David Hockney’s pop-art swimming-pool image, A Bigger Splash (1967), was built from earlier works—A Little Splash and The Splash (painted in the previous year)—which in turn traced back to a photograph on the cover of a late-1950s swimming-pool maintenance gui
He has been gone only a week, and already the most splashy image in his long life feels newly exposed: A Bigger Splash, painted in 1967, a moment frozen mid-plunge behind a house that now reads like a mid-century mod dream—palm trees, sun, and a kind of unnerving calm.
Hockney wasn’t just an Englishman. He was a northern Englishman, raised in an upbringing described as straitened and damp. That background mattered. because the painting’s fascination with wide-open Los Angeles life—freeform. sun-wattage. private wealth. the whole pop-culture myth of the city—lands with extra force coming from someone shaped by the opposite climate and the opposite cultural script.
For decades, Hockney gave himself over to many artistic forms, but most people still recognize A Bigger Splash instantly. Fewer. though. can recall the works it grew out of: A Little Splash and The Splash. both painted the previous year. Together, the three paintings form a small chain of transformation. It began with something almost utilitarian: the source was inspired by a photograph on the cover of a swimming-pool maintenance guide from the late fifties.
In the Sotheby’s video embedded at the top of the post. the sequence is laid out plainly: each time Hockney revisited the image. it became more abstracted and more Los Angelized. The more he iterated. the less the scene behaved like a straightforward depiction and the more it took on the particular glamour—and slight eerie edge—of a myth polished to a shine.
The shift isn’t presented as sudden. When it came time to paint the third version. Hockney built up the composition—house. pool. diving board. and sky—first with blocks of flat. characteristically bright color. Only after that did he gradually nudge those shapes toward representation by adding detail.
There’s also the scale of attention. Hockney. discussing the making of the painting later in life. liked to mention how much time he spent on the splash alone: a full week. at least. to render an event that lasts no longer than a second or two. It’s the kind of devotion that makes the finished image feel inevitable even when you understand how hard it was to make.
From there, there were more Hockney swimming pools. Each arrived with its own mood, its own charge. One of them—the near-photorealistic Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). from 1971—went for $90.3 million at Christie’s in 2018. Still. it was A Bigger Splash that went on to adorn the cover of Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. a book still described here as one of the most perceptive about that city.
What completes the loop is the shared geography of taste. Banham, the text notes, was “naturally” another besotted Brit—one more British mind caught by Los Angeles, like Hockney, and like the maintenance-guide photograph that started it all.
A Bigger Splash didn’t just show a pool. It showed how a manufactured image of leisure—taken from late-fifties instruction. pushed through repeated paintings. and shaped into something brighter and stranger—could become part of the cultural architecture of the city it depicted. And in the week since Hockney’s death. that process feels newly personal: a splash frozen by paint. made to outlast the second that started it.
David Hockney A Bigger Splash A Little Splash The Splash pop art swimming pools Los Angeles Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies Christie’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) art history