It was a perfect sunny day for lounging poolside at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The sky was a keen pale blue, with that piercing quality familiar in Southern California. The pool, where a man with straight black hair drifted on a pink and green striped raft, was a deeper, cerulean blue.
It looked a lot like a painting by David Hockney, the British-born L.A. transplant whose death on Thursday drew tributes from all corners of the world.
And Hockney had had a hand in this pool. In 1988, already famous, he spent a day here with a paint brush attached to the end of a broom, painting bright blue swooshes on the pool’s bottom. Now, even though many of the marks have faded, the remaining curves powerfully mimic and accentuate the flickering light on the water’s rippled surface.
The pool mural, which I visited on Friday, is one of the many gifts that Hockney has given us as residents of Los Angeles. In his five decades of living here, becoming as he would say an “English Angeleno,” he made his mark on the city in ways both dramatic and subtle, inflecting our image of the California lifestyle as well as influencing generations of artists. His influence is felt not just on the walls of museum, but everywhere.
He moved to the city in 1964 without ever having visited it, drawn in part by the “sleazy, sexy hot night-life” he read about in John Rechy’s 1963 novel “City of Night,” he said in a book-length interview in 1976. He plunged right in and painted the slickly erotic acrylic painting, “Man in Shower in Beverly Hills.”
“He loved the sunlight, the weather, the boys,” said Richard Benefield, a veteran museum executive who served as the first director of the David Hockney Foundation. “L.A. was the place he could go and be completely free; he could be gay and not worry about everything people were so hung up about in the 1960s in the U.K.”
Hockney’s sensuality and hedonism infused his paintings, said Stephanie Barron, department head of modern art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and a three-time sitter for his portraits. “David’s 1960s paintings of sparkling pools, manicured lawns and his sunbathing friends have become embedded in the psyche as symbols of Los Angeles, whether accurate or not.”
As Hockney once described the 1960s to Getty curators: “There were no paintings of Los Angeles. People then didn’t even know what it looked like. And when I was there, they were still finishing up the freeways. I remember seeing within the first week, a ramp of freeway going into the air, and I suddenly thought, my God, this place needs its Piranesi,” he said, comparing himself to the 18th-century Italian artist who documented a fast-changing Rome.
In 1966, Hockney painted “Sunbather,” with yellow, stylized lines tracing the looping play of light on the water and echoing the curves of a male sunbather’s buttocks.
The following year, he painted the larger, bolder and strangely clinical work, “A Bigger Splash,” where the poolside chair is empty, the pool looms larger than the low-slung midcentury house, and the splash stands in for a missing figure. It soon became the posterchild for a certain stylish-but-alienating lifestyle in L.A. and appeared on the cover of Reyner Banham’s groundbreaking 1971 book, “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.” For Banham, an architectural historian, the celebrated painting bundled together his notion of “Surfurbia” with the “dream of the good life.”
Hockney would explain to me, in an interview for The Times, that the city fed his appetite for using vivid, saturated colors. “Los Angeles has that effect on me,” he said, smelling faintly of cigarette smoke and dressed in a smart gray suit with a canary-yellow shirt. “The light there is 10 times brighter than anywhere else. It’s why Hollywood started there. Natural light was essential in 1910 for film.”
At his longtime home in the hills near Mulholland Drive — the famous ridgeline roadway through the eastern Santa Monica Mountains — Hockney built his studio on a tennis court and made a wide variety of paintings examining the local foliage and experimenting with multifocal, twisty vistas. His home also became his canvas — or stage set, considering his work for the theater, as he painted walls, railings and more in bright hues. In 1987, he seized the chance to turn his pool into a painting as well, concocting a tangle of wavy cobalt lines on the bottom of his comma-shaped swimming pool, then signing and dating his work when it was done.
He repainted it as needed, even doing so the day before his 80th birthday in the heat of July, recalled Benefield. He once proposed that the artist do a show on water — his pools, puddles and showers included. “He was more interested in his iPad paintings at the time,” Benefield said.
“David embraced new technologies like nobody I know, but at the core of his work was beauty,” Barron said. “I think that he gave many artists permission to engage with the beauty in their immediate surroundings.”
A few artists, including Jonas Wood, managed to wrangle invitations to visit the modern master in his studio. Wood, known for energetic renderings of things close to home, whether flowers or basketballs, said he felt connected to Hockney because of the domestic subject matter — they both have done their share of dog portraits.
“He might have been a political person, but he wasn’t a political artist,” said Wood, who painted Hockney’s portrait from a photograph in 2004 and met him a few years later. “He was capturing the life that he was living and the minute things that became interesting to him, interiors and exteriors.”
“I love his patterns, his colors and his textile vibes,” Wood continued, comparing Hockney to Vincent van Gogh in “the repetition of his mark, the squiggle of his mark, the mastery of his line.”
He left Los Angeles for Normandy, France, in 2019, and ended up returning for visits only. “He told me he left L.A. because he couldn’t smoke at his favorite places anymore,” Wood recalled. “Indoor smoking, outdoor smoking, patio smoking, it all got canceled.”
Talk to anyone who worked with Hockney, and you will hear stories about his incessant cigarette breaks — and the dispensations obtained so that he could light up during museum installations and openings.
“We had to get a special permit for him to be able to smoke on the terrace for his ‘82 Portraits and 1 Still-Life’ show in 2018,” Barron said. “David was a lifelong, committed chain smoker and all legislation about smoking irritated him.”
In 2016, another British transplant in Los Angeles, the artist Tacita Dean created a short 16-millimeter film, “Portraits (Hockney),” that captures him in full color smoking five cigarettes in his studio, with his paintings of friends behind him. The smoke curls sensuously, much like the curves on the bottom of the Hollywood Roosevelt pool.
As for Hockney’s fading mural, the front desk manager Dustin Crain said it’s a recent problem. “We closed the pool for multiple days last year to have the work restored,” he said. “The crazy part is we worked with a painter sanctioned by Hockney’s studio. They used the wrong kind of paint or something.”
Crain said that refreshing the quintessentially SoCal artwork is a priority — once the summer rush at the pool is over.
The post David Hockney Taught Los Angeles to See Itself appeared first on New York Times.
