In a way, it always made sense that one of the most memorable visual distillations of Southern California life would have been painted by an Englishman. The purest appreciation for the wide-open lifestyle choices, freestyle built environment, unrepentant private wealth, and high-wattage sunshine of Los Angeles — especially as it was exaggerated, and indeed mythologized, in mid-twentieth century popular culture — could only be felt by someone from an infinitely more traditional, straitened, and damp part of the world. David Hockney, who died last week, wasn’t just an Englishman but a northern Englishman, who would have grown up surrounded by the kind of attitudes satirized in the “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch made famous by Monty Python. Little wonder he fell in love with the newest city of the New World.
Hockney gave that many artistic forms over decades of his long life and career. Practically anyone who knows his name can recognize A Bigger Splash, from 1967, a both idyllic and faintly eerie depiction of someone having just plunged into the swimming pool behind what now looks like a classic “midcentury modern” home accented with palm trees.
But fewer can call to mind the works from which it evolved, A Little Splash and The Splash, both of which Hockney painted the previous year; all together, they constitute a series originally inspired by a photograph on the cover of a swimming-pool maintenance guide from the late fifties. You can see the three paintings put in context in the Sotheby’s video at the top of the post, which reveals how Hockney’s image grew more abstracted, and more Los Angelized, with each iteration.
When it came time to paint the third version, Hockney first built up its arrangement of house, pool, diving board, and sky with blocks of flat (if characteristically bright) color. He then gradually nudged these shapes toward representation by adding detail. Discussing the making of the painting later in life, he liked to mention how much time he spent on the splash alone: a full week, at least, to render an event that lasts no longer than a second or two. There would be more Hockney swimming pools, each evocative in its own way, none more expensive than the nearly photorealistic Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), from 1971, which went for $90.3 million at Christie’s in 2018. But it was only A Bigger Splash that went on to adorn the cover of Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, still one of the most perceptive books about that city — and one written, naturally, by another besotted Brit.
Related Content:
David Hockney Shows Us His Sketch Book, Page by Page
Watch David Hockney Paint with Light, Using the Quantel Paintbox Graphics System (1986)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
