DAVID HOCKNEY | Different Kinds of Water Pouring into a Swimming Pool, Santa Monica

Mr and Mrs J. Kasmin, London (acquired directly from the artist)
Sotheby’s, New York, 2 May 1989, Lot 75
Acquired from the above sale by Louis J. C. Tan

London, Kasmin Gallery, David Hockney: Pictures with Frames and Still Life Pictures, December 1965
Valdagno; Baden-Baden, Staatliche Kunsthalle; Humlebæk, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art; Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum; London, Tate Gallery; and Paris, Galerie Musée, Marzotto Prize Exhibition: Metropolitan Scene: Images and Objects, September 1966 - August 1967, n.p., no. 50, illustrated in colour
Brussels, Palais des Beaux Arts; Berlin, Akademie der Künste, Young British Painters, 1967, no. 30
Kassel, documenta IV, June - October 1968
Manchester, Whitworth Art Gallery, Paintings and Prints by David Hockney, February - March 1969, p. 16, no. 20, illustrated
Tokyo, Metropolitan Art Gallery; Tochigi, Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts; Osaka, National Museum of Modern Art; Fukuoka, Fukuoka Art Museum; and Sapporo, Hokkaido Museum of Art, Aspects of British Art Today, February - October 1982, n.p., no. 128, illustrated
New Delhi, Lalit Kala Akademi; and Mumbai, Jehangir Nicholson Museum of Modern Art, National Centre for Performing Arts, The Proper Study: Contemporary Figurative Paintings from Britain, December 1984 - February 1985, p. 69, no. 45, illustrated
Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and London, Tate Gallery, David Hockney: A Retrospective, February 1988 - January 1989, p. 145, no. 27, illustrated in colour

Exh. Cat., London, Whitechapel Art Gallery (and travelling), David Hockney: Paintings, Prints and Drawing, 1960-1970, April - May 1970, p. 49, no. 65.2, illustrated
Nikos Stangos, Ed., David Hockney by David Hockney, London 1976, p. 117, no. 127, illustrated
Marco Livingstone, David Hockney, London 1981, p. 75, no. 54, illustrated
Gregory Evans and David Graves, Hockney’s Pictures, London 2007, p. 86, illustrated in colour
Hans Werner Holzwarth, Ed., David Hockney. A Bigger Book (chronology book), Cologne 2016, pp. 71-72 (installation view) and p. 398 (installation view), illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the green and red is brighter and more vibrant in the original. The red pigment on the left side of the composition tends more towards a bright orange. The illustration fails to convey the metallic nature of the silver pigment and the pencil markings in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Different Kinds of Water Pouring into a Swimming Pool, Santa Monica delivers an extraordinary illustration of what is arguably David Hockney’s most iconic motif within his long and varied oeuvre: the swimming pool. The great symbol of California's outdoor pleasures – and an extremely exotic and sumptuous prospect for a young man from Bradford – the swimming pool plays the central role in Hockney's output from 1963 to 1967. The present work delivers a highly abstracted composition that evolves from the swimming pool as symbol of comfort and affluence, to a formal device for the depiction of light and reflective surfaces. Different Kinds of Water Pouring into a Swimming Pool, Santa Monica combines Hockney’s fascination with finding ways to paint exactly what he sees with his singular ability to absorb and resolve the disparate aesthetic and technical concerns of Minimalism, Modernist Abstraction, and Pop art in a style that is entirely his own. Executed in 1965, Different Kinds of Water Pouring into a Swimming Pool, Santa Monica forms an integral part of what was to be a watershed moment in Hockney’s career. In October of that year the artist travelled back to England for the first time since he left for America, for his second one-man exhibition at John Kasmin’s celebrated and eponymous gallery in London. The exhibition was entitled Pictures with Frames and Still Life Pictures and included ten paintings he made in 1965. A sell-out, the show was a resounding success. Critics were unanimous in their praise: “Most of David Hockney’s latest paintings… are the outcome of a trip to California. They are certainly among his best so far,” wrote John Russell in 1965 in The Times, whilst, in 1966, Edward Lucie-Smith of Studio International went on to say the works “…are a product of a much longer residence in and around Los Angeles, and are a great commitment to America itself. By comparing them to Hockney’s earlier work, it is possible to see how astonishingly sensitive he is to atmosphere. Chameleon-like he has become a Californian” (John Russell and Edward Lucie-Smith cited in: Christopher Simon Skyes, Hockney: The Biography, Volume I, 1937-1975, London 2011, p. 166). Whilst it is hard to conceive that the boy from conservative Bradford in the North of England had indeed become Californian, the critics’ praise of this new body of work certainly gave credence to his desire to capture the atmosphere and essence of this bucolic land, exclaiming “My God, this place needs a Piranesi; Los Angeles could have a Piranesi, so here I am” (David Hockney, The Lister, 22 May 1975 in: ibid., p. 145). Like his artistic forebear who captured Rome in all its glory, Hockney embarked on capturing California with the same vigour.

Hockney had been enthralled with Los Angeles since he first arrived there at the beginning of 1964. As the artist later reflected, “California did affect me very strongly… I instinctively knew I was going to like it. And as I flew over San Bernardino and saw the swimming pools and the houses and everything and the sun, I was more thrilled than I have ever been in arriving in any city'' (David Hockney in conversation with Martin Glazebrook in: Exh. Cat., London, The Whitechapel Art Gallery, David Hockney Paintings, prints and drawings 1960-1970, 1970, p. 11). In California, he found the quintessence of a fantasy that he had formed wherein athletic young men, swimming pools, palm trees and perpetual sunshine sensually coexisted without inhibition. As Paul Melia notes, Hockney’s paintings “… of male nudes climbing in or out of swimming pools, sleeping by the pool's edge, or floating on inflatable beds appear to represent a return to a pre-modern world of sensuality and plenty, a second Eden” (Paul Melia and David Luckhardt, David Hockney, London 2011, p. 58). Indeed, Hockney’s interest in water and swimming pools allowed him to extend the European tradition of the depiction of classical beauties bathing, set harmoniously within a utopian landscape; a long standing theme within the history of Western art that has captivated Renaissance and Modern masters alike, from Titian and Rembrandt, to Cézanne and Matisse.

For Hockney, the swimming pool represented the embodiment of this tranquil land of affluence and leisure, and he embarked on meticulous observations of the water he saw. When intense sunlight hits water it reflects in sensuous curves, wobbles off ripples and flickers against a serene surface, in ways that present remarkable challenges to any artist. Quickly the technical challenge of painting water itself became of equal interest for Hockney, as first seen in the painting Man Taking a Shower (Tate, London) executed at the beginning of 1965 whilst he was teaching at the University of Colorado. Furthermore it presented a platform for the artist to tackle the graphic difficulties of light, depth, transparency and reflection. As the artist explained, “Water in swimming pools changes its look more than in any other form… But the look of swimming pools is controllable – even its colour can be manmade – and its dancing rhythms reflect not only the sky but, because of its transparency, the depth of water as well. So I had to use techniques to represent this. If the water surface is almost still and there is a strong sun, then dancing lines with the colours of the spectrum appear everywhere” (Nikos Stangos, Ed., David Hockney by David Hockney, London 1976, p. 104).

These technical challenges also provided a platform for Hockney to make his first foray into an American inspired style of abstraction. No doubt influenced by the contemporaneous American  artists in his gallerist Kasmin’s stable, such as Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella, Hockney felt a desire for exploration: “I have never thought of my painting as advanced, but I wanted to be involved, if only peripherally, with modernism” (David Hockney cited in: Hockney: The Biography, op. cit., p. 43). Starting with Different Kinds of Water Pouring into a Swimming Pool, Santa Monica and a series of still lifes, he explored the different possible interpretations of Cézanne’s famous remark that nature should be broken down into the essential components of the sphere, the cylinder, and the cone. As Hockney has since explained: “The ‘artistic devices’ are images and elements of my own and other artists’ work and ideas of the time… All the paintings were, in a way, influenced by American abstractionists, particularly Kenneth Noland, whom I’d got to know through Kasmin who was showing him. I was trying to take note of these paintings… they’re all done the same way as Kenneth Noland’s, stained acrylic paint on raw cotton duck, and things like that” (David Hockney quoted in: ibid, p. 159).

The artistic devices in this instance are the movements of different types of flowing water; technical problems that offered him the opportunity to experiment with the abstract arrangements of curves, the effects of translucency, and dynamic form as depicted through a hyper-stylised abstract tapestry of vivid blue and white tones. Having briefly experimented with acrylics in London, Hockney found the American acrylics superior in texture and colour. He could now use acrylics to his satisfaction, and their quick drying properties allowed him the freedom, not only to focus on one work at a time, but additionally to emphasise the pre-eminence of the image by achieving a smooth surface of flat and brilliant colour. His use of a wider palette of colours – curving interweaving lines of violet, blues and reds – accentuate the play of light as it is reflected upon water’s ever-changing surface. Furthermore, the purported objectivity and sense of distance from his subject reveals Hockney’s growing interest in photography, which had sprung from the synthesized, superficial impression of reality he had seen in glossy American magazines. This is suggested by the strip of raw canvas and thick silver border around the image, which stresses the absolute artificiality of pictorial representation and continued dialogue with abstraction, whilst creating the impression of a ‘picture within a picture’: "...by including the representation of a frame within the painting itself he gives the work another layer of meaning which causes us to ask exactly where reality lies" (John Russell, The Times, 9 December 1965 in: ibid., p. 166).

The combination of boldness of design, grandeur of size, intensely vivid colour, and the explosive movement and variegation of water makes Different Kinds of Water Pouring into a Swimming Pool, Santa Monica one of Hockney’s most arresting and technically advanced images. As The Times review of his 1965 exhibition went on to say: "He uses as his weapons exactly these illusionistic devices, relying on an extremely subtle formal sense to bring them into unexpected relationships, and thus create fresh images" (John Russell, ibid., p. 166). This work not only summates the vision of the Californian idyll that so captivated the artist, it eloquently encapsulates the advancement of formal and technical concerns that would establish Hockney’s reputation as the leading artist of his generation. As he simply recalled, “Swimming pools I’ve always liked as things. I like swimming in blue swimming pools in sunny Hollywood. But water is done in quite different ways. Sometimes I did it very formally, other times it’s done more naturalistically… the way the light would dance on the water. And really the paintings about water are about movement aren’t they?” (David Hockney in conversation with Martin Glazebrook, op. cit., p. 13).