DAVID HOCKNEY (b. 1937)
A Bigger Wave, 1989
Oil on canvas, on four joined panels
60 x 72 1/4 inches (152.4 x 183.5 cm)
Signed, titled and dated March 1989 (on the reverse)
Provenance
André Emmerich Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Mexico (acquired by 1992 from the above)
Acquired from the above in 2013 by the present owner
Auction History
Sotheby’s New-York: 13 May 2024
Estimated: USD 7,000,000 – 10,000,000
USD 8,307,300
A Bigger Wave | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)
Thin, diaphanous washes of ochre and teal collide with the sculptural white impasto of David Hockney’s A Bigger Wave, which sees the artist at a heightened spatial and sensorial sensitivity as he indulges the newfound splendors of the California coast. Here, Hockney takes on what he has described as “the largest swimming pool in the world,” the sea, and deploys the titular device of “A Bigger…,” bestowed upon his expansions of his most significant subjects, such as the Grand Canyon, his studio interiors, through to the iconic pool seen in A Bigger Splash. (the artist quoted in: “Chronology: 1988,” The David Hockney Foundation (online)) A Bigger Wave, executed in 1989, takes inspiration from his move to Malibu from the Hollywood Hills the year prior, during which time he was the subject of a critically acclaimed retrospective exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, his first in the United States. A Bigger Wave, which ranks among the largest in Hockney’s limited group of paintings featuring the wave motif, shows Hockney stirred by his proximity to the sea in a heady rediscovery of his adopted hometown.
LEFT: KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI, UNDER THE WAVE OF KANAGAWA FROM THE SERIES 36 VIEWS OF MT.FUJI, C.1830-31. IMAGE © TOKYO FUJI ART MUSEUM / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES. RIGHT: ROY LICHTENSTEIN, WHITE BRUSHSTROKE I, 1965. SOLD AT SOTHEBY’S, NEW YORK FOR $25.4 MILLION IN JUNE, 2020. PRIVATE COLLECTION. ART © ESTATE OF ROY LICHTENSTEIN
In the present work, the ocean swells over the shore in hyperbolic shades of emerald, cerulean, and ultramarine. As spume collides with sand, forming a rich fringe of white froth, the waves of the background coalesce into weighty, near-cylindrical cones, accumulating with a density that belies their natural transience. Marrying a saturated Fauve palette with a Cubist reconfiguration of space and depth, Hockney takes the centuries-long art historical tradition and amalgamates the works of his predecessors to present a scene unmistakably his. A Bigger Wave casts aside the Academic obsession with perspectival accuracy and the terror-laced awe of Romanticism; Hockney riffs on Botticelli, whose stylized ripples birthed Venus, on Courbet and Homer, who a century earlier wrestled with the ocean’s violent sprays of mist and its tempestuous undulations, and on the ubiquity of Hokusai’s image of Kanagawa. His meditation on the theme, however, offers a delightfully benign alternative: the water is active yet undoubtedly warm, the picture graced by the suggestion of an impossibly blue sky overhead.
“At one side of my little house in Malibu is the Pacific Coast Highway; at the other side is the beach. I step out of my kitchen door and there, right here, is the sea. So when I am painting in my studio I am very aware of nature, in its infinity, and of the sea endlessly moving.”
DAVID HOCKNEY AT HIS BEACH HOUSE IN MALIBU, CALIFORNIA, 1991. PHOTO © PAUL HARRIS/GETTY IMAGES
In 1988 Hockney purchased a residence and studio in Malibu. His commute to and from his former home on Mulholland Drive became the Pacific Coast Highway, the flat grids of the San Fernando Valley seen from the hills giving way to stretches of unending coastline. As Hockney acclimated to Malibu’s palisade-lined beaches, the coexistence of mountain and sea manifested itself in the paintings to follow. The monumentality and volumetric playfulness in Hockney’s treatment of water in A Bigger Wave are thus legible as a shrewd conflation of Malibu’s topography, which would further evolve into his geometric V.N. (Very New) abstractions of the 1990s. From his new dining room, encased in floor-to-ceiling windows, Hockney was suffused by panoramic views of the Pacific, and in his studio he began to experiment with a fax machine, which he used to collage massive arrangements of sheets into singular, composite images. Hockney’s proximity to the ocean—in all its enormity—proved so generative that it prompted a physical expansion in the size of his work.
WILLEM DE KOONING, UNTITLED, 1979. SOLD AT SOTHEBY’S, NEW YORK FOR $34.8 MILLION IN NOVEMBER 2022. PRIVATE COLLECTION. ART © 2024 THE WILLEM DE KOONING FOUNDATION / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK
The ecstasy Hockney found in adjusting to life in Malibu mirrors his first revelatory encounters with Los Angeles, when he arrived in the city nearly three decades earlier. The epic three-part crescendo of the Splash paintings find their mature counterpart in A Bigger Wave, as the ocean provided uncontrollable, immeasurably constant movement and splashes to capture on canvas. Hockney’s repeated and resolutely enthusiastic approach to discovering and rediscovering the cities of southern California infuses his paintings with the spirit of the state’s Bacchanalian arcadia of social liberation, sexual freedom, and wealth of leisure. Ultimately, A Bigger Wave testifies to Hockney’s belief in repetition—that a place or subject can become more miraculous the longer one looks—and offers a euphoric impression of his visual appetite, a curiosity sated only by creation.
SURFRIDER BEACH IN MALIBU, 2014. PHOTO © BY TED SOQUI/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES
“With their high horizon lines (or even lack of horizon),” Andrew Wilson observed, “what the Malibu paintings of this period addressed was an immersive looking into deep space, a slowness, a drawing out of time.” (Andrew Wilson quoted in: Exh. Cat., London, Tate Britain (and travelling), David Hockney, 2017, p. 146) The work to come from this period of Hockney’s career would shape the trajectory of the rest of his prolific, celebrated career. Innocuous yet formidable, sun-soaked and sublime, A Bigger Wave represents the apex of his exploration with the ephemeral and exemplifies Hockney’s deeply personal and idealistic vision of life in Los Angeles.
Flourish, 1989
Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2024
Estimated: USD 500,000 – 700,000
USD 554,400
DAVID HOCKNEY (B. 1937), Flourish | Christie’s (christies.com)
DAVID HOCKNEY (B. 1937)
Flourish, 1989
Oil on canvas
12 x 24 1/8 inches (30.5 x 61.3 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Flourish 1989 David Hockney’ (on the reverse)
Hockney spent long periods at Malibu at the end of the 1980s, in a studio that only allowed him to work on a relatively small scale. If most of the paintings he made there were small in size, their subject was anything but. Facing out to sea from the deck of the house, he would look at an always changing landscape, as he described at the time: ‘Here I am on the edge of the largest swimming pool in the world – the Pacific Ocean. Beyond me is nothing but sea… Studying the movement of the water sends one into a profound meditative state. When you live this close to the sea… it is not the horizon line which dominates, but the close movement of the water itself… endlessly changing, endlessly fascinating.’ With their high horizon lines (or even lack of horizon), what the Malibu paintings of this period addressed was an immersive looking into deep space, a slowness, a drawing out of time.”
Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1809. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Photo: Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany / Bridgeman Images.