Making a very big Splash... the £23m Hockney
ONE of David Hockney’s most famous swimming pool paintings fetched £23.1million at auction last night.
The Splash sold at Sotheby’s in London to an anonymous buyer for eight times the £2.9million it made when it last went under the hammer in 2006.
It was the third highest price for a work by Hockney, a Sotheby’s spokesman said.
The Splash, painted in Los Angeles in 1966, is the second of a three-part sequence of variations on the same theme.
The Little Splash, painted earlier in 1966, is privately owned, while the largest and bestknown of the three – 1967’s A Bigger Splash – is in the Tate in London.
All three paintings celebrate an ideal of Californian living, depicting a view over a
‘A breathtaking realisation’
sun-drenched swimming pool towards 1960s modernist architecture and were inspired by the front cover of a 1959 technical manual on how to build swimming pools.
Bidding for The Splash started at £15million and rose to a final hammer price of £23,117,000 including the premium.
The 6ft x 6ft painting has been held in a private collection for the past 13 years.
Before that it was once owned by American billionaire David Geffen. It was expected to sell for up to £30million. Head of Sotheby’s sale Emma Baker described the Hockney masterpiece as ‘a breathtaking realisation of his Californian fantasy’ and ‘one of the most iconic Pop art images of the 20th century’.
She said it was ‘as recognisable as Edvard Munch’s The Scream, Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers and Monet’s Waterlilies’.
Bradford-born Hockney, 82, first visited LA in 1964 and was instantly struck by the landscape – and the number of swimming pools. He relocated to LA in 1966 where he developed his distinctive style and mastered one of his main challenges – how to freeze a still image of something that is never still.
‘Everyone knows a splash can’t be frozen in time, so when you see it like that in a painting it’s even more striking than a photograph,’ he once said. Hockney became the most valuable living artist when his Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), painted in 1972, sold for £70million in 2018.