ITP 17: A Bigger Splash by David Hockney
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 inspiration for A Bigger Splash.
The young Hockney is identified in many people’s minds with “Swinging London” but the truth is that he had disliked London in many ways when he studied there at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s. It was precisely because London had seemed so unswinging that California seemed so free and exciting. “There are no meeting places in London,” he later complained, “except the pubs with their ridiculous hours. If you go to the theatre or the cinema you want to go to a pub afterwards but they’re all closed. That’s why there are no meeting places; they’ve closed them all up. The place is dead; just tacky night clubs for tired businessmen. That’s not life in a city.” Hockney’s London was a place of closed minds and clenched morals, and he resented the way people there so evidently disapproved of him for being attracted to other men. In response, he flaunted the way he was and filled his early works with funny, teasing little references to his homosexuality. Peopled by cartoon-like figures in uncertain circumstances and decorated with scraps of text from Whitman or Cavafy or commercial products like Deep Heat liniment (“penetrates deep down for complete relief”) they have the sudden, blurted immediacy of the graffiti on the wall of a public lavatory.
Hockney all but abandoned his stance of mild gay militancy when he arrived on the West Coast of America. It would have had little point, after all, in California, where he was surrounded by people who either shared his own sexual preferences or who were blandly tolerant of them. The artist’s change in mood was reflected, almost immediately, in a change of style. The rough surfaces and self-consciously “cheeky” (his word), confessional devices of his earlier painting were supplanted by a new relaxed and easygoing manner. This is exemplified by A Bigger Splash, which is so relaxed it seems almost anonymous. Its mood is reflective rather than confessional and it contains no figures at all. It as if, in holiday mood, the artist finally found the confidence to leave himself out of his own work.
Hockney himself has said he painted the picture because he was interested in Leonardo da Vinci’s studies of the fluid motions of water, and because he liked the idea of spending two weeks painting an event – a splash – which only lasts for two seconds. I think there is also a slight astringency to the picture, a trace element of the very English irony which had characterised all of Hockney’s earlier painting. A Bigger Splash is so deliberately and perfectly bland – an effect enhanced by the flat and artificial colours of acrylic paint, which Hockney had recently discovered in an art materials store in Hollywood – that it is hard not to suspect the artist of some ulterior, satirical motive. The empty deckchair; the jutting diving board; the low-lying bungalow with its uniform sliding plate glass doors; the pair of palms; the perfunctorily indicated lawn – these are the elements of an identikit American idyll, as perfectly superficial as it is perfectly unruffled. Even as Hockney celebrated it, he also made a kind of mockery of the dumb blankness of the Californian good life.
But the mockery is light and affectionate and the predominant mood of the painting is still, I think, one of undiluted pleasure and satisfaction. The subject of A Bigger Splash is both a disappearance and an immersion – the vanishing of the diver, his entry of the pool – which was surely Hockney’s way of dramatising his own feelings on having arrived in America. He too had made his getaway, had plunged into a new and delightful place. The artist does not actually show us his alter ego, the diver, revelling in the sudden silence of underwater. But he makes much of the splash that hides him from us. This is the picture’s one genuinely agitated passage of painting: a flurry of excited white paint into which the painter seems to have distilled all the happiness and energy of being young, and in love, and exactly where you want to be; an ejaculation of joy.
Date: 13-08-2000
Owning Institution: Tate Britain, London
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”
Subject:
Now 20th Century
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 inspiration for A Bigger Splash.
The young Hockney is identified in many people’s minds with “Swinging London” but the truth is that he had disliked London in many ways when he studied there at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s. It was precisely because London had seemed so unswinging that California seemed so free and exciting. “There are no meeting places in London,” he later complained, “except the pubs with their ridiculous hours. If you go to the theatre or the cinema you want to go to a pub afterwards but they’re all closed. That’s why there are no meeting places; they’ve closed them all up. The place is dead; just tacky night clubs for tired businessmen. That’s not life in a city.” Hockney’s London was a place of closed minds and clenched morals, and he resented the way people there so evidently disapproved of him for being attracted to other men. In response, he flaunted the way he was and filled his early works with funny, teasing little references to his homosexuality. Peopled by cartoon-like figures in uncertain circumstances and decorated with scraps of text from Whitman or Cavafy or commercial products like Deep Heat liniment (“penetrates deep down for complete relief”) they have the sudden, blurted immediacy of the graffiti on the wall of a public lavatory.
Hockney all but abandoned his stance of mild gay militancy when he arrived on the West Coast of America. It would have had little point, after all, in California, where he was surrounded by people who either shared his own sexual preferences or who were blandly tolerant of them. The artist’s change in mood was reflected, almost immediately, in a change of style. The rough surfaces and self-consciously “cheeky” (his word), confessional devices of his earlier painting were supplanted by a new relaxed and easygoing manner. This is exemplified by A Bigger Splash, which is so relaxed it seems almost anonymous. Its mood is reflective rather than confessional and it contains no figures at all. It as if, in holiday mood, the artist finally found the confidence to leave himself out of his own work.
Hockney himself has said he painted the picture because he was interested in Leonardo da Vinci’s studies of the fluid motions of water, and because he liked the idea of spending two weeks painting an event – a splash – which only lasts for two seconds. I think there is also a slight astringency to the picture, a trace element of the very English irony which had characterised all of Hockney’s earlier painting. A Bigger Splash is so deliberately and perfectly bland – an effect enhanced by the flat and artificial colours of acrylic paint, which Hockney had recently discovered in an art materials store in Hollywood – that it is hard not to suspect the artist of some ulterior, satirical motive. The empty deckchair; the jutting diving board; the low-lying bungalow with its uniform sliding plate glass doors; the pair of palms; the perfunctorily indicated lawn – these are the elements of an identikit American idyll, as perfectly superficial as it is perfectly unruffled. Even as Hockney celebrated it, he also made a kind of mockery of the dumb blankness of the Californian good life.
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