David Hockney

André Emmerich Gallery Inc., New York

Private Collection (acquired from the above in 1991)

Sotheby’s, New York, 10 November 2010, Lot 158 (consigned by the above)

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Gregory Evans and David Graves, Hockney’s Pictures, London 2004, p. 178, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the background tends more towards red in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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David Hockney’s Beach House by Day is a work of innate tenderness that demonstrates the technical skill that the artist had attained by this stage of his career and reveals the joy he took from his Malibu beach house. Indeed, Hockney’s love of California is one of the central themes of his output. Having lived there intermittently since the 1960s, he has allowed the climate and culture of the state to permeate his work. At first glance, the present work seems more in keeping with one of Hockney’s feted Yorkshire paintings, perhaps an interior of his house in Bridlington; we are presented with reddish wooden bookcases, deep comfortable chairs, and a crackling fire, in front of which Hockney’s familiar dachshund is curled up. However, several elements betray the true location of the scene. The first is the window, which is filled with the bright blue Californian sky and ocean. The light of Los Angeles was hugely inspiring to Hockney, and filled his oeuvre with saturated colours. In this intense blue we are reminded of the high key palettes of the Swimming Pool paintings that Hockney executed in the late 1960s, in which the heat and glamour of L.A. are palpable through the canvas. The abstract delineations of deeper blue on the carpet, are another reference to those earlier works. These deftly executed brushstrokes directly recall the graphic manner in which Hockney depicted the sunlight playing on the water of pools in masterpieces such as Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool  (1966) and Sunbather (1966). They provide a subtle reference that not only places this work geographically, but also contextualises it within Hockney’s wider body of work.

Hockney's extensive theories on art history, its relative merits, and its various practitioners, have informed every stage of his production. He has always held still lifes and interiors in high regard: “Painting still lifes can be as exciting as anything can be in painting... Just some tulips in a vase. The profundity is not in the subject, it is the way it’s dealt with” (David Hockney and Paul Joyce, Hockney on Art: Conversations with Paul Joyce, New York 1999, p. 203). Beach House by Day demonstrates this line of thought: a quotidian subject made profound by the care of its depiction. The brevity, confidence, and accuracy of the brushstrokes, and the vibrancy and energy of the wider composition convey the influence of Paul Cézanne. Indeed, as with so many of his most important works, Hockney was undoubtedly thinking of Post-Impressionist precedents in the execution of this painting. Its interpretation recalls Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 Bedroom in Arles. The influence of Henri Matisse and the Fauves, who also created interiors based on a colourful palette and opted for a crowded approach to ornament, is here overt. In this regard it recalls Matisse’s Red Room (Harmony in Red), one of his most celebrated works that is likewise impactful in its chromatic saturation. The companion painting to the present work, Beach House by Night from 1990, shows that Hockney was thinking about how his view of the present scene altered according to the light, in direct emulation of Impressionists like Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. These subtle inclusions of art historical reference typify Hockney’s praxis at its most considered.

In the execution of this work, Hockney was not looking to achieve an objective record of his Malibu living room, but was rather interested in conveying his own familiar view of that room at a specific moment in time. The personal significance of the scene is obvious. Combining art historical influences and iconological references to past stages of this artist’s career, this painting is a strong example of the still lifes and interiors that populate Hockney’s practice.