Watch David Hockney compare California to London
California is a near-constant presence in the work of David Hockney. The blazing sunshine and glittering pools of Los Angeles were a bountiful source of inspiration in his bright paintings, and Hockney spent a career straddled between the Californian warmth and the drab winters of Yorkshire. When he first visited LA in 1964, a creative cog slipped into place, and he got to work documenting its hazy decadence for decades, becoming one of Britain’s best-known artists in the process.
Something of a chameleon, you can chart where Hockney was based throughout his career through his art, which serves as a kitschy time capsule and visual guide to the two places he called home. When he first left for LA, he was shocked to find there were pools everywhere – a luxury back home but part of the California scenery. Vast bodies of blue water were populated by tanned LA figures, most often by nude men. The California attitude to homosexuality was far more tolerant than it was in England, and his art revelled in intimate scenes that reflected that breezy attitude.
“I knew when I was very young that gay people hid things, and I didn’t want to do that,” Hockney told The Guardian. “I thought: ‘Well, I’m just going to be an artist, I have to be honest.’ You have to be honest. So that was it. I just was gay, and it didn’t worry me. And I always used to say that we lived in bohemia, and bohemia is a tolerant place.”
In paintings like Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) and, most famously, The Splash, he captured that bohemia with such warmth you can sense how comfortable he felt in California. Many artists have spiritual homes; Vincent van Gogh had Arles, and Andy Warhol had New York. The humid air of LA proved to be Hockney’s. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, he’d move around LA, London and Paris, often comparing the nightlife of the cities as he travelled.
He declared London’s “Swinging Sixties” a farce. LA’s bars, he argued, shut at the far more reasonable hour of 2am. While he reasoned that you could feasibly do it in London, it would have to be a sketchy rhythm and blues bar where drinks cost the “ridiculous” price of £1, and the chairs are so small, it was like “an organised children’s tea party”. The Californian nightlife had him sold, and London’s did little to compare.
In a later reflection, he called his Californian period the “freest time, probably ever”. He continued travelling back and forth from there through most of his career, even settling in Normandy. “I now realise it’s over,” he told Jonathan Jones of the bohemian heydey. “So I’ve locked myself away in a nice house in Normandy where I can smoke and do what I want. And that’s where I’m going to stay.”
Watch David Hockney compare London and California below:
