Um Grande Splash (A Bigger Splash) - David Hockney

Um Grande Splash (A Bigger Splash) - David Hockney
Tate Gallery, Londres, Inglaterra
Acrílica sobre tela - 242x243 - 1967

A Bigger Splash is a large pop art painting by British artist David Hockney. Measuring 242.5 centimetres (95.5 in) by 243.9 centimetres (96.0 in), it depicts a swimming pool beside a modern house, disturbed by a large splash of water created by an unseen figure who has apparently just jumped in from a diving board. It was painted in California between April and June 1967, when Hockney was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. Jack Hazan's fictionalised 1974 biopic, A Bigger Splash, concentrating on the breakup of Hockney's relationship with Peter Schlesinger, was named after the painting.

Luca Guadagnino's 2015 film A Bigger Splash (a loose remake of La Piscine) was also named after the painting.

A Bigger Splash shows a typical California day – warm and sunny, with a cloudless blue sky. In the background, two palm trees loom over a large single-story house, with flat roof and large sliding glass doors, in front of which an empty director's chair with thin crossed legs stands on a wide pink patio. A shadow under the chair suggests that the sun is high in the sky, around noon. In the foreground, a yellow diving board slants away from lower right corner, leading the viewer's gaze towards the centre of a large swimming pool, where water fountains into the air, capturing the moment right after someone has dived in. The diver is not visible, presumably still under the water. The chair lies further back along the same diagonal line. A thickening in the white line atop the building's flat roof emphasizes the place where the diver has entered the water.

Hockney's composition is based on a photograph of a swimming pool in a book and an earlier drawing by Hockney of Californian buildings. It was created with meticulous care, simplified, but enlarging his earlier paintings entitled A Little Splash (1966) and The Splash (1966) (both are held in private collections; the latter was sold at Sotheby's for £2.6 million in 2006). The canvas – almost a perfect square – is dominated by the strong vertical and horizontal lines of the trees, the building, and the edge of the pool; it is divided evenly into the sky, building and patio in the upper half, and the pool and diving board in the lower half. The rectilinear composition is broken by the oblique thrust of the diving board. The calmness of the overall composition contrasts with the violent explosion of water caused by diver. Hockney has expressed his pleasure at taking two weeks to paint a moment that lasted two seconds.

In a March 2009 interview for the Tate, to the question "Who jumped into the pool?" Hockney answers: "I don't know actually. It was done from a photograph of a splash. That I haven't taken, but that's what it's commenting on. The stillness of an image. (...) Most of the painting was spent on the splash and the splash lasts two seconds and the building is permanent there. That's what it's about actually. You have to look in at the details."

The painting was made using acrylic Liquitex on a white cotton duck canvas, with no underdrawing. Hockney uses a limited palette – cobalt blue, ultramarine blue, raw sienna, burnt sienna, raw umber, Hooker's green, Naples yellow and titanium white – applied either mixed together or as tints. Apart from the splash, the painting was finished very evenly and flat with a paint roller, in two or three layers, with the few details – tree, grass, chair, reflections – overpainted. The central splash was heavily worked over a period of about two weeks using a variety of small brushes. A wide border and central narrow stripe at the pool's edge are left unpainted. The border creates an effect like a Polaroid photograph. The painting has been viewed as a critical link in Hockney's ruminations on time between his earlier Picture Emphasising Stillness and his later "joiners" portraits, created by collaging many photographs of the same subject taken over a period of hours.

The Marquess of Dufferin and Ava bought the finished work from John Kasmin's gallery in 1968, and sold it to the Tate in 1981.

This painting depicts a splash in a Californian swimming pool. Hockney first visited Los Angeles in 1963, a year after graduating from the Royal College of Art, London. He returned there in 1964 and remained, with only intermittent trips to Europe, until 1968 when he came back to London. In 1976 he made a final trip back to Los Angeles and set up permanent home there. He was drawn to California by the relaxed and sensual way of life. He commented: ‘the climate is sunny, the people are less tense than in New York ... When I arrived I had no idea if there was any kind of artistic life there and that was the least of my worries.’ (Quoted in Kinley, [p.4].) In California, Hockney discovered, everybody had a swimming pool. Because of the climate, they could be used all year round and were not considered a luxury, unlike in Britain where it is too cold for most of the year. Between 1964 and 1971 he made numerous paintings of swimming pools. In each of the paintings he attempted a different solution to the representation of the constantly changing surface of water. His first painted reference to a swimming pool is in the painting California Art Collector 1964 (private collection). Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool 1964 (private collection) was completed in England from a drawing. While his later swimming pools were based on photographs, in the mid 1960s Hockney’s depiction of water in swimming pools was consciously derived from the influences of his contemporary, the British painter Bernard Cohen (born 1933), and the later abstract paintings by French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901-85). At this time he also began to leave wide borders around the paintings unpainted, a practice developed from his earlier style of keeping large areas of the canvas raw. At the same time, he discovered fast-drying acrylic paint to be more suited to portraying the sun-lit, clean-contoured suburban landscapes of California than slow drying oil paint.
A Bigger Splash was painted between April and June 1967 when Hockney was teaching at the University of California at Berkeley. The image is derived in part from a photograph Hockney discovered in a book on the subject of building swimming pools. The background is taken from a drawing he had made of Californian buildings. A Bigger Splash is the largest and most striking of three ‘splash’ paintings. The Splash (private collection) and A Little Splash (private collection) were both completed in 1966. They share compositional characteristics with the later version. All represent a view over a swimming pool towards a section of low-slung, 1960s modernist architecture in the background. A diving board juts out of the margin into the paintings’ foreground, beneath which the splash is represented by areas of lighter blue combined with fine white lines on the monotone turquoise water. The positioning of the diving board – coming at a diagonal out of the corner – gives perspective as well as cutting across the predominant horizontals. The colours used in A Larger Splash are deliberately brighter and bolder than in the two smaller paintings in order to emphasise the strong Californian light. The yellow diving board stands out dramatically against the turquoise water of the pool, which is echoed in the intense turquoise of the sky. Between sky and water, a strip of flesh-coloured land denotes the horizon and the space between the pool and the building. This is a rectangular block with two plate glass windows, in front of which a folding chair is sharply delineated. Two palms on long, spindly trunks ornament the painting’s background while others are reflected in the building’s windows. A frond-like row of greenery decorates its front. The blocks of colour were rollered onto the canvas and the detail, such as the splash, the chair and the vegetation, painted on later using small brushes. The painting took about two weeks to complete, providing an interesting contrast with his subject matter for the artist. Hockney has explained: ‘When you photograph a splash, you’re freezing a moment and it becomes something else. I realise that a splash could never be seen this way in real life, it happens too quickly. And I was amused by this, so I painted it in a very, very slow way.’ (Quoted in Kinley, [p.5].) He had rejected the possibility of recreating the splash with an instantaneous gesture in liquid on the canvas. In contrast with several of his earlier swimming pool paintings, which contain a male subject, often naked and viewed from behind, the ‘splash’ paintings are empty of human presence. However, the splash beneath the diving board implies the presence of a diver.