David Hockney's 'A Bigger Splash' and Its Evolution Traced in Sotheby's Video

David Hockney, who died last week, created the iconic 1967 painting 'A Bigger Splash', a distillation of Southern California life by a northern Englishman. The work evolved from two earlier paintings from 1966, 'A Little Splash' and 'The Splash', inspired by a photograph on a swimming-pool maintenance guide cover from the late 1950s. A Sotheby's video reveals how Hockney's image grew more abstracted with each iteration. For the third version, Hockney built up the composition with flat color blocks before adding detail, spending a full week on the splash alone. Later, his 1971 'Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)' sold for $90.3 million at Christie's in 2018. 'A Bigger Splash' adorned the cover of Reyner Banham's book 'Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies'.