David Hockney’s House Palm and Pool, two paintings on paper from 1982, exude the California Cool that the artist is so renowned for. Created soon after the artist bought his Hollywood Hills house, each presents a subtly different vignette of the artist’s lush backyard, rendered with the vibrant color and distilled lines that call Henri Matisse to mind. These works capture Hockney’s love affair with the city of Los Angeles, best epitomized in the subject matter of the swimming pool ever since his first visit in the 1960s. Ten years after completing the iconic painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972, Hockney continued to be fascinated with the motif, returning to it to revel in the immediacy of painting with three large-scale gouaches on paper titled House Palm and Pool, two of which Phillips is delighted to be offering.

David Hockney’s backyard, pictured in Architectural Digest, April 1, 1983.

"As I flew over San Bernardino and saw the swimming pools and the houses and everything and the sun, I was more thrilled than I have ever been in arriving in any city."
—David Hockney

As much as these works represent a continuation of Hockney’s early work, they also mark the important inflection point ushered in by his purchase of his Hollywood Hills home which would become a favored subject across the decades, as evidenced in such recent paintings as A Bigger Interior With Blue Terrace and Garden, 2017. With these works, Hockney presents us with intimate snapshots of the calm, yet vibrantly painted, sanctuary he was able to build in the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles.

Hockney’s discrete House Palm and Pool series consists of just three large-scale gouaches, each presenting a similar view of Hockney’s property captured by the artist from a slightly elevated position en plein air on his terrace. In each work, Hockney distills the architecture, landscaping and colors through a remarkably economy of line and color: broad brushstrokes give form to the cobalt-blue slats of his terrace; blue squiggles capture the pool sparkling under the California light. Like Paul Cézanne’s repeated renderings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, Hockney in this way creates masterful studies of form, color, and perspective.

"[Hockney is] a direct heir of Matisse’s Fauvism, pushing color contrasts to trippy and hedonistic extremes."
—Deborah SolomonThese two works powerfully exemplify Hockney’s interrogation of different modes of seeing and are closely related to his concurrent photographic practice. Viewed in tandem with Hockney’s composite Polaroid works of his property, they reflect Hockney’s ambition of making and viewing pictures more faithfully committed to the actual phenomena of seeing – thereby challenging the fixed viewpoint of the camera, and the Renaissance tradition of linear perspective more broadly. House Palm and Pool brilliantly captures our everyday experience of seeing, where the eye wanders and the body shifts, gaining different vantages of the same scene from one moment to the next.

David Hockney, Interior with Blue Terrace and Garden, 2017.
- Provenance
  André Emmerich Gallery, New York
  Robin Quist Gates, California
  Thence by descent from the above to the present owner
- Literature
  Peter Webb, Portrait of David Hockney, London, 1988, p. 201
- Artist Biography
  David Hockney
  David Hockney (b. 1937) is one of the most well-known and celebrated artists of the
  20th and 21st centuries. He works across many mediums, including painting, collage,
  and more recently digitally, by creating print series on iPads. His works show semi-
  abstract representations of domestic life, human relationships, floral, fauna, and the
  changing of seasons.
  
  Hockney has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Royal
  Academy of Arts in London, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, among many
  other institutions. On the secondary market, his work has sold for more than $90
  million.
  
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