This is supposed to be the season of getting away from it all, so for those who haven’t quite managed it this week’s picture is David Hockney’s perennially refreshing appeal to the spirit of hedonistic escapism, A Bigger Splash.

In his engaging memoir, Hockney on Hockney, the painter remembered the year he spent in California from 1966 to 1967 – the date of A Bigger Splash – as the happiest time of his life. Having graduated from art school, and having sold enough work to be able to afford to travel, he was living in the city of his dreams, Los Angeles. His work (as the painting shown here proves) was going swimmingly. Most important of all, he was in love with a young man called Peter Schlesinger, and the feeling was mutual.


Hockney and Schlesinger spent the year together in a tiny rented house on Pico Boulevard, a seedy part of town in those days, just around the corner from their friend Nick Wilder. They had very little money but it still felt like paradise.

“We saw Nick Wilder a lot, and Nick’s friends, who were always rather young and beautiful boys…he had a pool there and we’d go swimming in that pool. I saw a lot of Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. And we lived next door to a Californian artist called Ron Davis, a geometric artist. He was just getting going then and we became friendly. I used to play chess with him sometimes. I think the very first game of chess we played he won, and he said, ‘That’s what comes of playing with geometric artists’. The second game I won, and I said ‘That’s what comes of playing with figurative artists who know what to do with a queen.’” Those days were the...

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