Hockney, David: A Bigger Splash (1967)

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About the artist

"I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask 200 guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." It's one of the most famous lines of art criticism, John Ruskin's denunciation of Whistler 's Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. It was a remark for which Whistler sued him, and won damages of a single farthing.

But the irony of the case was that Ruskin's words were, though rude, perfectly true to Whistler 's intentions. The focus of his attack were the smudges of white paint with which Whistler depicted exploding fireworks - and this paint is indeed flung, or does its best to look flung. The main point of the Nocturne is its conspicuous and daring use of accidental marks to represent something chaotic. Painted in 1875, it was a pioneering work. In it, Whistler gave the nod to all the flicked, dripped, slung and spattered paint in modern art.

Almost a century later, another picture appeared with a salient eruption of white chaos. The scene is now day, not night. The eruption is of water, not fire. The painter is not an American artist in Britain, but a British artist in America. And in A Bigger Splash, David Hockney's impudence takes the opposite form to Whistler's fling.

A California poolside. A low modern dwelling with wall-sized glass panels. Palm trees. A sweltering cloudless sky. An unoccupied chair. And suddenly... Yes, you could make a human story of it, and rather a neat one. Here's an uninhabited view, where the only sign of life is the sign that someone has, this very instant, disappeared - for the splash is presumably that of a person who has just sprung from the board and plunged beneath the water surface.

Literally, yes. But who, looking at A Bigger Splash, ever thinks about that diver? The drama of this picture is not about an empty scene and an implied vanished figure. It is more elementary - a drama of stasis and disruption, order and chaos.

It's an extremely composed composition. The picture is a perfect square, divided into two almost equal oblongs, the sky above and the pool below, with a band of pink sandwiched between them. The shapes are all straight lines, mostly verticals, horizontals, parallels, rectangles. The paint is applied in solid, even areas, yielding an immaculate and utterly uneventful surface. The motionless water is as depthless as the sky and the wall. Everything is clear, flat and simple, reduced to a geometrical plan.

Some little incidents punctuate this scheme: the insect-like director 's chair, the abrupt patch of isolated grass, the one-and-a-half palm trees. But their singular forms do not seriously disrupt the level pattern of oblongs or the uniform paint surface. Order, dead calm and continuousness prevail beside the pool - just waiting to be broken.

An explosion in the water is the picture's event. It's a violent and instantaneous occurrence that interrupts the ongoing stillness. It's an outbreak of complex natural chaos that disturbs the picture's artificial simplicities and regularities. The splash is painted quite differently from its surroundings. Suddenly we have irregular shapes and edges. Suddenly we have a sense of brushstrokes jabbed and dashed in speedily by human hand. With the splash, spontaneous and accidental paint-marks seem to enter the regimented scheme.

Oh, but not so fast. Because the longer you look at it, the more outrageously calculated this splash actually appears. It is far from Whistler's fling of paint, and far from all the wilder flings of Whistler's heirs. Hockney's cheek here is to set up a drama of order and chaos - and then, against expectation, to do the chaos in a highly controlled way. It is chaos by numbers.

The splash breaks down into four types of paintwork. There is the dense burst of white strokes and twirls in the middle of it. There are the single bright spidery lines. There are the sprays of tiny dots. There are the fluid, wobbly-edged but uniform areas of darker and lighter blue. None of these elements is accidental or spontaneous. Even the apparent mess in the middle is a formation of minute crisscross lines - a deliberately plotted, patiently executed imitation of mess. Nowhere is the painting carried away.

The splash, in short, is not remotely splashy. It is an elegant, schematic graphic design for a splash. As it bursts, it is frozen, analysed, turned into painted formula. Cool artifice rules, as it rules the entire image - which is, after all, a picture within a picture, a painted square set inside the square canvas, with a wide margin of bare cloth around it. This world with its regularities and its irregularities is just a layer of paint on canvas.

About the artist

David Hockney (born in 1937) is the most versatile, popular and public-spirited artist of his generation. Painter, draughtsman, printmaker, photographer, stage-designer, he arrived as a British Pop artist, and - even though he moved to America - swiftly became the first British artist celebrity. His Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy is one of the best-loved modern pictures, and his life-drawings were instant classics. He has experimented with new media while vigorously defending painting, and never shied away from controversy - as a homosexual, opponent of smoking bans, or self-made art historian with revisionist view. He is the complete artist.