Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
David Hockney is one of the most celebrated and influential artists of our time. His paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and stage designs have captured the imagination of millions of people around the world. His works are not only aesthetically pleasing, but also rich in meaning and emotion, reflecting his personal experiences, observations, and insights.
Deconstructing David Hockney’s California
A body, submerged, becomes a ghostly, aqueous blur. Another, poised at the edge, is rendered solid and defined by the flat, unyielding California light. Between them lies a plane of impossible, chemical blue, a surface that both connects and separates. This is the world of David Hockney’s 1965 painting, ‘California’. It is an image of profound simplicity and bottomless psychological depth.
Now, after decades in a private collection, unseen by the public, the painting is surfacing. Its arrival at a Christie’s auction, with an estimate that places it in the stratosphere of contemporary art, is more than a financial event. It is an opportunity. It forces us to look again, to dive beneath that cool blue surface and ask a fundamental question: what is this painting actually about? The answer, it seems, is everything. It is a portrait of a place, a psychological drama, a technical manifesto, and, above all, the story of an artist finding himself in an alien new world.
The English Eye in an Alien Light
To understand ‘California’, you must first understand the journey. In 1964, David Hockney, a prodigy of the British art scene, left a world of damp tweed, brick dust, and soft, forgiving light. He arrived in Los Angeles and found himself in a landscape that was less a place and more an idea. This was a world of sheer surfaces, of glass, stucco, and ever-present, chlorinated water.
The swimming pool, which would become his most enduring motif, was not merely a symbol of the hedonistic California lifestyle. For Hockney, the English eye, it was an object of intense formal fascination. It was an alien geometry carved into the suburban landscape, a controlled, man-made container for a wild, uncontrollable element. He was captivated by the painterly problem it presented: how do you paint water? How do you capture something that is transparent, reflective, and in constant motion, and render it on a flat, static canvas?
A New Language for a New World
The problem of the pool demanded a new language. And Hockney found it in a new medium. Acrylic paint was itself a Californian substance. Unlike the slow, layered, forgiving depth of traditional oils, acrylics were flat, fast, and unforgiving. They dried almost instantly, creating smooth, unmodulated fields of pure, synthetic colour. It was the perfect medium for a world without shadows, a world of clean edges and bright, hard surfaces.
In ‘California’, you can see him mastering this new language in real time. The brilliant blue of the pool, the sharp green of the lawn, the clean line of the building – these are laid down with a confidence that is almost architectural. He is not just painting a scene; he is constructing it. He famously used photographs, projecting them onto the canvas to trace the figures, a technique that was seen by some as a kind of cheating. But it was, in fact, a radical act of honesty. He was acknowledging that in this new, media-saturated world, the photographic image had become as real, as primary, as the lived experience.
The Geometry of Desire
The painting’s formal brilliance, however, is merely the stage set for a quiet, unresolved human drama. The two figures are Hockney’s lover and muse at the time, Peter Schlesinger, standing on the edge, and an unknown swimmer, distorted by the water. The composition is a masterpiece of psychological tension.
Schlesinger is rendered with an almost classical solidity. He is present, knowable, a fixed point in the composition. The swimmer, by contrast, is an enigma. He is a presence defined by absence, his form broken and abstracted by the very element that sustains him. The true subject of the painting, in a sense, is the psychological space between them – an unbridgeable distance measured in chlorinated water.
Is the swimmer a memory? A fantasy? A rival? The painting refuses to say. This ambiguity is what gives the work its enduring power. It is a scene charged with a silent, erotic longing. The flat, bright sunlight does not illuminate; it exposes. It creates a feeling of stark, beautiful loneliness. This is not the joyful splash of a holiday snapshot. This is the sound of silence, punctuated by the gentle lapping of water against tile.
The Ghost in the Machine
Of course, Hockney was not painting in a vacuum. The ghost of American Pop Art is present in the painting’s flat, commercial aesthetic. But he took its cool, impersonal grammar and used it to write a deeply personal, almost melancholic, poem. Where Andy Warhol used flatness to comment on the emptiness of celebrity culture, Hockney used it to explore the complexities of desire.
There are other ghosts here, too. The bold, simplified colour fields of Henri Matisse, the search for underlying geometric structure of Paul Cézanne. But Hockney is not merely quoting his influences; he is absorbing and transmuting them. He is creating a style that is entirely his own, a fusion of Pop Art’s coolness, Modernism’s formal rigour, and a deeply English sense of literary, psychological narrative.
Why, then, the staggering auction estimate? Why does this single image, painted when Hockney was still in his twenties, command such attention? Because ‘California’ is more than a painting. It is a genesis. It is the moment an artist found his subject, his medium, and his voice, all at once. It is a foundational document of post-war art, a picture that perfectly captures the magnetic pull of a new world and the timeless, lonely complexities of the human heart.
It is a rare thing for a single work to so completely define an artist and an era. Looking at it today, it feels as fresh, as mysterious, and as coolly beautiful as it must have done in 1965. The cool surface of the water still holds its secrets, refusing to give up the full story. And that, perhaps, is its most brilliant, and enduring, quality.
