California Dreaming

David Hockney's love of 1960s California resulted in some of his finest work

Words by Skye Sherwin

No other painting says summer in the city quite like David Hockney's 1967 masterpiece A Bigger Splash. It's a man-made world of sunny, geometric harmony, where almost everything seems crafted from orderly rectangles. The backdrop consists of a blue sky, as flat and blemish-free as a billboard, and a chic, low-slung modern pad that could only be in California: a single storey sand-stone pink dwelling with palm trees reflected in its sliding patio doors and a director's chair out front. The focus though is the swimming pool in the foreground, disrupted by a sudden, chaotic explosion of white spray.

Hockney's fascination with California began with images of bronzed, buffed guys in a muscle magazine, Physique Pictorial, which he collected while living in grey old London. When he first went to Los Angeles in the early 60s he was chasing a fantasy, and the Bradford boy made good fashioned himself as a figurehead of the swinging decade. With his bleached mop of hair, trademark glasses of two thick black hoops and natty dress sense, he seemed the quintessential modern dandy. One of the first series to garner him acclaim was his Rake's Progress of 1961 - 1963, a semi-autobiographical young, gay, New York-set update of Hogarth's 18th century morality tale, created at a moment when being queer was still considered queer. Hockney wanted to make work that tapped into the 'right now'. He wanted to find a paradise of sun, sex and the city. In his California Dreaming series he achieved both.

These paintings evoke classic tales of moneyed urbane highlife. Think of the playboy decadence suggested by the nude youth coming out of a pool in Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool from 1966 say, or the woman, pausing between a stuffed animal head on the wall and her zebra-print reclining designer chair, in Beverly Hills Housewife. These works make us wonder about the before and after. A Bigger Splash focuses our attention on the moment, the sound of water erupting, briefly, to disorder a near perfect calm. But what of the diver who has plunged into the balmy turquoise depths and the person watching, alone on the poolside? There's an ache in its blank surfaces.

If you want to know more about the art star's life in this period there's a documentary of sorts, also called A Bigger Splash, from 1974. Directed by Jack Hazan, it was shot over four years in London, Los Angeles and New York, with Hockney and his friends playing versions of themselves, in a fiction that may be something like reality, only far more elegant. With other luminaries from the decade like his art-school chum, clothes designer Ossie Clark and his wife, the textiles designer and style icon, Celia Birtwell, Hockney's days are full of fashion shows, swimming pools and chic furniture, and set to an opera soundtrack - one of his passions. The action centres around the idea that he cannot paint having lost his muse, a beautiful, dark-haired young man played by his real life ex-lover and model, Peter Schlesinger.

The world conjured in the film comes close to Hockney's paintings for irony, style and languor. Full of art and designer objects, beautiful clothes and beautiful people, it tempers a dry wit, with a great sense of longing.

Hockney Then & Now

A Bigger Splash (the painting) was largely done with acrylic and rollers. The splash itself, as Hockney wrote in his autobiography, took "two weeks to paint this event that lasted for two seconds."

When Beverly Hills Housewife sold at auction in New York in 2009, it reached over £5.2 million - a record price for the artist.

Now in his 70s, Hockney is reportedly passionate about his iPhone, creating images of flowers and sunrises with his fingers on its touchscreen. His prize device even has its own mini wooden easel