A Bigger Splash (painting)
| A bigger splash |
|---|
| David Hockney , 1967 |
| Acrylic on canvas |
| 242.5 x 243.9 cm |
|
Tate Gallery , London
Link to the picture |
A Bigger Splash is the last and largest in a series of three David Hockney pool paintings that do not depict people. The picture has been in the Tate Gallery in London since 1981 . It is considered an "icon" of Pop Art and the pleasure society.
history
A year after completing his studies at the Royal College of Art in London, Hockney moved to California for a longer stay. Between 1964 and 1971 he painted several pictures with swimming pools, where he was particularly concerned with capturing the constantly changing light reflections on the moving water surface. The first picture with a swimming pool, Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool , was made in 1964.
The Splash , painted in 1966, was auctioned off at Sotheby’s for $ 5.35 million to an unknown bidder in 2002 and has been privately owned ever since. A little Splash (1966) is also privately owned. A Bigger Splash , the third and final in this series, was painted by Hockney between April and June 1967 when he was teaching at Berkeley . The painting was acquired in 1981 by the Tate through the Knoedler Gallery from the possession of the Marquis of Dufferin and Ave.
- Quote
“First and foremost, I appreciate the idea of painting like Leonardo, all of his studies on water, swirling things. And I liked the idea of painting these things that last for two seconds: it took me two weeks to paint this event that lasted for two seconds. "
description
What is shown is the splash that a swimmer causes when jumping into the water, the swimmer himself remains invisible. It's a warm, sunny day, the sky is cloudless blue, the sun is at its zenith - the folding chair in front of the pool house hardly casts a shadow. The surface of the pool, over which the white water splashes spread, is smooth and flawlessly blue. In the windows of the pool house, which take up almost two thirds of the front, houses and palm trees are reflected in a diffuse gray. Two very slender palm trees tower behind the house. In the almost square, large-format picture, the horizontal and orthogonal lines dominate, even the grass on the wall grows neatly straight, in one line.
In addition to a brush, Hockney also used a roller to achieve the greatest possible flatness of the color fields. Not the entire surface of the picture is covered with paint: a narrow strip of canvas remains free at the border between water and land and has now taken on a brownish color due to the action of light.
Didier Ottinger writes in his article in the Bonn catalog from 2001: " A Bigger Splash is a perfect advertisement for California, a concentrate of its symbols of the Californian lifestyle, its decorative clichés: an absolutely clear sky, modern, spacious, open-plan flat-roof bungalows, palm trees with tree tops lofty heights and of course swimming pools again and again. "
reception
The picture is the title giver for Luca Guadagnino's film A Bigger Splash from 2015. Guadagnino reports in an interview that he shot a scene in London's Tate that takes place in front of Hockney's picture. "It's a great scene, but we finally cut it out of my film." A Bigger Splash had Guadagnino in front of them practically continuously while shooting, Die Welt quotes the director of the film. "The motif of the swimming pool, the color palette of the film - the picture is everywhere," says Guadagnino in an interview with Anne Waak.
In 2016, the French artist Zevs (= Aguirre Schwarz, * 1977) exhibited a series of pictures under the title The Big Oil Splash in the Lazarides Gallery in London , which parody Hockney's picture. Format, subject matter and composition are largely retained, while the color of the water, the house and other objects can vary. On each wall of the pool house someone has sprayed the logo of an oil company in black paint: EXXON , Esso , Chevron , Shell , Total . The color runs in thin rivulets down the wall to over the edge of the pool and into the water there, where it creates a dense, dirty blue cloud that can be in sharp contrast to the pure yellow of the diving board.
Hans Traxler parodies the picture in his comic "Hockney".
In 1973 Jack Hazan made a documentary about David Hockney called A Bigger Splash , for which he was awarded the Silver Leopard in Locarno in 1974 .
literature
- Exciting Times Are Ahead. David Hockney . Exhibition catalog. Bonn: Art u. Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany 2001. Plate 29. pp. 102–103.
- David Hockney: Paintings, Prints and Drawings 1960-1970 . Exhibition catalog. Whitechapel Gallery, London 1970.
- Stephanie Barron, Maurice Tuchman: David Hockney: A Retrospective . Exhibition catalog. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Tate Gallery, London 1988. pp. 37, 38, 158
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ quoted from: Lilith Frey: A hymn to Los Angeles. In: Cicero. Political Culture Magazine. March 20, 2012.
- ↑ Figure
- ↑ Los Angeles Times June 22, 2006, accessed August 31, 2016.
- ↑ David Hockney by David Hockney. New York: Abrams 1977. p. 124.
- ^ Exciting Times Are Ahead. Catalog Bonn 2001. p. 102.
- ↑ BFI #LFF 2015: Director Luca Guadagnino talks A Bigger Splash and Suspira October 10, 2015, accessed on August 31, 2016.
- ↑ Quoted from Anne Waak: The stranger with the great urge to freedom . In Die Welt May 4, 2016, accessed August 31, 2016.
- ↑ Elly Parsons: Oil painting: Zevs 'liquidates' a David Hockney classic at London's Lazarides Gallery , variants accessed August 31, 2016.
- ↑ Hans Traxler: My classics. Picture poems. Stuttgart: Reclam 2018. pp. 110–111.
- ↑ IMDb
- ↑ Sebastian Markt: A Bigger Splash, film review , accessed on September 13, 2018.
