David Hockney - THE SPLASH
photo: sotheby’s
David Hockney’s The Splash is undoubtedly one of the most iconic Pop art images of the Twentieth Century. In tandem with its sister painting, Tate’s A Bigger Splash, Hockney’s composition of a sun-drenched swimming pool disturbed by a torrent of cascading water is a definitive image, not only within the artist’s career and the Pop art movement at large, but also within the greater canon of art history itself. Indeed, looking beyond the Twentieth Century, there are very few artworks to have attained such a status: equally as recognisable as Edvard Munch’s The Scream, Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowersand Claude Monet’s Waterlilies, this motif is a masterstroke of ingenuity that sits squarely in the select pantheon of true art history icons. Semiotically tied to our very understanding of what Pop art is and inextricable from an ideal of Californian living, this image is utterly ingrained within the contemporary cultural imagination. It is an irrefutably famous and undeniably rare painting of masterpiece calibre and mythic proportion.
Painted in Los Angeles towards the end of 1966, The Splash is the second in a three-part sequence of variations on the very same theme. It is sandwiched between the much smaller The Little Splash (Private Collection) and Tate’s A Bigger Splash, which was created early the following year in Berkeley whilst Hockney was fulfilling a teaching post. When comparing the two, the present work’s scale of 72 by 72 inches is immersive and rivals the colossal dimensions of its sister version at Tate Britain; the compositions are almost identical, with large bands of unprimed canvas framing the clean lines and still colour fields of the central image, whilst the splash itself is rendered with equal deftness and dexterity in both canvases – the immediacy of a split-second moment is here immortalised by brushstrokes of careful application and minute articulation. The Splash and its pendent piece undoubtedly represent the apex of Hockney’s Californian fantasy which truly began following the artist’s first trip to LA in 1964. Cleansing the air of the previous decade, which had seen Abstract Expressionism gradually suffocate under its own earnestness, Hockney’s ‘Splashes’ revealed the artist’s pre-eminence as a leading light of his generation. With the present work, Hockney at once coined a visual identity for LA during the 1960s whilst absorbing and resolving the disparate concerns of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop art in a style that was entirely his own.
