Realizing the futility of his efforts, Hockney abandoned that effort and, reinvigorated, started the painting all over again. He chose a new setting, a pool by a house in the south of France that belonged to British film director Tony Richardson. He took two models with him: a photographer named John St. Clair and Mo McDermott, his studio assistant.
He took hundreds of photos of the two. St. Clair, the submerged swimmer, dived into the pool in his white briefs so many times that he eventually cracked his head on the bottom and had to stop.
McDermott acted as Schlesinger’s stand-in, wearing his reddish pink jacket by the pool. Back in London, Hockney persuaded Schlesinger to pose for him early one morning in Hyde Park for yet more photos.
Once back at his Notting Hill studio, Hockney painted for 18 hours a day on a canvas seven feet by 10. At one point, Hockney is filmed taking a Polaroid of the unfinished painting.
At another moment, he paints in Schlesinger’s brown hair with a long brush. “I must admit that I loved working on that picture, working with such intensity,” he later told biographer Sykes. “It was marvelous doing it, really thrilling.”
While he spent six months of the first version, the final “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” was finished in just two weeks, to meet a deadline for a New York show in May 1972.
In “A Bigger Splash,” Hockney, with his trademark bleached blond hair and black, owlish spectacles, stands in bright red braces and a bow tie, carefully checking out how the painting was hung and lit in the show.
It was the star exhibit, perhaps an expression of Hockney’s personal loss and his acceptance that his long affair with Schlesinger was finally over.
But as we now know, all this wasn’t without a sense of Hockney feeling cheated by what happened next. An American, apparently alerted by a British dealer, just came in off the street and bought it.
The dealer then promptly took it to an art fair in Germany and sold it to a London collector for nearly three times the price. As he wrote in “My Early Years”: “Within a year people had made far more on that picture than Kasmin (John Kasmin, his London dealer), Andre (Emmerich, his New York dealer) or I had.
Considering the effort and trouble and everything that had gone into it, it seemed such a cheap thing to do.”
We can only imagine how Hockney will feel after this sale, when the painting he worked so hard on has sold for more than 5,000 times its original price.
The current seller and the auction house will no doubt profit, but, as a Christie’s spokesperson confirmed, “the artist will not be financially benefiting.”
Christie’s hasn’t named the seller, but he’s believed to be British businessman Joe Lewis, who has famously collected postwar British art for some time.
At 81, Lewis happens to be the same age as Hockney. He also has a net worth of $5 billion.
Leave a Comment