Beschreibung:

David Hockney Autumn Pool (Paper Pool 29) 1978 Colored and pressed paper pulp in six parts. 182.9 x 215.9 cm. (72 x 85 1/2 in). Initialed and dated 'DH 78' lower right.
Provenance LA Louver, Los Angeles Literature N. Stangos, ed., David Hockney Paper Pools, London, 1980, p. 99 (illustrated); K. E. Tyler, Tyler Graphics: Catalogue Raisonné, 1974–1985, Minneapolis, 1987, p. 391 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay In 1978, David Hockney was travelling from London to Los Angeles, his second home, when he paid a visit to his friend, the lithographer Ken Tyler, in Bedford Village, New York. Having lost his driving licence, Hockney extended what was originally a brief stop-over to a longer stay during which he collaborated with Tyler on what would become one of his most celebrated bodies of work, the Paper Pool series. As Hockney waited for his replacement licence to arrive, Tyler showed him some works made with paper pulp using a revolutionary printing technique which produced brilliant and dazzling colour. Hockney was so intrigued that he spent the next several months creating 29 works based on the motif of Tyler’s swimming pool of which Autumn Pool, the present lot, is an outstanding example. The swimming pool is without doubt the most recognisable motif in David Hockney’s oeuvre. Since the mid-1960s, Hockney has painted, drawn, photographed and printed the image of the swimming pool. Emerging out of the greyness of the post-war years, Hockney’s depictions of Californian swimming pools and their association with a glamorous and exotic life of sun, wealth and leisure, ushered in a period of renewed optimism, youthfulness and colour in Britain. The Tate Gallery’s A Bigger Splash, arguably Hockney’s most famous painting, is an early work depicting a diver’s splash in a swimming pool in the garden of a modernist house under a typical warm, sunny, cloudless Southern California day. The culmination of a series of three paintings based on the same motif, A Bigger Splash sees Hockney engage with the age-old problem of how to create an illusion of light, space and volume. Using flat blocks of highly saturated colours, Hockney defined with unprecedented vitality and innovation a classic yet modern landscape. Autumn Pool, executed 12 years later in an entirely different, radical medium, is a continuation and evolution of the themes and compositional devices Hockney first examined in A Bigger Splash. While the swimming pool and diving board remain, the house recedes into the background, leaving the focus of the image on the illusion of light, space and volume by the opposition of line and colour and of surface and perspectival depth. Autumn Pool is a tightly framed pictorial composition across six sheets of paper, with a composite, tessellated image of a pool and its diving board. The picture’s balanced layout is dominated by the strong vertical and horizontal lines of the jutting diving board and the edges on the pool. Accentuated by the protruding white board, the composition’s one-point perspective effortlessly draws the viewer’s eye across the brilliant, jewel-like tones of the pool’s water which reflects and refracts the luminous light drenching the outdoor scene. While the bold lines define a perspective, Hockney’s lack of formal tonal recession reinforces the abstract flatness of the picture plane. Simple and daring in its formal design, Autumn Pool is filled with a tension between the figuration of the composite image and the abstraction of each individual sheet. This mode of representation has been an ongoing concern in Hockney’s work, especially in Polaroid photographic pieces in which the image is made up of a mosaic of accumulated detailed images. Another major formal influence are the Japanese woodblock prints, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji by Hokusai, with their sense of compressed space and emphasis on diagonal perspective – a visual and compositional effect clearly seen in Autumn Pool. Ever since his move to Los Angeles in 1964, Hockney has been interested in the ways in which water can be represented. The technique used to create Paper Pools, was developed with Hockney by Ken Tyler, a renowned p