The Boy In Hockney’s Pool Paintings

“We two boys together clinging
One the other never leaving,
Up and down the roads going, North and South excursions making,
Power enjoying, elbows stretching, fingers clutching,
Arm’d and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving…”

Poem by Walter Whitman

“We Two Boys Together Clinging” (1961) Inspired by Walter Whitman’s Poem, expressing his love for men.

Hockney met then 18-year-old Peter Schlesinger, a student 11 years his junior at UCLA while teaching a summer course. Their relationship would take Schlesinger to London, where he began studying at the Slade School of Fine Art. This would expose the California-born boy to the bohemian glamour and creativity of Hockney’s home-country.

“Peter Schlesinger with Polaroid Camera” by David Hockney, 1977 (Google Images)

While studying painting there, Schlesinger began to capture the most magnetic personalities in the couple’s social circle with his Pentax camera. Figures like Manolo Blahnik and Paloma Picasso. Also photographing Eric Boman, who would eventually become his lifelong parter after splitting with Hockney.

“Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool” by David Hockney, 1966 (Google Images)

Whilst being in a relationship with Hockney, Schlesinger was often the subject and muse behind many of the artist’s famous works. Including this painting of himself hoisting onto the cement.

“David had a big romance with California. And I was an object in it.”

“I was actually posed against the hood of my MG,” he says, explaining that Hockney photographed him as a study, and then inserted the figure into the pool. “That’s why the part under the water isn’t painted well — because it was just invented.”

And Hockney’s biggest monetary success to date, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) was sold for $90.3 million — becoming the most expensive work of art by a living artist sold at auction as of last year.

Preparatory photograph for Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (Google Images)

In London Hockney took photographs of his partner, Peter Schlesinger, in Kensington Gardens, from which he also worked to create the pink-jacketed figure standing at the pool’s edge. Film still from A Bigger Splash, 1974. (Google Images)

“Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” painted in 1972 (Google Images)

Schlesinger and Hockney are “friendly” with one another, still keeping in contact to date.

“…No law less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering, thieving,
threatening,
Misers, menials, priests alarming, air breathing, water drinking, on
the turf or the sea-beach dancing,
Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness chasing,
Fulfilling our foray.”

Poem by Walter Whitman

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