More than any other artist in the 20th century, David Hockney defined Los Angeles in the public imagination. When he first arrived in January 1964, age 26, his mental image of the city had been forged not by art but by Hollywood movies, which he had watched as a young boy in Yorkshire, England. In later life, he often recollected the sharp-edged shadows cast by the Californian sunlight in movies such as Laurel and Hardy\u2019s \u201cBig Business.<\/p>\n
Before he ever went to L.A., Hockney \u2014 who died Thursday<\/a> at 88 \u2014 knew that he would love it. Writing about his first descent into the city, he recalled how \u201cas I flew over San Bernardino and looked down \u2014 and saw the swimming pools and the houses and everything and the sun, I was more thrilled than I\u2019ve ever been arriving at any other city, including New York.\u201d By this time, the glamour of Hollywood had been compounded by other influences, including the homoerotic magazines that an American friend had given him at the Royal College of Art in London. Titles such as Physique Pictorial, published in L.A. by the pioneering \u201cbeefcake\u201d photographer Bob Mizer, held out a promise of California as a paradise of rippling men and permanent sunshine. A darker, no less thrilling image of the city had arisen from Hockney\u2019s reading of \u201cCity of Night,\u201d the 1963 novel by John Rechy that tells the story of a hustler in the gay underworld of downtown L.A.<\/p>\n Los Angeles itself felt young to Hockney. He loved the light, the architecture, the sense of space and the sense of possibility \u2014 not least the possibility of greater sexual freedom. West Hollywood boasted a large gay bar, the Red Raven on Melrose Avenue, that was unlike anything he had found in London or New York. There was also the lure of the beach, with its pageant of sculpted physiques. Venice Beach struck him as a more body-beautiful version of London\u2019s Portobello Road.<\/p>\n Before long, his work shifted from generic fantasies of the city (a young man showering in Beverly Hills, for instance) to vivid portrayals of its real-life pools, palm trees, architecture and people. American artists such as Edward Ruscha and Edward Kienholz were producing their own canonical images of L.A. in these years, but for Hockney, there were no artistic precedents \u2014 \u201cno ghosts,\u201d as he later put it \u2014 to live up to. \u201cPeople then didn\u2019t even know what it looked like,\u201d he once said. \u201cAnd when I was there, they were still finishing up some of the big freeways.\u2026 I suddenly thought: \u2018My God, this place needs its Piranesi, Los Angeles could have a Piranesi, so here I am!\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n He was true to his word, even if his luminous, serene images of the city were a far cry from Giovanni Battista Piranesi\u2019s feverish visions of Baroque Rome. \u201cBeverly Hills Housewife\u201d (1966), a portrait of a pink-dressed collector in her modernist home, marked the onset of a realist style that would define Hockney\u2019s work for the next decade. This era gave rise to paintings that became icons of their time and place. Among them were \u201cA Bigger Splash\u201d (1967), which was based on a magazine cover that he came across on a newsstand, and \u201cChristopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy\u201d (1968, sold last year at Christie\u2019s New York for $44.3 million). Inspired by Hans Holbein, this portrait of the English novelist and his artist partner was one of the first celebratory portrayals of a gay couple. Hockney would later recount how Isherwood proclaimed: \u201cOh David, we\u2019ve so much in common; we love California, we love American boys, and we\u2019re both from the north of England.\u201d Hockney\u2019s beloved American boy at this time was Peter Schlesinger, a young artist he had met while teaching at UCLA in the summer 1966 \u2014 and a recurring presence in the early L.A. pictures.<\/p>\n According to Norman Rosenthal, who curated a major survey of Hockney\u2019s art at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris last year: \u201cIt is astonishing that a boy from a poor family in Bradford became the person \u2014 partly because of his gayness, but also his talent \u2014 who defined what everybody now thinks of as California. L.A. had no real image in the world before then, unlike New York.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite his enchantment with Los Angeles, Hockney didn\u2019t settle there until 1978, after a decade of bouncing between America and Europe. In the summer of 1979 he moved into a house in the Hollywood Hills, and soon adorned its pool with swishing strokes of blue paint. In the early 1980s, he converted the paddle tennis court into a studio. The meandering routes and Mediterranean scenery of the Hills were a fresh source of amazement, giving rise to monumental depictions of Mulholland Drive and Nichols Canyon in a newly abstract style.<\/p>\n By this time, the city was deeply familiar \u2014 a second home \u2014 and he had a close circle of friends around him who included the patron Betty Freeman (subject of \u201cBeverly Hills Housewife\u201d), the designer Gregory Evans, the gallery owner Nicholas Wilder and the film producer Joe Simon. \u201cL.A. had represented a whole new world for him,\u201d says Simon, who remained in regular contact with the artist until his final days. \u201cHe just loved the light. He was like a kid in a candy store when he first came. But David was all about the work. Everything came back to that.\u201d<\/p>\n In recent decades, Hockney\u2019s name had become synonymous with the landscapes of his native Yorkshire, which he began painting prolifically in the early 2000s. But Los Angeles never lost its newness and promise. His house in the Hills remained a sanctuary until his final years, when he was too frail to travel. L.A. was where he had come of age, and it remained an indelible part of his life and psyche \u2014 not least in terms of its egalitarian spirit and its tendency toward the horizontal. \u201cThe great thing about Hockney was that he spoke to everybody,\u201d says Rosenthal. \u201cFew artists of his world and his generation could do that.\u201d<\/p>\n James Cahill, a novelist and an art critic, is the author of, among other books, \u201cDavid Hockney<\/a>\u201d and the forthcoming \u201cThe Beverly Hills Housewife<\/a>: Hockney\u2019s Californian Muse and the World Beyond the Pool.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than any other artist in the 20th century, David Hockney defined Los Angeles in the public imagination.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":358322,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[2308,2029,1409,145676,145709,5014,2303,48,52,51,6547,47,50,49,63,4694,27635,315,5965,8074],"class_list":["post-358321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-art","tag-beverly-hills","tag-city","tag-david-hockney","tag-hockney","tag-hollywood-hills","tag-l-a","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-london","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-los-angeles-times","tag-new-york","tag-painting","tag-time","tag-vision","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=358321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358321\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/358322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}