"The paintings of these years were his best to date and there is one good one after another: Beverly Hills Housewife, Portrait of Nick Wilder, Savings and Loan Building, A Lawn Sprinkler, A Neat Lawn, and A Bigger Splash. All are detached, all breathe a clarity of light, perception and realized intention that make Hockney's new and greater ambition to paint the world of today dead-on…"—Henry Geldzahler

Belonging to a series of monumental canvases painted in 1967, David Hockney’s A Neat Lawn is a seminal example of the artist’s California Dreaming paintings. Here, Hockney presents a Los Angelesian house set against bright blue sky with a perfectly tended lawn nurtured by a sprinkler, the spewing spindrifts offering the only indication of movement in this otherwise static scene. A Neat Lawn demonstrates one of Hockney’s first sustained experimentations on the dynamics of light and water, as exemplified in the strong shadows cast by the eave and across the hedges as well as the glistening blades of grass. Hockney recalled, “for the first time it became an interesting thing for me, light.”ⁱ A Neat Lawn was first shown alongside A Bigger Splash and A Lawn Sprinkler in 1968 at the artist’s sensational solo exhibition at Kasmin Gallery, London, a pivotal show that brought him to international acclaim.

Hockney took his first trip to Los Angeles in 1964 and was immediately enthralled with the sunlight, pools, and glitz and glamor of the city he had only thus far experienced through magazines and film. However, it was not until 1967 when teaching a graduate course at the University of California in Berkeley that Hockney was afforded the opportunity to celebrate his muse-city on an epic scale. Weekending in Los Angeles, where he was living on Pico Boulevard with his partner Peter Schlesinger, Hockney stayed in Berkeley during the week, where he was offered a studio on the university grounds. “In Berkeley they gave me a very large proper studio...It was the first time I’d ever had a proper studio with a north light.”ⁱⁱ It was here that Hockney embarked on his most ambitious California pictures to date, as the space and light allowed Hockney to endeavor on the largest canvases he had so far attempted, including the present work, A Bigger Splash, and The Room, Tarzana. Indeed Hockney recalled, “[In 1967] I painted more pictures than I’d ever done before....it was certainly the happiest year I spent in California.”ⁱⁱⁱ

"The one thing that had happened in Los Angeles was that I had begun to paint real things I had seen; all the paintings before that were either ideas or things I’d seen in a book and made something from. In Los Angeles, I actually began to paint the city round me…"
—David Hockney

In A Neat Lawn, the ostensible subject of Hockney’s gaze is a modest structure typical of the suburban middle-class neighborhoods located on 1033 South Bedford Street—just blocks away from Hockney’s home at the time. “As the climate and the openness of the houses reminded me of Italy,” Hockney expressed, “I borrowed a few notions from Fra Angelico and Piero Della Francesca.”^iv Exemplifying the artist’s earliest investigations into coalescing his enchantment with the suburban landscape and lifestyle, A Neat Lawn elevates the mundane to the monumental, transforming the shallow front yard of the property into a grand lawn and supersizing the innocuous structure to the majestic proportions of his sensibility.

 

At the time Hockney created A Neat Lawn, he was preoccupied with capturing the fleeting movement of water, a recurring feature of his work from this period. He expressed, “I loved the idea, first of all, of painting like Leonardo, all his studies of water...And I loved the idea of painting this thing that lasts for two seconds.”^v In an interview reflecting on Hockney’s 1968 show at his gallery, John Kasmin recalled how this fascination manifested in A Neat Lawn, “[It was] painted in and the result of David’s living in Los Angeles, and being impressed by the treatment of the lawns in that dry area and sprinklers being everywhere. I think it probably was the first time he’d noticed lawn sprinklers.”^vi In the present work, Hockney channeled his newfound captivation for lawn sprinklers as Kasmin described through his engrossment with depicting water as a formal endeavor. In the artist’s words, “I had become interested in the more general problem of painting the water, finding a way to do it. It is an interesting formal problem, really, apart from its subject matter; it is a formal problem to represent water, to describe water, because it can be anything…”^vii

 

 

Of Hockney’s works from this period, Chris Stephens observed, “Despite these attempts at a kind of realism, the works continued to be predominantly about the tension between representation and artifice.”^viii While evincing Hockney’s virtuosic handling in representing the transparency and transience of the water, the sprinkler spews rather like a dignified fountain, alerting viewers to the other seemingly realistic elements that appear too perfectly—the shapeliness and verdure of the vegetation, the immaculate façade, the salient stillness of the scene. 

"Of course all painting, no matter what you’re painting, is abstract in that it’s got to be organized. No matter what the illusion created, it is a flat canvas and it has to be organized into shapes."
—David Hockney

Showcasing Hockney’s achievement of harmonizing representation and abstraction through his singular painterly language, the various formal and technical devices he employs in A Neat Lawn ultimately lend themselves to his ongoing dialogue with the conditions governing modern painting. In the present work, Hockney divides the composition into three horizontal bands of saturated color representing the sky, lawn, and sidewalk, and reduces the façade to pure form through a series of rectangles carefully arranged along the vertical axis. Reflecting on his formal concerns, Hockney noted, “Buildings, roads, sidewalks were all straight lines, because that’s what L.A. looks like in the flatlands: long straight roads, right angles, cubes.”^ix

 

Hockney creates a tension between the depicted flatness of the architectural façade and the literal flatness of the picture plane. “Before the sprinkler was put in, before the windows were put in, it looked at one point exactly like a symmetrical Robin Denny painting. I was consciously making a slight attempt at that, to give it an ironic touch, the way all those buildings are square,” Hockney explained. “The architecture is very typical Southern Californian architecture; you can probably find a building like it anywhere there. But many of my California pictures are more carefully constructed in an abstract way.”^x

 

At once following Clement Greenberg’s emphasis on the significance of a centered composition in abstraction and the technical precision of the Minimalist grid, the image presents an ironic engagement with abstraction while rejuvenating the sterility of 1960s American Minimalism by locating its rectilinear forms through the mid-century modern architecture of Los Angeles. Further embodying his goal to locate the node of classic representational painting and modernist abstraction, the composition bears a striking evocation of a Polaroid photograph. Between 1964 and 1967, Hockney created borders in his works by leaving a strip of bare canvas around the image, on which he explained, “This wasn’t just a framing device. It started off as a formal device...By 1967 I’d realized that the reason I was using the border was that the pictures had become more fully pictorial.”^xi

"There is something jarring about the apparent depopulation of Los Angeles…Unconsciously, perhaps, a sense of isolation emerges, not so much the somber melancholia of Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings as a feeling of aloneness as indicated by Edward Hopper’s pictures of deserted American city streets."
—Marco Livingston

 

Like the best of his California Dreaming paintings, A Neat Lawn ultimately embodies the English artist’s cultural dandyism—in his words, “It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it.”^xii Hockney transports the building from a crowded urban neighborhood to an idyllic, empty oasis. As Andrew Causey noted, “Emptiness rather than the life of the bars attracted Hockney as he started to paint a city which he was never to show as bustling or populous but only as building fronts and street signs.”^xiii Rather than representing the physical and social realities of the city, Hockney’s paintings from this period reflect his idealized, voyeuristic vision of Los Angeles as a kind of exotic second Eden, much like Gauguin’s Tahiti or Matisse’s Morocco.

 

Through the entirety of its construction, A Neat Lawn epitomizes Hockney’s painterly virtuosity in utilizing formal and technical devices to realize the pinnacle of artifice through a seeming realism, abstraction through representation, and reality through perception. The seductive lawn, immaculate façade, whimsically spraying jets, and the peaceful stillness at once reflect Hockney’s loving awe for the foreign city that became his muse and the sense of artificiality he had observed, embodied in his comment, “I love California; everything is so artificial.”^xiv

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• A Neat Lawn set the world record for the artist at auction when it was last offered in 2006 at $3.6 million.

• In December 2020 in New York, Phillips achieved the world record for a landscape by Hockney with Nichols Canyon, which soared above $40,000,000.

 

ⁱ David Hockney, quoted in Nikos Stangos, ed., David Hockney by David Hockney, London, 1988, p. 151.

ⁱⁱ Ibid.
ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid.
^iv Ibid., p. 98.
^v Ibid., p. 126.
^vi John Kasmin, quoted in Monica Petzal and Cathy Courtney, “Kasmin: On David Hockney’s 1967 exhibition,” National Life Stories for Artists’ Lives, audio interview transcript, British Library, London, 2004-2016.
^vii David Hockney, quoted in “1966,” The David Hockney Foundation, online.
^viii Chris Stephens, David Hockney, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2017, p. 68.
^ix David Hockney, quoted in David Hockney, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1988, p. 85.
^x David Hockney, quoted in Nikos Stangos, ed., David Hockney by David Hockney, London, 1988, 126.
^xi Ibid., p. 125.
^xii David Hockney, quoted in Nigel Farndale, “The Talented Mr. Hockney,” The Telegraph, November 15, 2001.
^xiii Andrew Causey, quoted in John A. Walker, Cultural Offensive: America's Impact on British Art Since 1945, London, 1998, p. 136.
^xiv David Hockney, quoted in Paul Melia and Ulrich Luckhardt, “1963-1967: Images of Southern California,” David Hockney: Paintings, New York, 1994, p. 61.