“It’s very, very beautiful, this part of the world. It’s unbelievably green. Everywhere we look is green."
Executed at a critical moment in the development of David Hockney’s remarkable career, L’Arbois, Sainte-Maxime of 1968 is a work of pivotal significance that brilliantly embodies the artist’s masterful synthesis of photography, painting, and drawing. The present work is an impressively scaled example of Hockney’s celebrated series of pictures inspired by the South of France, exquisitely rendering the landscape and architecture of the French Riviera in brilliant colour. Directly following his sun-drenched Californian swimming pools and preceding his meticulously rendered double portraits, the burgeoning naturalism of the present work heralds a new direction in Hockney’s practice that would bring forth some of the most iconic and acclaimed masterworks of his career. The work belongs to a group of four paintings based on photographs that Hockney took during a European sojourn with his companion Peter Schlesinger during the autumn of 1968. Together they visited the home of Oscar-winning film director Tony Richardson in the south of France, near St. Tropez; the same trip inspired the artist’s 1972 masterpiece, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). Hockney travelled all around the area of Richardson’s home, and began to use photography in earnest, not.mes rely for snapshots, but for visual information that would help him with his compositions. He voraciously photographed the rolling hills and sparkling sea of Saint-Tropez, and also in the nearby town of Sainte-Maxime, the inspiration for the present work. Together with the other paintings from this period, L’Arbois, Sainte-Maxime represents Hockney's first serious use of his own photographs as inspiration – a watershed moment that has continued to influence his practice even today. Confronted with deeply pigmented forms of luscious foliage set against the elegant geometry of modernist architecture, we are transported to a space that is at once an aesthetically seductive and finely composed mise-en-scène: informed by photographic, cinematic, and art historical precedent, this is a perfect expression of Hockney’s unique Pop dialect.
David Hockney’s South of France Pictures
Painted shortly after the success of Hockney’s celebrated run of five solo exhibitions in 1966, L’Arbois, Sainte-Maxime belongs to an era of burgeoning popularity for the young English artist. As early as 1963, Hockney had been making trips abroad, creating graphic journals of his visits. His first adventure was to Egypt, at the invitation of London’s The Sunday t.mes s, where he sketched numerous drawings in graphite and coloured pencils of the city of Cairo and the various hotels in which he stayed. This desire to visually record the fruits of his wanderlust has remained with the artist, and is as potent today as it was over sixty years ago. Hockney’s move to Los Angeles at the end of 1963 resulted in a series of shifts in his style, technique and a more open embrace and declaration of his own unique visual vocabulary. He began to use the more elastic medium of acrylic paint, rather than oil, and started to use photography for purposes of documentation (whether cataloguing portraits, male nudes, shadows or swimming pools). He became much more sophisticated in his attention to playful composition and, especially, the way light and shadow served to flatten rather than give dimension to his deliberately compressed surfaces. His paintings of California life catapulted the artist onto the international art stage, to the extent that he was celebrated with no fewer than five solo exhibitions in 1966. It was in 1966 that Hockney met Peter Schlesinger, a young Californian art student who would become Hockney’s closest companion and favourite model. Painted at the height of Hockney’s romance with Schlesinger, the present work speaks to a t.mes of both personal and professional fulfilment.
In 1968 Hockney and Schlesinger returned to London, where Schlesinger was enrolled at the Slade School of Art. Peter Webb notes, though, that by October 1968 “… the couple were traveling again, this t.mes to the film director Tony Richardson’s home in the south of France … [Hockney] discovered that they shared not only common roots and a northern sense of humour but also a love of sunshine and the clear light of the south” (Peter Webb, Portrait of David Hockney, New York 1988, p. 100). Having started seriously to pursue photography as not only an autonomous means of artistic expression, but also as an instrument to further develop his draughtsmanship and painterly techniques, Hockney explored the area around Richardson’s home extensively photographing scenes and vistas in the nearby town of Sainte-Maxime. It was here that the artist’s lifelong love affair with France began; he would return again and again over the decades, ultimately settling in Normandy in the late 2010s. The Hotel L’Arbois, which inspired the present work, sits directly on the waterfront, across the bay from Saint-Tropez; Hockney’s chosen view intriguingly ignores the sparkling sea lying just to the left and focuses instead on the crisp linear architecture and verdant stone pine tree. The meticulous detail of the composition markedly signals a new direction for the next phase of Hockney’s career, which would result in the celebrated suite of double portraits that now mark the apex of his career: Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968, Private collects ion); Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott (1969, Private collects ion); and Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1970-71, Tate, London).
Right: David Hockney, source photograph for the present work, 1968. © David Hockney
The original source for this work is a developed photograph squared up for ease of transition to canvas, reminiscent of the working processes of the Old Masters in which a cartoon drawing would be transferred to canvas by blowing charcoal through pinholes in the paper sheet. For Hockney, such a process had a profound effect on his subsequent paintings. He notes that “in a way [that] was when the naturalism in the pictures began to get stronger… In America, it was the period when photo-realism was becoming known, and I was slightly interested in it… it was similar to using a photograph from Physique Pictorial, doing an interpretation of a photograph” (David Hockney in Nikos Stangos, ed., David Hockney by David Hockney, 2nd ed., New York 1988, p. 160). Furthermore, an extant drawing based on the photograph illustrates the development of Hockney’s composition, with the central tree clearly emerging as the primary focus from the outset. In that drawing, the leaves and branches are emphatically worked up with shiny layers of graphite accretions, contrasting radically with the delicately hatched-in architectural backdrop. In the final composition, the present canvas, Hockney’s exquisite attention to detail and superbly executed surface retells the determination of his constant endeavour to create a new painterly idiom. Indeed, the prominent, richly textured trees in the foreground are rendered with the fidelity of a portrait study, presaging the artist’s later preoccupation with the Yorkshire landscape and the many imposing trees as subjects in his works of the early 2000s.
In addition to his own photography and drawing, Hockney here also plays with preconceptions associated with the grand tradition of landscape painting, and specifically the ground-breaking developments of the Twentieth Century in which the genre’s legacy had been confronted, appropriated, and re-invented. From the flattening of the perspectival picture plane and attention to surface schema pioneered by Henri Matisse with such revolutionary Fauvist pictures as Les toits de Collioure, 1905, to Ed Ruscha’s dramatically simplified renderings that portray quotidian structures as actors in urban dramas such as his Standard Stations of the early 1960s, L’Arbois, Sainte-Maxime continues this interrogation of everyday scenes to recast the apparently banal as complex images that invite profound contemplation on the nature of visual cognition and perception. Indeed, Matisse’s work in particular resonates with Hockney’s landscapes, given the French master’s similar fascination with the coastal towns in the south of France, from Collioure to Nice. An abiding influence on Hockney, Matisse’s use of bold, unmodulated colour and vigorous, simplified forms can be traced throughout the British artist’s career, from his early realistic pictures such as A Bigger Splash of 1967 (Tate, London) all the way through to his later, more abstracted works such as Garrowby Hill (2017, Private collects ion). In these works, as in L’Arbois, Sainte-Maxime, although the art of photography remains an important stage in the construction of the work, the viewer is made most aware of Hockney’s skill and intervention as a painter.
Within L’Arbois, Sainte-Maxime, the acute precision of line that belongs to the draughtsman and the photographer is aligned with the painter’s sensitivity to colour, here flattened to the point that colour becomes an abstract building block in itself. This is a painting that majestically declares Hockney’s embrace of three artistic disciplines which, in isolation, he stands commended but, in terms of his synthetic process and unification of photography, painting and drawing, he is almost unique in post-war art. However, above all else, the present painting explores the relationship between painting and photography – a pursuit which propelled much of Hockney’s practice in the later 1960s and into the 1970s. As Marco Livingstone notes, the present work reveals Hockney's fascination with the technical possibilities offered by the camera, and that he “did allow himself for a moment to be seduced by what he discovered with it” (Marco Livingstone, David Hockney, 3rd ed., London 1996, p. 116). Here, shadows are conspicuously missing, serving to flatten the surface, allowing Hockney to emphasise the effects of strong sunlight on pure planes of colour. The artist has also removed any extraneous detail, so that the focus remains entirely on the trees and the way they obscure the hotel beyond. Devoid of human figures, the composition is built from coordinated patterns of form, into which we as viewers are inextricably drawn. Indeed, as Livingstone again elaborated, “Unconsciously, perhaps, a sense of isolation emerges, not so much the sombre melancholia of Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings as a feeling of aloneness as induced by Edward Hopper’s pictures of deserted American city streets” (Marco Livingstone in: Peter Webb, Portrait of David Hockney, London 1988, p. 83). Here the composition and subject invite an extraordinary interaction with the painting: willingly we enter Hockney’s narrative while also remaining acutely conscious of its meticulous construction through the purely formal elements of line and colour.
Right: Ed Ruscha, Standard Station With 10-Cent Western Being Torn in Half, 1964. Private collects ion, on extended loan to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Art © 2024 Ed Ruscha Bridgeman Images
Thus Hockney’s painting is not only a masterful technical rendition of skilled draughtsmanship, but also a highly sophisticated conceptual undertaking. Situated between his seminal Californian swimming pool paintings and the ground-breaking “naturalism” of his double portraits, the present work investigates the relationship between photography and painting that neatly dovetailed with the current of photorealism running alongside the Pop movement in the 1960s. For Hockney, the use of photography fuelled a broader interest in perception and how we truly see the world, ultimately concluding in his 2001 thesis Secret Knowledge that paint has the power to re-inscribe the temporal dimensions eliminated by photography: that the slow, deliberate act of putting brush to canvas offered a more accurate rendition of human vision, accounting for the complex processes that allow us to fully observe our surroundings. In the artist’s words, “Painting comes much closer to the real experience of watching what happens in life. Painting is more real than photography. It’s got t.mes in it, layers of t.mes ” (the artist quoted in Peter Adam, Hockney at Work, BBC documentary, 1981). Further channelled through the intermediary step of drawing, the present work translates the source photograph through Hockney’s compositional decision-making and pictorial idiom into the resulting, precisely balanced canvas. Thus, L’Arbois, Sainte-Maxime is a painting that majestically declares Hockney’s emphatic embrace of all three disciplines, in a manner that distinguished him as a singular master of the Twentieth Century.