The photographic source and artistic affinities of ’s ‘’

by MARTIN HAMMER

DAVIDOCKNEY’S H A bigger splash (Fig.32), painted fifty years down from the more visible of the two trees, coincides roughly ago this year, features naturally in the artist’s current eightieth with the far-right corner of the diving-board. birthday retrospective, reviewed on pp.413–15.1 A canonical Aesthetic detachment reflected the circumstances of the pic- work in art history, the picture owes its wide appeal to many ture’s creation. A bigger splash was completed in Berkeley, where factors: legibility and economy; the visual wit inherent in im- Hockney was teaching from April to June 1967, and not in Los plying human action although no figure is visible; its evocation Angeles. In fact, the was the elaboration of an idea of an idyllic sunny environment, the dream of Arcadia trans- explored in two pictures produced the previous year, The little planted from the Roman Campagna to modern California; splash and (both in private collections).4 nI that sense, Hockney’s precise, well-crafted execution; reproducibility; and A bigger splash comprised a distillation of , realised a lingering association with the Swinging Sixties and its good with the benefit of geographical and emotional distance. The vibrations. Yet the recent recycling of Hockney’s title for that of two previous versions had been sold in Hockney’s one-man a rather dark film about a Mediterranean holiday that goes bad- show at the Landau-Alan Gallery in New York in April 1967, ly wrong, suggests not merely the continuing resonance of the organised in conjunction with his London dealer, John Kas- work, but also its availability to less upbeat interpretations.2 nI min.5 The impulse to make the larger version that spring may reinserting A bigger splash into its specific historical and cultur- therefore have had a commercial dimension, looking ahead to al moment, and by employing close reading and comparative his next show. A bigger splash was exhibited early the following analysis (including with its photographic source, here identi- year at Kasmin’s, and was quickly sold.6 fied), the aim of this article is to bring out some of the complex- If audiences and collectors remote from Los Angeles relished ities and ambiguities of the painting. the exotic theme, they also doubtless appreciated Hockney’s The work draws one in, spatially and imaginatively. Judg- modern idiom. The intensity of colour, underlying clarity and ing from the grisaille reflections in the window, the urban set- geometry, and the use of flat, unmodulated paint, acrylic rather ting wraps around the pool, into which an individual has just than oil, applied with a roller, and with masking-tape establish- plunged, the human presence reduced to the merest suggestion ing sharp edges, would all have brought to mind the large ab- of fleshy pink at the base of the splash. The diving-board pro- stract of Kenneth Noland or his British counterpart, jects from the viewer’s side of the pool. Metaphorically speaking Robyn Denny.7 Such artists were being exhibited to critical we, too, are encouraged to take the plunge, to seek out layers acclaim at Kasmin’s, which largely operated as a London out- of meaning and association beneath the serene, flat façade. Yet post of post-painterly Abstraction.8 Hockney recalled building that immersion coexists with an inbuilt distance. The diver has up A bigger splash initially as an arrangement of blocks of flat absented him- or herself, leaving us high and dry. The omission colour, which were then rendered representational through the of the section of the pool surround in the foreground serves to insertion of pockets of detail. Similarly, he noted that the close- disembody the viewer. Although the picture contains natural- ly related painting A lawn sprinkler (1967; Fig.33) ‘looked at one istic detail, it comes across as artfully contrived and simplified. point exactly like a symmetrical Robin [sic] Denny painting’.9 An image of implied momentary, perhaps spontaneous, action In A bigger splash, Hockney’s palette and diving-board could is suspended within a painting that appears highly controlled in be seen to allude to works by Denny such as Ted Bentley (1961; the manner of its execution, ‘a balanced composition’ in Hock- private collection) and Little man (1964–65; private collection).10 ney’s words.3 eW might register, for instance, that the white In the latter, the central vertical strip, animated surround and patch at the heart of the splash is positioned on the painting’s white border may even have triggered associations with pool central vertical axis. The unbroken transverse band at the far imagery for Hockney. side of the pool occupies the horizontal centre of the painting, A bigger splash must have seemed poised, knowingly and ap- while the area above is bisected by zones describing the build- pealingly, between abstraction and figuration. It is also ambiva- ing and the flat blue sky. The perspective of the diving-board lent in tone. Although most perceive a celebratory intention, recedes in the direction of the small chair, and its ochre colour spectators might also identify an ironic aspect to Hockney’s de- is picked up in the building’s flat roof. A vertical, continuing pictions of the Californian good life. At the affirmative end of

1 C. Stephens and A. Wilson, eds.: exh cat. David Hockney, London ( 5 Exh. cat. David Hockney: New Paintings and , New York (Landau-Alan Britain), Paris () and New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) Gallery) 1967. 2017–18. 6 Exh. cat. David Hockney: a splash, a lawn, two rooms, two stains, some neat cushions 2 A Bigger Splash, directed by . 2015. and a table . . . painted, London (Kasmin Ltd) January–February 1968. The paint- 3 N. Stangos: David Hockney by David Hockney, London and New York 1975, p.125. ing was purchased from Kasmin Ltd in 1981 by Sheridan, Marquess of Dufferin 4 Ibid., pp.124 and 161. and Ava.

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32. A bigger splash, by David Hockney. 1967. Canvas, 242.5 by 243.9 cm. (Tate, London; © David Hockney).

the scale, outdoor pools were bound up with an erotic frisson the focus of family life, a latter-day ‘hearth’ for one commenta- in both hetero- and homosexual milieux. The motif offered an tor in 1967, Hockney’s variants on it could be seen to extend his obvious pretext for the display of nearly naked male bodies, as ‘assimilationist’ and domesticated vision of homosexual iden- adapted elsewhere by Hockney from magazines such as Phy- tity.12 One critic discerned oblique self-portraiture in this image sique Pictorial.11 Given the status of the pool in Los Angeles as of ‘undiluted pleasure and satisfaction’:

7 The Tate acquired Noland’s Gift (1961–62) in 1966, see http://www.tate.org. 10 Reproduced in D.A. Mellor: The Art of Robyn Denny, London 2002, pp.74 and 114. uk/art/artworks/noland-gift-t00898/text-catalogue-entry, accessed 17th January 11 On the gay dimension, see T. Stallings: ‘From Beefcake to Skatecake: Shifting 2017. Depictions of Masculinity and the Backyard Swimming Pool in Southern Cali- 8 See L. Tickner: ‘The Kasmin Gallery, 1963–1972’, Oxford Art Journal 30, 2 fornia’, in D. Cornell, ed.: Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California (2007), p.263. 1945–1982, Munich, London and New York 2012, pp.128–71. 9 Stangos, op. cit. (note 3), p.126. 12 C. Whiting: Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s, Berkeley 2006, p.124.

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33. A lawn sprinkler, by David Hockney. 1967. Canvas, 122 by 122 cm. (Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; © David Hockney).

The subject of A Bigger Splash is both a disappearance and an was currently emerging in New York.15 The association with immersion – the vanishing of the diver, his entry into the Hockney’s image may seem far-fetched, although we should pool – which was surely Hockney’s way of dramatising his note that Duchamp was by then a focus of attention in Califor- own feelings on having arrived in America. He too had made nia, following his 1963 retrospective in Pasadena.16 In A bigger his getaway, had plunged into a new and delightful place. The splash one might also discern an ironic reference to Abstract artist does not actually show us his alter ego, the diver, revel- . Hockney certainly knew the recent, more ling in the sudden silence of underwater. But he makes much pastoral work of Willem de Kooning, as in Merritt Parkway of the splash that hides him from us [. . .] a flurry of excited (Fig.34), with its dramatic explosion of white floated against white paint into which the painter seems to have distilled all deep flat blue and audaciously applied with house-painters’ the happiness and energy of being young, and in love, and brushes. Hockney surely conceived his own fastidious and more exactly where you want to be; an ejaculation of joy.13 illustrative variation on the splash theme as a knowing refer- ence to such precursors, especially given that De Kooning’s By extension, the picture might be located within a minor art- 1959 sell-out show at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York was istic tributary, rooted in Dada, whereby the splash motif is reviewed in Time magazine under the title ‘Big Splash’. 17 The associated with sexual excitement.14 The idea was launched article noted De Kooning’s spontaneous method of working: by Francis Picabia around 1920 and elaborated in Marcel ‘“I’m not trying to be a virtuoso”, he explains, “but I have to do Duchamp’s Paysage fautif (1946; Museum of , it fast. It’s not like poker, where you can build to a straight flush Toyama), a globular splash of seminal fluid and paint on black or something. It’s like throwing dice. I can’t save anything”’.18 satin, an ironic response to the macho, gestural aesthetic that It seems pointed that Hockney should have emphasised how

13 A. Graham-Dixon: ‘A Bigger Splash by David Hockney’, Sunday Telegraph (13th Museum) 1963. August 2000). 17 Anon.: ‘Big Splash’, Time 73, 20 (18th May 1959), p.74. 14 D. Hopkins: Dada’s Boys, New Haven and London 2007, pp.123–35. 18 Ibid. 15 G. Parkinson: The Duchamp Book, London 2008, p.63. 19 Stangos, op. cit. (note 3), p.124. 16 Exh. cat. Marcel Duchamp, A Retrospective Exhibition, Pasadena (Pasadena Art 20 See H. Geldzahler: ‘Introduction’, ibid., pp.17 and 21.

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The Watts Riots, prompted by racial tensions, had caused spectacular levels of destruction in August 1965. Hockney fo- cused not on the public sphere, but on private lives in interiors and secluded gardens with pools, once a preserve of the very rich but now an increasingly widespread feature of middle- class housing. Imagery of domestic pools was ubiquitous in the advertising of real estate agents, and in architectural journals and lifestyle magazines such as House Beautiful, showing off the fashionable modernist houses that had been sprouting up since the Second World War in Palm Springs, Beverly Hills and elsewhere in southern California.21 These were the spring- board for stunning photographs by the likes of Julius Shulman, as in the richly tonal black-and-white images of the Edgar J. Kaufmann House in Palm Springs (1947), or the later colour shots of the Case Study houses in Los Angeles.22 The elimina- tion of figures and the general air of theatricality in such im- agery, combined with their striking compositions, could well have appealed to Hockney and informed his conception of A bigger splash. The pool theme also featured in more vernacular kinds of photography, notably the postcards and brochures that sought to project a favourable image of vacations in the West, from Las Vegas to California, as mass driving-based tourism took off in the . Hockney’s picture alludes to the exaggerated colours of this imagery, with the wide white border signifying not just postcards but also polaroid photog- raphy. The Polaroid Swinger had been launched in 1965, and 34. Merritt Parkway, by Willem de Kooning. 1959. Canvas, 203.2 by 179.07 cm. Hockney recalls acquiring his first camera at this time, and (Detroit Institute of Art; © The Willem de Kooning Foundation, New York). occasionally using polaroids for reference.23 Indeed, A bigger splash is recognisable as a painting of a photo- he had taken two weeks to painstakingly render a momentary graph, capturing as it does a frozen moment in time. Hockney sensation in paint.19 acknowledged that in this case he had used ‘a photograph I A Bigger Splash reads, more affirmatively, as Hockney’s hom- found in a book about how to build swimming pools I found age to a specifically American realist mode from the inter-War on a news stand in Hollywood’.24 The source for A bigger splash period that focused on architectural themes. This was epito- was the banal image employed as the cover of a popular tech- mised by Edward Hopper and the precisionist Charles Sheeler nical manual, first published in 1959 with several subsequent (they had died in May 1967 and May 1965 respectively, having editions (Fig.35).25 The splash, diving-board and general ar- been hailed as precursors of Pop and Photorealism). According rangement of the elements in the photograph, together with to his friend , Hockney greatly admired their details of the building beyond the pool and the back- work, in which vivid description of light, space and architec- drop, were all quoted in Little splash. A good deal was already tural detail was combined with compositional order and often omitted: the trees, pool furniture, complex reflections on glass with an elimination of the figures who traditionally served to and water, and above all the couple looking admiringly at their animate the scene.20 Both artists were virtually unknown in athletic offspring. In Hockney’s second version and in A bigger Britain, but Hockney probably became aware of their work in splash, the replacement of the folksy architecture with a mod- public and private collections in America, as well as through re- ernist bungalow, the substitution of a pair of palm trees for the productions. Sheeler worked from photographs, and a painting mountains and other picturesque details, and the general sense such as Classic landscape (1931; National Gallery of Art, Wash- of order, serve to heighten the effect of distillation. In the ab- ington) provided a model for the structural rigour, clarity of sence of figures or a fully developed setting, we are left with light and frontal perspective that Hockney employed in A bigger the idea of house and pool as the collective fantasy of wealthy, splash. Hopper’s suffusion of his images of everyday life with sophisticated Los Angeles society. subjective feelings of alienation and loneliness is an undertone Hockney’s work of this period can be related not just to ab- that we might equally discern in Hockney’s work. straction but also to photorealism. This had been launched in A bigger splash was the culmination of a series of pool pictures 1966 with the show The Photographic Image, organised by the conveying Hockney’s highly selective vision of Los Angeles. In critic and curator Lawrence Alloway for the Guggenheim Mus- reality, the city was noted for its banal architecture, suburban eum in New York.26 The exhibition included work by the sprawl, its traffic and freeways and its significant social problems. painters Richard Artschwager, Lynn Foulkes and Malcolm

21 See J. Watts: ‘Swimming Alone: The Backyard Pool in Cold War California’, 25 Swimming Pools, Menlo Park 1959, front cover. I am grateful to Sam Tanis, who in Cornell, op cit. (note 11), pp.52–59. had also noted the Hockney connection, for supplying me with a scanned image 22 Illustrated in ibid., pp.107, 110, 111 and 121. of this now obscure publication. 23 Stangos, op. cit. (note 3), p.99. 26 Exh. cat. The Photographic Image, New York (Solomon R. Guggenheim 24 Ibid., p.124. Museum) 1966.

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realism the subject-matter is not the actual objects represent- ed on the canvas, it’s a flat photograph of those objects.28

For Alloway, the exemplary practitioner of the new aesthetic was Malcolm Morley, whose one-man show of paintings of ocean liners and cabin interiors took place at New York’s Korn- blee Gallery in February 1967,29 shortly before Hockney’s ex - hibition at the Landau-Alan Gallery. The two artists must have been in friendly contact, since Morley’s chateau and castle pic- tures were said by Alloway to have been based on a postcard from Hockney.30 They presumably got to know one another in America, given that Morley had left London for the United States a year before Hockney moved to the capital from York- shire. There is an intriguing convergence between A bigger splash and Morley’s Diving champion of 1967 (Fig.36), based on a page from a publicity calendar produced by the Goodyear tyre company, as the inscription makes clear. Beyond the shared im- agery, both works employ a wide white border, evoking photo- graphic formats such as Polaroid, and a bright, synthetic palette, dominated by the intense blues of commercially produced im- agery. Yet the comparison also highlights Hockney’s more am- bivalent attitude towards the hedonistic theme epitomised by the visibility and youthful glamour of Morley’s diving figures. Diving champion flaunts its origin in routine, clichéd imagery, and invites the viewer to reflect on the transposition from an ephemeral, disposable source, typically encountered in a rel- atively working-class social environment, into a large, hand- made painting. A bigger splash triggers associations with such vernacular imagery, but maintains, as noted, a sense of distance 35. Cover of Sunset Swimming Pools, Menlo Park c.1959 and subsequent printings. – aesthetic, emotional and imaginative – between spectator and image, a space into which less affirmative resonances might also intrude. Morley, alongside artists such as who transposed The Los Angeles art scene provides points of reference closer photographic images more directly into their work by means of to home for the conception and ambiguous charge of A bigger or silkscreen transfer. Alloway explained his insistence splash. It is well known that Hockney was marginally involved on referring to photographic sources in the experience of mak- in the city’s artistic community (his friend Nick Wilder ran a ing and viewing this type of work: gallery). The key figure of that scene was Ed Ruscha, whose most inventive contribution was his series of photobooks, . . . when we look at a photographic realist painting there is launched by Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations (1963), extending a a double image: we see both a painting and an image clearly deadpan Pop aesthetic to a fresh medium, and to subject-matter derived from a photograph. The painting carries a reference centred on vernacular Los Angeles buildings and urban spac- to another channel of communication as well as to the de- es such as parking lots. In his synoptic account of the 1960s, picted scene or object [. . .] Such a view seems to accord with Thomas Crow extolled Ruscha’s virtues at the expense of the fascinating realism of everyday subjects oddly distanced Hockney, whom Crow portrayed as a superficial consumer of from us, of complex references rather than substantial prefer- the urban spectacle. He remarked of Ruscha’s fold-out book- ences, that characterize photographic realism.27 let Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966): ‘The treatment of Hockney identified with this impulse to a certain degree, but in that uniquely linear and discrete urban district as a ready-made, hindsight insisted that his own practice stood apart: the refusal of artful arrangement or commentary, distribution through cheap, endlessly duplicatable means, all made for fresh In America, it was the period when photo-realism was be- application of Duchampian strategems’.31 Crow argued that the coming known, and I was slightly interested in it [. . .] I ‘cognitive rewards and formal acuity’ of the booklet: never used their technique of projecting a colour slide onto the canvas, so that you’re really reproducing a photograph. put in the shade better-known ‘Pop’ appropriations of the I just drew the photographs out freehand. It was still similar Los Angeles landscape, such as David Hockney’s embodi- to using a photograph from Physique Pictorial [. . .] In photo- ment of the Northern Englishman in paradise: his A Bigger

27 L. Alloway: ‘Photo-Realism’ (1973), in R. Kalina, ed.: Imagining the Present: 1967), pp.16–19; idem: ‘Morley Paints a Picture’, Art News 67 (Summer 1968), Context, Content and the Role of the Critic, London 2006, pp.193–98. pp.42–44 and 69–71. 28 Stangos, op. cit. (note 3), p.160. 30 Alloway, op. cit. (note 27), p.197. 29 See L. Alloway: ‘The Paintings of Malcom Morley’, A r t a n d A r t i sts 1, 11 ( F e b r u a r y 31 T. Crow: The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent,

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36. Diving cham- pion, by Malcolm Morley. 1967. Canvas, 127 by 152.4 cm. (Private collection; © Malcolm Morley; courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York).

Splash of 1967 returns to the more accessible precedents of take on gestural mark-making, with a hint perhaps of it pro- De Kooning and Franz Kline, turning the broad expressive verbially being no use crying over spilled milk. A bigger splash movement of the loaded brush into a souvenir of exuberantly also makes for an interesting juxtaposition with Ruscha’s chlorinated tourism.32 monumental Los Angeles County Museum on fire (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington), begun in 1965, In this account, Hockney is somewhat patronised as a ‘North- as the Museum’s new wing opened, but only exhibited in ern Englishman’ and so presumably not very sophisticated (al - 1968.34 Both paintings include expanses of water and seem though Ruscha, who grew up in Nebraska and Oklahoma, is subtly poised between perspectival naturalism and a stylised, not described as a ‘Midwest American’). Hockney comes across simplified architectural imagery that could have been ex- as a camp globetrotter, whose proclivity for bleaching his hair tracted from any larger urban setting, so that we seem to be is perhaps hinted at in the ‘chlorinated’ tourist jibe. looking at a model or blueprint. At a thematic level, both As a corrective to Crow’s polarisation it is productive to undercut the utopian connotations of sub-modernist Los explore the compatibilities between the pair of artists, who Angeles architecture with a note of threat or transient distur- moved in the same circles in Los Angeles and were at least bance. Hockney’s splash, with its elusive narrative, is matched acquainted. In the 1960s Ruscha was better known for his by the fire afflicting the museum of Ruscha’s composition. paintings, and we might note the conjunction between im- In a more obvious affinity, Ruscha’s book Nine Swimming agery of fleeting, gravity defying liquid motion in A bigger Pools (and a Broken Glass) (1968), his only exercise in colour splash and that in Ruscha’s Glass of milk, falling (Fig.38), a work photography, is typically laconic in its approach to this ubiq- of 1967 that was exhibited that year at the Whitney Museum uitous, increasingly banal fixture of post-War housing in of American Art, New York.33 Ruscha’s painting is a playful Los Angeles and Las Vegas.35 The absence of human activity

New Haven and London 2004, p.84. Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings. Volume One: 1958–1970, New York 2003, 32 Ibid. pp.250–51. 33 Exh. cat. 1967 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, New York 34 Ibid., pp.276–79. (Whitney Museum of American Art) 1967, no.58; P. Poncy, ed.: Edward Ruscha: 35 Reproduced in Cornell, op. cit. (note 11), pp.205–07.

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37. Still from Sunset Boulevard, directed by Billy Wilder. 1950.

reinforces the desolate atmosphere. Moreover, in Nine Swim- holic.36 With reference to film and television iconography, ming Pools a shattered glass floats in the pool as if to suggest the Dick Hebdige remarked that ‘the body in the pool as metonym night before, and to evoke the physical and emotional hazards for trouble in paradise is [. . .] a recurrent motif bordering on latent in the most benign of circumstances. cliché in West Coast sunshine noir’.37 Sunset Boulevard (1950) A bigger splash can likewise be seen to echo the well-estab- is the archetypal movie reference, and stills of the moment at lished trope of the swimming pool as a site of death and de - which the male lead falls, again fatally shot, into the depths struction. Here, parallels beyond fine art seem relevant. In of the swimming pool are uncannily reminiscent of A bigger F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), the eponymous splash (Fig.37). Another instance is The Graduate, also a work hero took his only swim of the summer in the pool of his of 1967, which is set in Los Angeles and Berkeley. The pool palatial abode, where he was shot dead in retaliation for a scenes evoke Ben’s successive moods of depression; his emo- crime he had not committed. John Cheever’s more contem- tional alienation from his bourgeois family and his sexual poraneous short story ‘The Swimmer’, published in The New fulfilment with Mrs Robinson. Overall, the coming-of-age Yorker in 1964, recounts Neddy Merrill’s journey home from a narrative projects a ‘scarifying picture of the raw vulgarity of drinks party via a long series of pools in which he swims. The the swimming-pool rich’, according to a reviewer in the New predictable shallow hedonism of Merrill’s nocturnal swims York Times.38 gradually modulates into the psychological depths of an un- The general notion that whatever we treasure is undercut ravelling life and symbolises the self-destructiveness of the alco- inevitably by transience is captured by the phrase Et in Arcadia

36 J. Cheever: ‘The Swimmer’, (18th July 1964), pp.28–34. 38 B. Crowther: ‘The Graduate’, New York Times (22nd December 1967). 37 D. Hebdige: ‘Hole: Swimming . . . Floating . . . Sinking . . . Drowning’, in 39 E. Panofsky: ‘Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition’, in idem: Cornell, op. cit. (note 11), p.195.

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38. Glass of milk, falling, by Ed Ruscha. 1967. Canvas, 50.8 by 61 cm. (© Ed Ruscha; courtesy Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills).

ego, an idea that had migrated from Erwin Panofsky’s learned diving figure are calculated to trigger speculation about who discourse on Poussin, and which found literary form in W.H. might have dived in and why.40 Auden’s 1964 poem of that title.39 The sense that all may not Such reflections crystallise the issue of what it was that be well in paradise was explored in relation to gay sexuality Hockney responded to in that photograph on the cover of the and Los Angeles in the novel A Single Man (also from 1964) by publication about pool construction. Hockney read his source Christopher Isherwood, an old friend of Auden’s and a new image against the grain of its own uplifting connotations. This one of Hockney’s. This tells the poignant story of a day in the could have involved the perverse conjecture that something life of a fifty-eight year-old gay university lecturer, struggling unexpected had just fallen from the sky, causing the dramat- with the recent death of his partner, the crushing boredom of ic splash. Such an interpretation might well have occurred to his job and with his own physical and mental decline, all ex- somebody familiar with the myth of the fall of Icarus, which acerbated by the frantic but ghastly urban development of Los was seen through Pieter Breugel the Elder’s painting of the sub- Angeles. At the end, after an adventure in and by the sea, he ject in Auden’s great poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ (1938).41 It dies. Hockney doubtless knew the book, and we might discern does not seem entirely ridiculous to see in A bigger splash an in A bigger splash comparable intimations of the fate of a soli- allusion to the fall of Icarus, and to read the painting as a var - tary individual, the emptiness of his or her existence echoed iation on the notion that even in Arcadia, personal tragedies by the arid domestic surroundings, who seeks fleeting release can occur, individuals can overreach and do terrible harm to from life’s cares in watery sensation, or even, perhaps, a more themselves. This article does not attempt to present Hockney as permanent oblivion. The inclusion of the chair (a chair and a misunderstood tragedian, but rather to suggest that the camp, lilo were initially present on the terrace of The splash, but then life-enhancing façade of his work may at times veil a proverbial replaced by the cactus bed) and the absence from view of the heart of darkness.

Meaning in the Visual Arts, New York 1955, pp.340–67; E. Mendelson, ed.: W. H. 40 I am grateful to Chris Stephens for this information about A splash. Auden: Selected Poems, London 1979, pp.250–51. 41 Mendelson, op. cit. (note 39), p.79.

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