David Hockney
Fundamental Paintings to Understand the History of Painting
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A Bigger Splash (1967). David Hockney
Acrylic on canvas. 243.8 cm x 243.8 cm
Tate Britain. London, United Kingdom
Although he worked for most of his career in the United States (this painting belongs to his series of Californian swimming pools) Hockney was an English artist. We can associate him to the so-called School of London. (Artists with different styles who constituted a fundamental group within the figurative painting of the 20th century, at a time when abstraction prevailed.) He was also an important contributor to Pop art.
Hockney, in fact, did not consider himself absolutely pop. He may be so in the choice of subject matter, or in the coloring, but as an artist he had some very personal concerns. Concerns that go beyond what Pop art proposes.
This is his best-known painting. And it is so called because he has already painted others entitled The Splash and A Little Splash.
The swimming-pool under the California sun, a recurring theme in his work, is certainly a pop theme. We can say that it is one of the icons representing success in the materialistic world. However, for Hockney, a swimming pool had a hypnotic appeal for a painter: the formal challenge of painting water. The artist said “it can be anything, it can be any color, it is movable; it has no set visual description.”
But there is something else in this work that makes it so attractive (although one, when looking at it for the first time, we may not understand why). And it is the artist’s skill to depict something that art recurrently seeks to capture: the ephemerality of life.
Hockney was fascinated by the contrast between a splash (which he had seen in a photograph), and the stillness of what surrounds it, the immobility of the building.
The real subject —as in every great work of art— is life itself.
The artist’s statement about this work is well known: “It takes me two weeks to paint an event that lasts two seconds.” And that is life, we insist.
Recommended links.
David Hockney, 82 Portraits and 1 Still Life.
Timeline: Moments of David Hockney.
Andy Warhol: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”
Timeline: Moments of Francis Bacon.
Timeline: Moments of Lucian Freud.
Francis Bacon: “My painting is not violent; it is life that is violent.”
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