David Hockney — A Bigger Splash #notesontheartwork
August is almost over but Europe is still hot as hell, so the ideal painting for the return of #notesontheartwork is, of course, A Bigger Splash by the British artist David Hockney, whose iconic depiction of his California dream can transport us to a refreshing moment on a hot day. And that’s everything someone can ask for while sitting on a chair writing an article on a warm apartment.
This 1967 painting became a milestone not only within the artist’s career and the Pop art movement but also within art history itself and it’s constantly mentioned as a masterpiece by art historians and curators while figuring in thousands of books and articles. But what makes this picture a masterpiece? In a video interview available on Tate’s website, Hockney answers the question of what makes a picture memorable “Nobody knows, really […] there’s no formula, if there was a formula, there’d be a lot more memorable pictures”. So, let’s dive into A Bigger Splash and try to understand what makes it so special.
This is a very simple, stylized and minimalistic painting that depicts a view of a Californian swimming pool on which someone appears to have jumped in the second before the painting was made. A yellow diving board breaks out of the right corner of the foreground to give perspective as well as to cut across the predominant horizontals, but mostly to introduce us to the main character in this short story, the splash, painted mixing areas of lighter blue with fine white lines on the monotone turquoise water.
Between the two massive blocks of blue-colored water and sky, in a strip of light pink-colored land is a pink modernist house whose straight lines construct a rectangular block with two plate glass windows, on which the open curtains mirror the city skylight. In front of the house is a folding chair sharply delineated, similar to the ones used in cinema, a direct allusion to Hollywood. A frond-like row of greenery carefully manicured gardens decorates its front together with two palm trees on the right side.
The colors divide the painting into three massive colorful blocks which were rolled onto the canvas while the details, such as the splash, the chair and the vegetation, were painted on later using small brushes. The colors used are brighter and bolder to emphasize the strong Californian light. The painting’s lines are precise and there are no distracting details in it, only the essential to focus our eyes on what matters: the splash.
Hockney was fascinated by that split second in which the water erupts and his challenge was to depict that moment in which the substance is in motion which is essentially transparent to the eye. This paradox fascinated him: to capture and freeze in a still image on a canvas something which is never still. He later commented how he had spent two weeks painting the splash, reproducing from a photograph he found: the shapes made by the upsurging cascade of water, the different areas of transparency, the details and traces of the tiny drips. He spent more time on that than on the house behind it — even though a splash lasts two seconds and a building is permanently there. This contradiction riveted him.
Hockney’s fascination with the theme led him to paint two more similar pictures devoted to that moment: The Splash (private collection) and A Little Splash (private collection) both completed in 1966. But the swimming pool theme doesn’t end there and between 1964 and 1971 he made numerous paintings and in each, he attempted a different solution to the representation of the constantly changing surface of the water as California Art Collector, 1964 (private collection) and Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool, 1964 (private collection).
This theme is a variation of his much-expressed love for California, which started upon his first visit to Los Angeles in 1963, a year after graduating from the Royal College of Art, London. He returned there in 1964 and remained, with only intermittent trips to Europe, until 1968 when he came back to London. In 1976 he made a final trip back to Los Angeles and set up a permanent home there. He was drawn to California by the weather and relaxed way of life, as opposed to his home country Britain where it is too cold for most of the year. When flying to Los Angeles, he would watch the city underneath unfold before his eyes, different from everything he had ever seen, discovering that everybody had a swimming pool that they could use all year round because of the climate. It was a pivotal moment for his life and his art. Sometimes you find inspiration in the simplest of things.
When looking at A Bigger Splash I always felt it was enigmatic and there’s a certain aura surrounding the painting that I don’t think I can quite explain (maybe that’s also one of the reasons for its success). It feels like this big interrogation point as I feel I’m watching a single frame of a bigger story that I do not have access to. I believe the fact that there’s a dive but no one to be seen, just its indication by the water’s splash, makes you inevitably wonder “Who was that person? Why was he not to be seen?”. The scene is almost entirely still … apart from the torrent of cascading water. It’s a contradiction and a paradox, just like Hockney intended. It’s like a fantasy scene from a movie about Los Angeles that became one of the most famous paintings of the second half of the 20th century.
References
David Hockney, A Bigger Splash, 1967. Tate. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hockney-a-bigger-splash-t03254
David Hockney’s Iconic Masterpiece, “The Splash”. Sotheby’s. Available at: https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/david-hockneys-iconic-masterpiece-the-splash
