David Hockney’s California (1965): ‘it was all so sexy’

In 1964, David Hockney left London for California. Having graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1962, he had saved up enough money from selling his paintings to live in Los Angeles for a year. Upon arrival he fell in love with the city’s dazzling brightness: the hummingbirds hovering in the palm trees, the hot sun burning in the blue sky, the swimming pools the colour of Frank Sinatra’s eyes.

It occurred to Hockney that the affluent Los Angeles suburbs had rarely been represented in art. He resolved to become the Piranesi of Santa Monica and Beverly Hills. Where the 18th-century artist had drawn Rome as a Gothic fantasy for European travellers, Hockney painted Los Angeles as the ordinary person’s dream of utopia. Everything is perfect: white recliners on sun-baked terraces, lithe bodies floating in rectangular pools, ornamental trees rising from the brown earth next to light-hearted parodies of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright.

California (1965), which is offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 7 March 2024, is one such painting. Made on a brief trip back to the UK in the winter of 1965, it is a picture of colour and warmth. The hint of magic is in the melting together of bodies and water. It all feels a little light-headed, like a summer romance in the fierce heat.

Hockney’s early career had been shaped by the criminalisation of his sexuality. It was not until 1967 that homosexuality was legalised in the UK. The permissive atmosphere of California in the mid-1960s represented liberation to the young artist. On arriving in Los Angeles, Hockney was introduced to the literary and artistic gay scene by the gallery owner Nick Wilder, and he had no trouble fitting in, becoming great friends of the novelist Christopher Isherwood and the painter Don Bachardy. ‘I thought it was all so sexy,’ he recalled, ‘all these incredible boys. Everybody wore little white socks then, and it’s always sunny.’

Almost immediately, the careful tonal control that had typified Hockney’s English paintings gave way to brilliant purples, greens and yellows. He delineated his sexuality as firmly as any other object in his paintings, be it a glass table or a pot plant. The source material for California is an American fitness magazine known for its homoerotic imagery. As the novelist Edmund White commented, Hockney ‘took up gay subject matter before anyone else, and the amazing thing is that he got away with it’.

California forms part of Hockney’s first Swimming Pool series, made between 1964 and 1967, which also includes A Bigger Splash (1967). Much of the series was focused on the representation of moving water, something the artist found intellectually stimulating.

‘The idea of painting moving water in a very slow and careful manner was (and still is) very appealing to me,’ he has said. ‘It is a formal problem to represent water, to describe water, because it can be anything — it can be any colour, it’s movable, it has no set visual description.’

His solution was to approach it abstractly, painting wavy lines in a similar manner to Jean Dubuffet’s Hourloupe cycle. Those meandering blue swirls added to the heady atmosphere of sexual liberation — perhaps because the dark lines in a pool are usually straight, marking out the lanes for swimmers. Here they travel free, suggesting there is no need to follow the rules. When Hockney later bought a house with a swimming pool, he painted its base in a riot of blue swirls.

The artist returned to the subject of swimming pools in the early 1970s, during the break-up with his lover, Peter Schlesinger, and it was during this time that he painted the famous work Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). The subject took centre stage again in 1978, in the collage series Paper Pools, depicting the printmaker Kenneth Tyler’s swimming pool in upstate New York.

In many ways, swimming has always felt more of a mood than a sport, and Hockney paints it as such. In those cool, glassy surfaces he captured an aspirational lifestyle, the red frame of California suggesting a window waiting to be climbed through. Hockney wedged his foot in the crack, and let everyone in.