Gallery, Tokyo (1994), as well as in a number of group exhibitions.
Rendered in thin, tangled lines of turquoise, Swimming Pool, Los Angeles depicts an elusive, gently moving body of water, its sporadic bends evoking the ever-changing lap of the pool’s surface. Passages of light and dark blue pastel span its folds, evoking its delicate shimmering reflections and plunging depths: a swimming figure is perhaps implied beneath the surface. Behind its complex coiling of water, the artist depicts a stark black pillar, its pattern of shapes recalling the abstract canvases of Henri Matisse. In the lower left corner, he presents us with what appears to be a diving board, its diagonal shadow allowing the form to float above the water’s surface. Framed by a border of virgin paper, Hockney’s Swimming Pool, Los Angeles marks a pivotal moment in the artist’s practice, referencing an early fascination with both his new techniques and newfound place of fantasy. ‘I never thought the swimming pool pictures were at all about mere hedonist pleasure’, Hockney has recounted. ‘They were about the surface of the water, the very thin film, the shimmering two-dimensionality … it’s that surface that fascinates me; and that’s what those paintings are about really’ (D. Hockney, quoted in L. Wechsler, ‘A Visit with David and Stanley Hollywood Hills 1987’, in David Hockney: A Retrospective, exh. cat. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles 1988, p. 81).
Hockney’s first painting of a swimming pool was in his seminal work California Art Collector in 1964, a canvas in which he depicts a woman in her luxurious Los Angeles home, a pool featuring in the distance of her backyard. By the time the artist executed Swimming Pool, Los Angeles a year later, the motif had taken centre stage in his compositions, functioning as a defining characteristic of his Californian oasis. Taking Jean Dubuffet’s L’Hourloupe paintings, Bernard Cohen’s spaghetti-like abstracts and the arabesques of Art Nouveau as his reference point, the present work and other early drawings were stylised in a flat, modern manner, their looping forms suggesting the erratic movement of water. Over the ensuing decades, as he began to employ the medium of photography, Hockney’s pool paintings would move from stylisation towards a powerful naturalism, a direction which can be traced through his masterpieces Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool (1966), A Bigger Splash (1967) and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972)—works which have driven both Hockney and his subject matter to indisputable acclaim. Bearing the hallmarks of his later compositions, Swimming Pool, Los Angeles is a rich testament to Hockney’s refined graphic technique and his lifelong love affair with California. ‘If there is one image that more than any other is conventionally associated with David Hockney’s art,' writes Christopher Knight, ‘surely it is the image of the swimming pool. There are many reasons for this. He has painted, drawn, photographed, or made prints containing images of swimming pools from the mid-1960s to the present day’ (C. Knight, quoted in Composite Views: Themes and Motifs in Hockney’s Art, exh. cat, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles 1988, p. 23).
Rendered in thin, tangled lines of turquoise, Swimming Pool, Los Angeles depicts an elusive, gently moving body of water, its sporadic bends evoking the ever-changing lap of the pool’s surface. Passages of light and dark blue pastel span its folds, evoking its delicate shimmering reflections and plunging depths: a swimming figure is perhaps implied beneath the surface. Behind its complex coiling of water, the artist depicts a stark black pillar, its pattern of shapes recalling the abstract canvases of Henri Matisse. In the lower left corner, he presents us with what appears to be a diving board, its diagonal shadow allowing the form to float above the water’s surface. Framed by a border of virgin paper, Hockney’s Swimming Pool, Los Angeles marks a pivotal moment in the artist’s practice, referencing an early fascination with both his new techniques and newfound place of fantasy. ‘I never thought the swimming pool pictures were at all about mere hedonist pleasure’, Hockney has recounted. ‘They were about the surface of the water, the very thin film, the shimmering two-dimensionality … it’s that surface that fascinates me; and that’s what those paintings are about really’ (D. Hockney, quoted in L. Wechsler, ‘A Visit with David and Stanley Hollywood Hills 1987’, in David Hockney: A Retrospective, exh. cat. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles 1988, p. 81).
Hockney’s first painting of a swimming pool was in his seminal work California Art Collector in 1964, a canvas in which he depicts a woman in her luxurious Los Angeles home, a pool featuring in the distance of her backyard. By the time the artist executed Swimming Pool, Los Angeles a year later, the motif had taken centre stage in his compositions, functioning as a defining characteristic of his Californian oasis. Taking Jean Dubuffet’s L’Hourloupe paintings, Bernard Cohen’s spaghetti-like abstracts and the arabesques of Art Nouveau as his reference point, the present work and other early drawings were stylised in a flat, modern manner, their looping forms suggesting the erratic movement of water. Over the ensuing decades, as he began to employ the medium of photography, Hockney’s pool paintings would move from stylisation towards a powerful naturalism, a direction which can be traced through his masterpieces Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool (1966), A Bigger Splash (1967) and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972)—works which have driven both Hockney and his subject matter to indisputable acclaim. Bearing the hallmarks of his later compositions, Swimming Pool, Los Angeles is a rich testament to Hockney’s refined graphic technique and his lifelong love affair with California. ‘If there is one image that more than any other is conventionally associated with David Hockney’s art,' writes Christopher Knight, ‘surely it is the image of the swimming pool. There are many reasons for this. He has painted, drawn, photographed, or made prints containing images of swimming pools from the mid-1960s to the present day’ (C. Knight, quoted in Composite Views: Themes and Motifs in Hockney’s Art, exh. cat, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles 1988, p. 23).