A Bigger Splash is a large pop art

Pop art

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...

 painting by British artist David Hockney

David Hockney

David Hockney, CH, RA, is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, who is based in Bridlington, Yorkshire and Kensington, London....

. Measuring 242.5 centimetres (95.5 in) by 243.9 centimetres (96 in), it depicts a swimming pool

Swimming pool

A swimming pool, swimming bath, wading pool, or simply a pool, is a container filled with water intended for swimming or water-based recreation. There are many standard sizes; the largest is the Olympic-size 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

Springboard

A springboard or diving board is used for diving and is a board that is itself a spring, i.e. a linear flex-spring, of the cantilever type....

. It was painted in California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

 between April and June 1967, when Hockney was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

, United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

.

Subject

The picture 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 door

Sliding glass door

A Sliding glass door or Patio door, a type of sliding door in architecture and construction, is a large glass window opening in a structure that provide door access from a room to the outdoors, fresh air, and copious natural light. A sliding glass door is usually considered a single unit consisting...

s, in front of which an empty director's chair

Director's chair

A director's chair is a lightweight chair that folds side-to-side with a scissors action. The seat and back are made of canvas or a similar strong fabric which bears the user's full weight and can be folded; the frame is made of wood, or sometimes metal or plastic...

 with thin crossed legs stands on a wide pink patio

Patio

A patio is an outdoor space generally used for dining or recreation that adjoins a residence and is typically paved. It may refer to a roofless inner courtyard of the sort found in Spanish-style dwellings or a paved area between a residence and a garden....

. 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 just 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 emphasises 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, simplifying 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

Sotheby's

Sotheby's is the world's fourth oldest auction house in continuous operation.-History:The oldest auction house in operation is the Stockholms Auktionsverk founded in 1674, the second oldest is Göteborgs Auktionsverk founded in 1681 and third oldest being founded in 1731, all Swedish...

 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.

The painting was made using acrylic Liquitex

Liquitex

Liquitex is a registred trademark for a brand of acrylic paints named using a portmanteau of the words "liquid" and "texture". The first water-based acrylic paint launched in 1955 by the company under this brand name was the first acrylic gesso, and colored liquid acrylic paints came one year later...

 on a white cotton duck

Cotton duck

Cotton duck , also simply duck, sometimes duck cloth or duck canvas, commonly called "canvas" outside the textile industry, is a heavy, plain woven cotton fabric...

 canvas

Canvas

Canvas is an extremely heavy-duty plain-woven fabric used for making sails, tents, marquees, backpacks, and other items for which sturdiness is required. It is also popularly used by artists as a painting surface, typically stretched across a wooden frame...

, with no underdrawing

Underdrawing

Underdrawing is the drawing done on a painting ground before paint is applied, for example, an imprimatura or an underpainting. Underdrawing was used extensively by 15th century painters like Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. These artists "underdrew" with a brush, using hatching strokes for...

. Hockney uses a limited palette – cobalt blue

Cobalt blue

Cobalt blue is a cool, slightly desaturated blue color, historically made using cobalt salts of alumina. It is used in certain ceramics and painting; the different cobalt pigment smalt, based on silica, is more often used directly in tinted transparent glasses...

, ultramarine blue, raw sienna

Sienna

Sienna is a form of limonite clay most famous in the production of oil paint pigments. Its yellow-brown colour comes from ferric oxides contained within...

, burnt sienna, raw umber, Hooker's green, Naples yellow

Naples Yellow

Naples yellow, also called antimony yellow, can range from a somewhat muted, or earthy, reddish yellow pigment to a bright light yellow, and is the chemical compound lead antimonate. Its chemical composition is Pb2/Pb32. It is also known as jaune d'antimoine. It is one of the oldest synthetic...

 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

Paint roller

A paint roller is a paint application tool used for painting large flat surfaces rapidly and efficiently.A paint roller typically consists of two parts: a "roller frame," and a "roller cover." The roller cover absorbs the paint and transfers it to the painted surface. The roller frame attaches to...

, in two or three layers, with the few details – tree, grass, chair, reflections – overpainted

Overpainting

Overpainting can mean the final layers of paint, over some type of underpainting, in a system of working in layers. It can also mean later paint added by restorers, or an artist or dealer wishing to "improve" or update an old image—a very common practice in the past. The underpainting gives a...

. 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

Instant film

Instant film is a type of photographic film first introduced by Polaroid that is designed to be used in an instant camera...

 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

Collage

A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....

 many photographs of the same subject taken over a period of hours.

The Marquess of Dufferin and Ava

Sheridan Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 5th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava

Sheridan Frederick Terence Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 5th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava was a British patron of the arts...

 bought the finished work from John Kasmin

John Kasmin

John Kasmin is a British art dealer who along with Robert Fraser promoted British and American Pop Art in the 1960s. He went to Magdalen College School in Oxford and then worked with the established London Art dealer Victor Musgrave. In 1960 Kasmin met David Hockney and when he set up his own...

's gallery in 1968, and sold it to the Tate

Tate

-Places:*Tate, Georgia, a town in the United States*Tate County, Mississippi, a county in the United States*Táté, the Hungarian name for Totoi village, Sântimbru Commune, Alba County, Romania*Tate, Filipino word for States...

 in 1981.

The painting is currently on loan to the Getty Center

Getty Center

The Getty Center, in Brentwood, Los Angeles, California, is a campus for cultural institutions founded by oilman J. Paul Getty. The $1.3 billion center, which opened on December 16, 1997, is also well known for its architecture, gardens, and views overlooking Los Angeles...

, where it is being displayed as part of the "Pacific Standard Time" exhibition.

Cultural reference

Jack Hazan's 1975 film A Bigger Splash, a fictionalised biopic concentrating on the breakup of Hockney's relationship with Peter Schlesinger, was named after the painting.

External links

• British artist David Hockney on 'A Bigger Splash', BBC Nottingham, 30 November 2009 (video)