“When David Hockney first arrived in Los Angeles in 1963, he realized that swimming pools were a prominent feature of Californian suburbia and so he started to depict them. This particular lithograph is a highly unconventional image consisting of an extremely tightly cropped view of a swimming pool, diving board, the paving bordering the pool and a small patch of grass.

Beneath that is naught but a large sheet of water cut off before it reaches the other end of the pool. The viewpoint seems to be set just a little above all these elements. We look down on the ensemble from an angle pitched just above it. One instinctively feels that the image should form part of a larger whole, but it does not. There is no ‘setting’ as such, no suggestion of the garden in which the pool must logically exist. Hockney is relentlessly single-minded and daring. He limits his subject matter to the pool and nothing but the pool.

The tiles in the interior of the pool form bold crisscrossing trellis patterns that emphasize the shape and structure of the pool.

An unseen filtration plant pumps in fresh water, and its action displaces the watery masses and stirs up currents. In the present work Hockney has captured this movement through a plethora of wriggly curved blue shapes advancing, like a shoal of eels, through the water.

The lithograph relates to a period of experiment when the artist was seeking means of suggesting the movement of sunlit water through various forms of stylized patterning in paintings such as ‘Sunbather’ (1966), ‘Portrait of Nick Wilder’ (1966), ‘Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool’(1964) and ‘Peter getting out of Nick’s Pool’ (1966) where the movement of the water is rendered as a mesh of curvilinear rhythmic lines. All these are recognized as among the artist’s homoerotic masterpieces conveying the hedonistic lifestyle that typified the city of the Angels.

The obsession with pools and water continued into the seventies producing works like ‘Rubber Ring floating in a Swimming Pool’ (1971), ‘Pool and Steps, le Nid du Duc’ (1971), ‘Swimming Pool with Rubber Mat’ (1976) and ‘Plastic Sheet floating in a Pool’ (1977).

In 1978 Hockney produced the ‘Paper Pools’. These were executed on paper pulp which absorbed the pigments which did not just lie on the surface. They sank into the new paper pulp medium which proved ideally suited to capturing the delicate shades of shimmering light bouncing off water. Colour is saturated and surfaces iridescent. ‘Le Plongeur’ (1978) is an ideal example.

There is no doubt that all these pool pictures form a significant and innovative part of Hockney’s oeuvre, and the lithograph under consideration forms an integral part of it.” - Lloyd Pollak