BY MARTIN HAMMER

DAVID HOCKNEY’S A bigger splash (Fig.32), painted fifty years ago this year, features naturally in the artist’s current eightieth birthday retrospective, reviewed on pp.413–15.1 A canonical work in art history, the picture owes its wide appeal to many factors: legibility and economy; the visual wit inherent in implying human action although no figure is visible; its evocation of an idyllic sunny environment, the dream of Arcadia transplanted from the Roman Campagna to modern California; Hockney’s precise, well-crafted execution; reproducibility; and a lingering association with the Swinging Sixties and its good vibrations. Yet the recent recycling of Hockney’s title for that of a rather dark film about a Mediterranean holiday that goes badly wrong, suggests not merely the continuing resonance of the work, but also its availability to less upbeat interpretations.2 In reinserting A bigger splash into its specific historical and cultural moment, and by employing close reading and comparative analysis (including with its photographic source, here identified), the aim of this article is to bring out some of the complexities and ambiguities of the painting.

The work draws one in, spatially and imaginatively. Judging from the grisaille reflections in the window, the urban setting wraps around the pool, into which an individual has just plunged, the human presence reduced to the merest suggestion of fleshy pink at the base of the splash. The diving-board projects from the viewer’s side of the pool. Metaphorically speaking we, too, are encouraged to take the plunge, to seek out layers of meaning and association beneath the serene, flat façade. Yet that immersion coexists with an inbuilt distance. The diver has absented him- or herself, leaving us high and dry. The omission of the section of the pool surround in the foreground serves to disembody the viewer. Although the picture contains naturalistic detail, it comes across as artfully contrived and simplified. An image of implied momentary, perhaps spontaneous, action is suspended within a painting that appears highly controlled in the manner of its execution, ‘a balanced composition’ in Hockney’s words.3 We might register, for instance, that the white patch at the heart of the splash is positioned on the painting’s central vertical axis. The unbroken transverse band at the far side of the pool occupies the horizontal centre of the painting, while the area above is bisected by zones describing the building and the flat blue sky. The perspective of the diving-board recedes in the direction of the small chair, and its ochre colour is picked up in the building’s flat roof. A vertical, continuing down from the more visible of the two trees, coincides roughly with the far-right corner of the diving-board.

Aesthetic detachment reflected the circumstances of the picture’s creation. A bigger splash was completed in Berkeley, where Hockney was teaching from April to June 1967, and not in Los Angeles. In fact, the painting was the elaboration of an idea explored in two pictures produced the previous year, The little splash and The splash (both in private collections).4 In that sense, A bigger splash comprised a distillation of Los Angeles, realised with the benefit of geographical and emotional distance. The two previous versions had been sold in Hockney’s one-man show at the Landau-Alan Gallery in New York in April 1967, organised in conjunction with his London dealer, John Kasmin. 5 The impulse to make the larger version that spring may therefore have had a commercial dimension, looking ahead to his next show. A bigger splash was exhibited early the following year at Kasmin’s, and was quickly sold.6

If audiences and collectors remote from Los Angeles relished the exotic theme, they also doubtless appreciated Hockney’s modern idiom. The intensity of colour, underlying clarity and geometry, and the use of flat, unmodulated paint, acrylic rather than oil, applied with a roller, and with masking-tape establishing sharp edges, would all have brought to mind the large abstract paintings of Kenneth Noland or his British counterpart, Robyn Denny.7 Such artists were being exhibited to critical acclaim at Kasmin’s, which largely operated as a London outpost of post-painterly Abstraction.8 Hockney recalled building up A bigger splash initially as an arrangement of blocks of flat colour, which were then rendered representational through the insertion of pockets of detail. Similarly, he noted that the closely related painting A lawn sprinkler (1967; Fig.33) ‘looked at one point exactly like a symmetrical Robin [sic] Denny painting’.9 In A bigger splash, Hockney’s palette and diving-board could be seen to allude to works by Denny such as Ted Bentley (1961; private collection) and Little man (1964–65; private collection).10 In the latter, the central vertical strip, animated surround and white border may even have triggered associations with pool imagery for Hockney.

A bigger splash must have seemed poised, knowingly and appealingly, between abstraction and figuration. It is also ambivalent in tone. Although most perceive a celebratory intention, spectators might also identify an ironic aspect to Hockney’s depictions of the Californian good life. At the affirmative end of the scale, outdoor pools were bound up with an erotic frisson in both hetero- and homosexual milieux. The motif offered an obvious pretext for the display of nearly naked male bodies, as adapted elsewhere by Hockney from magazines such as Physique Pictorial.11 Given the status of the pool in Los Angeles as the focus of family life, a latter-day ‘hearth’ for one commentator in 1967, Hockney’s variants on it could be seen to extend his ‘assimilationist’ and domesticated vision of homosexual identity. 12 One critic discerned oblique self-portraiture in this image of ‘undiluted pleasure and satisfaction’:

The subject of A Bigger Splash is both a disappearance and an immersion – the vanishing of the diver, his entry into the pool – which was surely Hockney’s way of dramatising his own feelings on having arrived in America. He too had made his getaway, had plunged into a new and delightful place. The artist does not actually show us his alter ego, the diver, revelling in the sudden silence of underwater. But he makes much of the splash that hides him from us [. . .] a flurry of excited white paint into which the painter seems to have distilled all the happiness and energy of being young, and in love, and exactly where you want to be; an ejaculation of joy.13

By extension, the picture might be located within a minor artistic tributary, rooted in Dada, whereby the splash motif is associated with sexual excitement.14 The idea was launched by Francis Picabia around 1920 and elaborated in Marcel Duchamp’s Paysage fautif (1946; Museum of Modern Art, Toyama), a globular splash of seminal fluid and paint on black satin, an ironic response to the macho, gestural aesthetic that was currently emerging in New York.15 The association with Hockney’s image may seem far-fetched, although we should note that Duchamp was by then a focus of attention in California, following his 1963 retrospective in Pasadena.16 In A bigger splash one might also discern an ironic reference to Abstract Expressionism. Hockney certainly knew the recent, more pastoral work of Willem de Kooning, as in Merritt Parkway (Fig.34), with its dramatic explosion of white floated against deep flat blue and audaciously applied with house-painters’ brushes. Hockney surely conceived his own fastidious and more illustrative variation on the splash theme as a knowing reference to such precursors, especially given that De Kooning’s 1959 sell-out show at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York was reviewed in Time magazine under the t itle ‘Big Splash’.17 The article noted De Kooning’s spontaneous method of working: ‘“I’m not trying to be a virtuoso”, he explains, “but I have to do it fast. It’s not like poker, where you can build to a straight flush or something. It’s like throwing dice. I can’t save anything”’.18 It seems pointed that Hockney should have emphasised how he had taken two weeks to painstakingly render a momentary sensation in paint.19

A Bigger Splash reads, more affirmatively, as Hockney’s homage to a specifically American realist mode from the inter-War period that focused on architectural themes. This was epitomised by Edward Hopper and the precisionist Charles Sheeler (they had died in May 1967 and May 1965 respectively, having been hailed as precursors of Pop and Photorealism). According to his friend Henry Geldzahler, Hockney greatly admired their work, in which vivid description of light, space and architectural detail was combined with compositional order and often with an elimination of the figures who traditionally served to animate the scene.20 Both artists were virtually unknown in Britain, but Hockney probably became aware of their work in public and private collections in America, as well as through reproductions. Sheeler worked from photographs, and a painting such as Classic landscape (1931; National Gallery of Art, Washington) provided a model for the structural rigour, clarity of light and frontal perspective that Hockney employed in A bigger splash. Hopper’s suffusion of his images of everyday life with subjective feelings of alienation and loneliness is an undertone that we might equally discern in Hockney’s work.

A bigger splash was the culmination of a series of pool pictures conveying Hockney’s highly selective vision of Los Angeles. In reality, the city was noted for its banal architecture, suburban sprawl, its traffic and freeways and its significant social problems. The Watts Riots, prompted by racial tensions, had caused spectacular levels of destruction in August 1965. Hockney focused not on the public sphere, but on private lives in interiors and secluded gardens with pools, once a preserve of the very rich but now an increasingly widespread feature of middleclass housing. Imagery of domestic pools was ubiquitous in the advertising of real estate agents, and in architectural journals and lifestyle magazines such as House Beautiful, showing off the fashionable modernist houses that had been sprouting up since the Second World War in Palm Springs, Beverly Hills and elsewhere in southern California.21 These were the springboard for stunning photographs by the likes of Julius Shulman, as in the richly tonal black-and-white images of the Edgar J. Kaufmann House in Palm Springs (1947), or the later colour shots of the Case Study houses in Los Angeles.22 The elimination of figures and the general air of theatricality in such imagery, combined with their striking compositions, could well have appealed to Hockney and informed his conception of A bigger splash. The pool theme also featured in more vernacular kinds of photography, notably the postcards and brochures that sought to project a favourable image of vacations in the West, from Las Vegas to California, as mass driving-based tourism took off in the United States. Hockney’s picture alludes to the exaggerated colours of this imagery, with the wide white border signifying not just postcards but also polaroid photography. The Polaroid Swinger had been launched in 1965, and Hockney recalls acquiring his first camera at this time, and occasionally using polaroids for reference.23

Indeed, A bigger splash is recognisable as a painting of a photograph, capturing as it does a frozen moment in time. Hockney acknowledged that in this case he had used ‘a photograph I found in a book about how to build swimming pools I found on a news stand in Hollywood’.24 The source for A bigger splash was the banal image employed as the cover of a popular technical manual, first published in 1959 with several subsequent editions (Fig.35).25 The splash, diving-board and general arrangement of the elements in the photograph, together with details of the building beyond the pool and the landscape backdrop, were all quoted in Little splash. A good deal was already omitted: the trees, pool furniture, complex reflections on glass and water, and above all the couple looking admiringly at their athletic offspring. In Hockney’s second version and in A bigger splash, the replacement of the folksy architecture with a modernist bungalow, the substitution of a pair of palm trees for the mountains and other picturesque details, and the general sense of order, serve to heighten the effect of distillation. In the absence of figures or a fully developed setting, we are left with the idea of house and pool as the collective fantasy of wealthy, sophisticated Los Angeles society.

Hockney’s work of this period can be related not just to abstraction but also to photorealism. This had been launched in 1966 with the show The Photographic Image, organised by the critic and curator Lawrence Alloway for the Guggenheim Museum in New York.26 The exhibition included work by the painters Richard Artschwager, Lynn Foulkes and MalcolmMorley, alongside artists such as Andy Warhol who transposed photographic images more directly into their work by means of collage or silkscreen transfer. Alloway explained his insistence on referring to photographic sources in the experience of making and viewing this type of work:

. . . when we look at a photographic realist painting there is a double image: we see both a painting and an image clearly derived from a photograph. The painting carries a reference to another channel of communication as well as to the depicted scene or object [. . .] Such a view seems to accord with the fascinating realism of everyday subjects oddly distanced from us, of complex references rather than substantial preferences, that characterize photographic realism.27

Hockney identified with this impulse to a certain degree, but in hindsight insisted that his own practice stood apart:

In America, it was the period when photo-realism was becoming known, and I was slightly interested in it [. . .] I never used their technique of projecting a colour slide onto the canvas, so that you’re really reproducing a photograph. I just drew the photographs out freehand. It was still similar to using a photograph from Physique Pictorial [. . .] In photorealism the subject-matter is not the actual objects represented on the canvas, it’s a flat photograph of those objects.28

For Alloway, the exemplary practitioner of the new aesthetic was Malcolm Morley, whose one-man show of paintings of ocean liners and cabin interiors took place at New York’s Kornblee Gallery in February 1967,29 shortly before Hockney’s exhibition at the Landau-Alan Gallery. The two artists must have been in friendly contact, since Morley’s chateau and castle pictures were said by Alloway to have been based on a postcard from Hockney.30 They presumably got to know one another in America, given that Morley had left London for the United States a year before Hockney moved to the capital from Yorkshire. There is an intriguing convergence between A bigger splash and Morley’s Diving champion of 1967 (Fig.36), based on a page from a publicity calendar produced by the Goodyear tyre company, as the inscription makes clear. Beyond the shared imagery, both works employ a wide white border, evoking photographic formats such as Polaroid, and a bright, synthetic palette, dominated by the intense blues of commercially produced imagery. Yet the comparison also highlights Hockney’s more ambivalent attitude towards the hedonistic theme epitomised by the visibility and youthful glamour of Morley’s diving figures. Diving champion flaunts its origin in routine, clichéd imagery, and invites the viewer to reflect on the transposition from an ephemeral, disposable source, typically encountered in a relatively working-class social environment, into a large, handmade painting. A bigger splash triggers associations with such vernacular imagery, but maintains, as noted, a sense of distance – aesthetic, emotional and imaginative – between spectator and image, a space into which less affirmative resonances might also intrude.

The Los Angeles art scene provides points of reference closer to home for the conception and ambiguous charge of A bigger splash. It is well known that Hockney was marginally involved in the city’s artistic community (his friend Nick Wilder ran a gallery). The key figure of that scene was Ed Ruscha, whose most inventive contribution was his series of photobooks, launched by Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations (1963), extending a deadpan Pop aesthetic to a fresh medium, and to subject-matter centred on vernacular Los Angeles buildings and urban spaces such as parking lots. In his synoptic account of the 1960s, Thomas Crow extolled Ruscha’s virtues at the expense of Hockney, whom Crow portrayed as a superficial consumer of the urban spectacle. He remarked of Ruscha’s fold-out booklet Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966): ‘The treatment of that uniquely linear and discrete urban district as a ready-made, the refusal of artful arrangement or commentary, distribution through cheap, endlessly duplicatable means, all made for fresh application of Duchampian strategems’.31 Crow argued that the ‘cognitive rewards and formal acuity’ of the booklet:

put in the shade better-known ‘Pop’ appropriations of the Los Angeles landscape, such as David Hockney’s embodiment of the Northern Englishman in paradise: his A Bigger Splash of 1967 returns to the more accessible precedents of De Kooning and Franz Kline, turning the broad expressive movement of the loaded brush into a souvenir of exuberantly chlorinated tourism.32

In this account, Hockney is somewhat patronised as a ‘Northern Englishman’ and so presumably not very sophisticated (although Ruscha, who grew up in Nebraska and Oklahoma, is not described as a ‘Midwest American’). Hockney comes across as a camp globetrotter, whose proclivity for bleaching his hair is perhaps hinted at in the ‘chlorinated’ tourist jibe.

As a corrective to Crow’s polarisation it is productive to explore the compatibilities between the pair of artists, who moved in the same circles in Los Angeles and were at least acquainted. In the 1960s Ruscha was better known for his paintings, and we might note the conjunction between imagery of fleeting, gravity defying liquid motion in A bigger splash and that in Ruscha’s Glass of milk, falling (Fig.38), a work of 1967 that was exhibited that year at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.33 Ruscha’s painting is a playful take on gestural mark-making, with a hint perhaps of it proverbially being no use crying over spilled milk. A bigger splash also makes for an interesting juxtaposition with Ruscha’s monumental Los Angeles County Museum on fire (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington), begun in 1965, as the Museum’s new wing opened, but only exhibited in 1968.34 Both paintings include expanses of water and seem subtly poised between perspectival naturalism and a stylised, simplified architectural imagery that could have been extracted from any larger urban setting, so that we seem to be looking at a model or blueprint. At a thematic level, both undercut the utopian connotations of sub-modernist Los Angeles architecture with a note of threat or transient disturbance. Hockney’s splash, with its elusive narrative, is matched by the fire afflicting the museum of Ruscha’s composition. In a more obvious affinity, Ruscha’s book Nine Swimming Pools (and a Broken Glass) (1968), his only exercise in colour photography, is typically laconic in its approach to this ubiquitous, increasingly banal fixture of post-War housing in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.35 The absence of human activity reinforces the desolate atmosphere. Moreover, in Nine Swimming Pools a shattered glass floats in the pool as if to suggest the night before, and to evoke the physical and emotional hazards latent in the most benign of circumstances.

A bigger splash can likewise be seen to echo the well-established trope of the swimming pool as a site of death and destruction. Here, parallels beyond fine art seem relevant. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), the eponymous hero took his only swim of the summer in the pool of his palatial abode, where he was shot dead in retaliation for a crime he had not committed. John Cheever’s more contemporaneous short story ‘The Swimmer’, published in The New Yorker in 1964, recounts Neddy Merrill’s journey home from a drinks party via a long series of pools in which he swims. The predictable shallow hedonism of Merrill’s nocturnal swims gradually modulates into the psychological depths of an unravelling life and symbolises the self-destructiveness of the alcoholic. 36 W ith r eference t o fi lm a nd t elevision i conography, Dick Hebdige remarked that ‘the body in the pool as metonym for trouble in paradise is [. . .] a recurrent motif bordering on cliché in West Coast sunshine noir’.37 Sunset Boulevard (1950) is the archetypal movie reference, and stills of the moment at which the male lead falls, again fatally shot, into the depths of the swimming pool are uncannily reminiscent of A bigger splash (Fig.37). Another instance is The Graduate, also a work of 1967, which is set in Los Angeles and Berkeley. The pool scenes evoke Ben’s successive moods of depression; his emotional alienation from his bourgeois family and his sexual fulfilment with Mrs Robinson. Overall, the coming-of-age narrative projects a ‘scarifying picture of the raw vulgarity of the swimming-pool rich’, according to a reviewer in the New York Times.38

The general notion that whatever we treasure is undercut inevitably by transience is captured by the phrase Et in Arcadia ego, an idea that had migrated from Erwin Panofsky’s learned discourse on Poussin, and which found literary form in W.H. Auden’s 1964 poem of that title.39 The sense that all may not be well in paradise was explored in relation to gay sexuality and Los Angeles in the novel A Single Man (also from 1964) by Christopher Isherwood, an old friend of Auden’s and a new one of Hockney’s. This tells the poignant story of a day in the life of a fifty-eight year-old gay university lecturer, struggling with the recent death of his partner, the crushing boredom of his job and with his own physical and mental decline, all exacerbated by the frantic but ghastly urban development of Los Angeles. At the end, after an adventure in and by the sea, he dies. Hockney doubtless knew the book, and we might discern in A bigger splash comparable intimations of the fate of a solitary individual, the emptiness of his or her existence echoed by the arid domestic surroundings, who seeks fleeting release from life’s cares in watery sensation, or even, perhaps, a more permanent oblivion. The inclusion of the chair (a chair and lilo were initially present on the terrace of The splash, but then replaced by the cactus bed) and the absence from view of the diving figure are calculated to trigger speculation about who might have dived in and why.40

Such reflections crystallise the issue of what it was that Hockney responded to in that photograph on the cover of the publication about pool construction. Hockney read his source image against the grain of its own uplifting connotations. This could have involved the perverse conjecture that something unexpected had just fallen from the sky, causing the dramatic splash. Such an interpretation might well have occurred to somebody familiar with the myth of the fall of Icarus, which was seen through Pieter Breugel the Elder’s painting of the subject in Auden’s great poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ (1938).41 It does not seem entirely ridiculous to see in A bigger splash an allusion to the fall of Icarus, and to read the painting as a variation on the notion that even in Arcadia, personal tragedies can occur, individuals can overreach and do terrible harm to themselves. This article does not attempt to present Hockney as a misunderstood tragedian, but rather to suggest that the camp, life-enhancing façade of his work may at times veil a proverbial heart of darkness.

1 C. Stephens and A. Wilson, eds.: exh cat. David Hockney, London (Tate Britain), Paris (Centre Pompidou) and New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 2017–18.

2 A Bigger Splash, directed by Luca Guadagnino. 2015.

3 N. Stangos: David Hockney by David Hockney, London and New York 1975, p.125.

4 Ibid., pp.124 and 161.

5 Exh. cat. David Hockney: New Paintings and Drawings, New York (Landau-Alan Gallery) 1967.

6 Exh. cat. David Hockney: a splash, a lawn, two rooms, two stains, some neat cushions and a table . . . painted, London (Kasmin Ltd) January–February 1968. The painting was purchased from Kasmin Ltd in 1981 by Sheridan, Marquess of Dufferin and Ava.

7 The Tate acquired Noland’s Gift (1961–62) in 1966, see http://www.tate.org. uk/art/artworks/noland-gift-t00898/text-catalogue-entry, accessed 17th January 2017.

8 See L. Tickner: ‘The Kasmin Gallery, 1963–1972’, Oxford Art Journal 30, 2 (2007), p.263.

9 Stangos, op. cit. (note 3), p.126.

10 Reproduced in D.A. Mellor: The Art of Robyn Denny, London 2002, pp.74 and 114.

11 On the gay dimension, see T. Stallings: ‘From Beefcake to Skatecake: Shifting Depictions of Masculinity and the Backyard Swimming Pool in Southern California’, in D. Cornell, ed.: Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography 1945–1982, Munich, London and New York 2012, pp.128–71.

12 C. Whiting: Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s, Berkeley 2006, p.124.

 13 A. Graham-Dixon: ‘A Bigger Splash by David Hockney’, Sunday Telegraph (13th

August 2000).

14 D. Hopkins: Dada’s Boys, New Haven and London 2007, pp.123–35.

15 G. Parkinson: The Duchamp Book, London 2008, p.63.

16 Exh. cat. Marcel Duchamp, A Retrospective Exhibition, Pasadena (Pasadena Art Museum) 1963.

17 Anon.: ‘Big Splash’, Time 73, 20 (18th May 1959), p.74.

18 Ibid.

19 Stangos, op. cit. (note 3), p.124.

20 See H. Geldzahler: ‘Introduction’, ibid., pp.17 and 21.

21 See J. Watts: ‘Swimming Alone: The Backyard Pool in Cold War California’, in Cornell, op cit. (note 11), pp.52–59.

22 Illustrated in ibid., pp.107, 110, 111 and 121.

23 Stangos, op. cit. (note 3), p.99.

24 Ibid., p.124.

25 Swimming Pools, Menlo Park 1959, front cover. I am grateful to Sam Tanis, who had also noted the Hockney connection, for supplying me with a scanned image of this now obscure publication.

26 Exh. cat. The Photographic Image, New York (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) 1966.

27 L. Alloway: ‘Photo-Realism’ (1973), in R. Kalina, ed.: Imagining the Present:

Context, Content and the Role of the Critic, London 2006, pp.193–98.

28 Stangos, op. cit. (note 3), p.160.

29 See L. Alloway: ‘The Paintings of Malcom Morley’, Art and Artists 1, 11 (February 1967), pp.16–19; idem: ‘Morley Paints a Picture’, Art News 67 (Summer 1968), pp.42–44 and 69–71.

30 Alloway, op. cit. (note 27), p.197.

31 T. Crow: The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, New Haven and London 2004, p.84.

32 Ibid.

33 Exh. cat. 1967 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, New York (Whitney Museum of American Art) 1967, no.58; P. Poncy, ed.: Edward Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings. Volume One: 1958–1970, New York 2003, pp.250–51.

34 Ibid., pp.276–79.

35 Reproduced in Cornell, op. cit. (note 11), pp.205–07.

36 J. Cheever: ‘The Swimmer’, The New Yorker (18th July 1964), pp.28–34.

37 D. Hebdige: ‘Hole: Swimming . . . Floating . . . Sinking . . . Drowning’, in Cornell, op. cit. (note 11), p.195.

38 B. Crowther: ‘The Graduate’, New York Times (22nd December 1967).

39 E. Panofsky: ‘Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition’, in idem: Meaning in the Visual Arts, New York 1955, pp.340–67; E. Mendelson, ed.: W. H.Auden: Selected Poems, London 1979, pp.250–51.

40 I am grateful to Chris Stephens for this information about A splash.

41 Mendelson, op. cit. (note 39), p.79.