"Whenever I left England, colors got stronger in the pictures. California always affected me with color. Because of the light you see more color, people wear more colorful clothes, you notice it, it doesn’t look garish: there is more color in life here."
A n early landmark of David Hockney’s era-defining painted visions of Los Angeles, Insurance BLDG L.A encapsulates the very genesis of his lifelong enchantment with the magnetic allure of Southern California. Revealing the artist’s impression of Los Angeles upon his move from England in 1964, the present work shows Hockney’s reinterpretation of the archetypal, innocuous mid-century architecture of a downtown Los Angeles office building through his forthright and confident skill as a draftsman. In the present work, Hockney reduces an insurance building in downtown L.A. to pure form and aesthetic nonchalance, paring down his representation of the Pacific Mutual Life insurance building through use of cubic linearity most closely associated with the tenets of Modernism.
Revealing his ongoing dialogue with abstraction, Hockney’s painting is dominated by straight edges and simplified shapes—the primary image is isolated in the center of the composition, framed by a flat background. Possessing an arresting immediacy that evokes the format of a Polaroid photograph, the present work underscores Hockney’s challenge to representational art by avoiding any suggestion of illusionistic perspectival space. Immediately predating the paintings of houses, pools, and lawns that would occupy his practice in the later 1960s, significant Insurance BLDG L.A captures Hockney’s earliest impressions of the city that would come to inspire, excite, and shape his brilliant artistic vision, reflecting a period of immense creative innovation for the artist.
