David Hockney

Harry N. Abrams Family Collection, New York
Fukuoka Soga Bank, Japan
François Pinault, Paris
Christie's, New York, November 13, 2002, lot 51
Acquired by the present owner from the above

New York, Landau-Alan Gallery, David Hockney: New Paintings and Drawings, March - April 1967
Belgrade, Museum of Modern Art, David Hockney, September - October 1970, no. 28, illustrated
Paris, Musée des arts decoratifs, Palais du Louvre, Pavillion de Marsan, David Hockney, October - December 1974, cat. no. 10, p. 32, illustrated
Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; London, Tate Gallery, David Hockney: A Retrospective, February 1988 - January 1989, cat. no. 33, p. 154 and 252, illustrated in color
Paris, Galerie Sud, Centre Georges Pompidou, David Hockney: Espace/Paysage, January - April 1999, p. 90, illustrated in color

David Hockney, David Hockney by David Hockney, New York, 1976, pl. no. 147, p. 132, illustrated in color
Peter Webb, Portrait of David Hockney, London, 1988, no. 79, illustrated
Paul Melia and Ulrich Luckhardt, David Hockney Paintings, Munich, 1994, pl. no. 28, p. 98, illustrated in color

Painter, draughtsman, illustrator, printmaker, photographer, stage designer and writer, David Hockney’s place in the annals of art history has already been secured. After a prize-winning career as a student at the Royal College of Art in London, Hockney moved to California and soon became the most famous British artist of his generation. His work, so full of flair and wit, and so versatile, both in terms of style and technique, seems to display many of the characteristics of the Hockney’s own irreverent genius: there is an abundance of humor, and yet that is tempered by a compositional order. There is vibrant color and a sexiness pervades all his work, whether an image of a flower or of a lover. The present work is a seminal portrait by the artist, and one of the finest of Hockney’s celebrated Pool paintings. It is a work that asked much and both employs and displays the many talents of the artist. The designer’s attention to ‘stage’ and ‘composition’ is combined with the technical prowess of the illustrator. The acute precision of line that belongs to the draughtsman and the photographer is aligned with the painter’s sensitivity to color, here flattened to the point that color becomes an abstract building block in itself. Portrait of Nick Wilder is a painting that majestically declares Hockney’s artistic genius, and remains one of his most important contributions to twentieth-century portraiture.

The present work was painted in 1966, two years after the young Hockney first traveled to California. It is the second of two large format paintings of swimming pools where one sees the artist deliberately attempting to mimic the objective, dry precision of the photograph (the painting, as object, mimics the form of a Polaroid photograph). Moving to California instigated a huge change in Hockney’s visual language and also coincided with an increased interest in photography. The flat geometry and stark horizontality of the Angelino landscape lent themselves well to Hockney’s illustrative style, and in conjunction with the use of photography, as well as drawings, Hockney began to define a unique vision of the West Coast. As far as Hockney was concerned, his role in chronicling the city of Los Angeles made him the ‘Piranesi of L.A.’.

Nick Wilder was an art dealer who was friends with both Hockney and his then lover, Peter Schlesinger. This painting marks a departure in Hockney’s work as it was the first portrait he had made in many years. Hockney recalls, "After Sunbather I did Portrait of Nick Wilder which I began in early 1966 … I had Mark Lancaster take pictures of Nick in the pool like that; I got Nick to pose with just his head coming out of the swimming pool and Mark had to go in the pool to take the pictures. I just painted it. I think this was about the first absolutely specific portrait I’d painted for many years." (David Hockney is Nikos Stangos, Ed., David Hockney on David Hockney, London 1976, p. 104).

Above all else, the present painting explores the relationship between painting and photography – a pursuit which propelled much of Hockney’s own painting in the 1960’s. Here, shadows are conspicuously missing, serving to flatten and not plasticize the surface, allowing Hockney to emphasize the effects of strong sunlight on pure planes of color. The painting is actually the product of countless photographic studies of the sitter, his pool and his house. Hockney makes a connection between his paintings and photography as both being exemplary of ‘coordinated patterns of form’ and also both serving to illuminate a very specific moment that drew him (back) to portraiture. He says, "I think that buying a camera coincided with an interest in making pictures that were depicting a place and people in a particular space … Certainly in California ‘65/66 when I had begun to do that, using only rather poor Polaroid photographs to jog my memory." (David Hockney in Marco Livingstone, David Hockney, London 1981, p. 97).

Marco Livingstone notes that Hockney’s work at this time made no insignificant nod to recent developments made in contemporary painting, particularly the work of Frank Stella, whose interior architectonics seem to inform the grid construction and concrete lines of the present composition. Livingstone notes, "The rectilinear grid … establishes a strong consciousness of the surface on which the image rests, while at the same time suggesting real space through the identification of this grid with a three-dimensional setting." (Livingstone, Ibid., p. 99). Hockney’s employment of a continuous horizontal band (the balcony), extending across the composition, is a visual echo of the framing edge, and may be related to the overt structural forms and formal structures of Stella’s paintings. Just as in Stella’s earlier Black Paintings, a powerful silence pervades Hockney’s pool scene, impressed upon us by the hard edges, the sharp geometry, blank windows, still curtains and almost mesmerized, somewhat enigmatic Wilder. Only the rippling water offers any relief to this silence – a quietude that infused all of Hockney’s finest paintings, and which would shortly be disrupted by the Splash.