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David Hockney, the towering English artist who made Los Angeles his home, created many pieces that epitomized the city’s sun-drenched landscapes filled with glittering pools, rolling hills and lush foliage. Here are five of his best.
“Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio,” 1980
Hockney’s largest canvas — at more than 7 feet tall and 20 feet wide — is filled with deft lines and Hockney’s signature swirls. It depicts the artist’s daily commute from his home in the Hollywood Hills to his studio on Santa Monica Boulevard. The iconic winding road from the painting’s title twists and sweeps through hills of blue, purple and pink. A swimming pool and tennis courts can be seen in the background and the landscape is dotted with power lines and trees. Cross-hatched grids in the background represent the vastness of the surrounding areas, including Burbank and Studio City. That the canvas is a representation of driving — one of the city’s core activities — makes it especially resonant with Angelenos who recognize that time spent in the car, while often frustrating, can also be a thing of transcendent beauty on the right road. Hockney loved to take visitors on what he called a “Wagner Drive,” winding through hills listening to opera. The work is part of the permanent collection at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and is currently on view.
“A Bigger Splash,” 1967
This is one of Hockney’s most iconic paintings — a large-scale image of a luminous blue swimming pool marked by a diver’s splash. A sleek modernist home with a single white director’s chair sits in the background with two slender palm trees rising into the light blue sky behind. A diving board juts into the frame to dominate the right corner. A frothy white water splash suggests the presence — and momentary absence — of the swimmer now submerged in cool water. Hockney made “A Bigger Splash” while living with his partner and muse, the artist Peter Schlesinger, on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. The couple spent time with writer Christopher Isherwood and his partner, the painter Don Bachardy. Hockney would remember this period as one of his most prolific and happiest times in California.
“American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman),” 1968
Hockney’s double portraits are among his most celebrated achievements. He painted this one of the heiress to Hunt Wesson Foods and her husband, a zealous art fan, shortly after creating another well-known double portrait of Isherwood and Bachardy. By the 1950s the Weismans had one of the country’s most ambitious collections of contemporary art. Hockney captures the luminescence of the California sunshine as the couple poses in the sculpture garden of their L.A. home. A turquoise William Turnbull sculpture is between them, and another sculpture by Henry Moore is in the background, a seeming replication of Marcia’s stiff stance in her bright pink, floor-length dress. A single totem pole appears in the far right of the tight frame, as stiff and formal as Fred. The reserved couple does not look at each other, even as we gaze closely at them.
“Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),” 1972
This tense large-scale canvas measuring 7 by 10 feet combines Hockney’s double portraits with one of his signature swimming pools. It also contains the seeds of gay love that defined Hockney’s work. His fantasy of California as a place much more accepting of homosexuality than England originally inspired Hockney to visit L.A. for the first time in 1964. In this painting, a man meant to be Hockney swims underwater to the edge of the pool, his dark hair swaying in the water, his tight white swimsuit blending in with the sun-dappled water. A man representing Schlesinger, dressed in white slacks, polished loafers and a dark pinkish-red blazer stands at the edge of the pool, near its shadowy edges, staring down at the swimmer. Deep green hills covered in dense trees rise in the background, receding into the far distance — representing the many ways that wild land seems to thrive in this vast urban space. In 2018 this painting sold for $90.3 million, which was, at the time, the highest price paid at auction for a work by a living artist.
“Beverly Hills Housewife,” 1966-67
This massive portrait of philanthropist Betty Freeman was painted four years after Hockney left the Royal College of Art in London and is part of his acclaimed “California Dreaming” series. Instead of a pool, this canvas features another of Hockney’s signature fascinations: a manicured, bright green lawn. The grass frames the foreground, and Freeman is depicted in a fuchsia dress inside a linear, glass-fronted modernist home. A zebra-striped lounging chair to the left and a taxidermied antelope head on the wall behind hint at the wealth and leisure of its titular city — another subject of great interest to Hockney.
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