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David Hockney: the masterpiece “California” at auction in London at Christie's with an estimate of 16 million pounds

The Christie's auction will be held on March 7th in London and sees David Hockney's masterpiece, California (20, estimate on request: in the region of £21) as a highlight of the 1965th/16.000.000st century.

David Hockney: the masterpiece “California” at auction in London at Christie's with an estimate of 16 million pounds

Held in the same private European collection since 1968, the painting is among Hockney's first large swimming pool paintings and remained invisible to the public for more than 40 years. The California was purchased by its current owner in 1968. The painting opened in London on January 25, ahead of a program of touring exhibitions that will include Paris from February 3 to 8 and New York from February 15 to 19. California will then be on display in London, at Christie's global headquarters in King Street, from 1 to 7 March. California is the largest and most beautiful of the extraordinary group of early pool paintings created in London after Hockney's first visit to Los Angeles in 1964. Art historians Paul Melia and Ulrich Luckhardt have noted that “Hockney considers it one of his most important swimming pools". paintings'. The paintings that followed have become synonymous with his work, combining dazzling technical virtuosity with tensions of fantasy, desire and longing.

David Hockney, California (1965)

Hockney loved paintings of swimming pools

A blissful sight of carefree summer bliss, California is among Hockney's earliest iterations of the pool motif and was one of the first pool paintings to include figures. Although Hockney incorporated a swimming pool into the 1964 California Art Collector painting, it was not until he returned to London for Christmas that year that he made his first painting with a complete swimming pool: a figureless composition entitled Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool (1964 ). California followed shortly after, along with the closely related painting Two Boys in a Pool, Hollywood (1965). California anticipates many of the achievements that followed in Hockney's later masterpieces. His kaleidoscopic representation of water in motion lays the foundation for the techniques explored in A Bigger Splash (1967, Tate, London) and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972). His nude figures prefigure the sensuous male nudes of Sunbather (1966, Museum Ludwig, Cologne) and Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool (1966, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). Hockney considered the painting so essential to his oeuvre that, unable to include it in his 1988 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, he made a copy, now held in the museum's permanent collection. Faced with depicting the elusive and ever-changing properties of water and light, a theme that is at the heart of Hockney's practice, he made his first major forays into the themes of vision and perception that would define his work. The stylized Californian vocabulary of tangled lines and cells is particularly characteristic of this early period, predating the artist's turn to naturalism and his famous double portraits made in the late 60s and early 70s.

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