Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles

David Hockney first came to Los Angeles in 1964 from London. From the outset he was fascinated with this place - so different in lifestyle from London with its sunny wide open spaces and tolerant social climate. Los Angeles and its unique lifestyle became the dominant subject of his painting during this seminal period. The pictures have in common a strong and specific sense of place. His subjects range from friends and patrons to L.A.'s buildings, houses, backyards, swimming pools, and street corners. His first painting in Los Angeles was of a plastic tree in front of City Hall, capturing both the reality of the building and the seemingly official sanction of the artificial. "The one thing that happened in Los Angeles was that I had begun to paint real things I had seen; all the paintings before that were either ideas or things I'd seen in a book and made something from." In their specificity and intimacy, these works are very much portraits in the traditional sense.

In 1964 Hockney made just two paintings of street corners in his Santa Monica studio, the present example and Wilshire Boulevard. In Olympic Blvd, Los Angeles, "...the entire image is contained - as the white border and Letraset caption suggest - within the format of a postcard, indicating that what is depicted is an image of a city composed of tourist clichés: palm trees, cloudless skies, and Modernist buildings. As David Thompson observed in the introduction to the catalogue of The New Generation: 1964 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London "You are quickly aware that he is more likely to be watching you watching him being ingenuous, and finding it amusing. For this self-conscious art may be a kind of autobiography, but it is not self-revelation" (P. Melia, David Hockney, New York, 1994, p. 66).