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In 1964, David Hockney, then 27 years old, moved to Los Angeles. Coming from grey, conservative England, he had come out there despite the fact that homosexuality was still a crime. Flying over American cities on the West Coast, he was struck by the multitude of swimming pools: a luxury in his home country, a necessity in the Californian climate. He did not yet know that this would become one of the most characteristic themes of his creative output and, above all, that the market would recognize it as his expressive signature: in 2018, at Christie’s, this painting Portrait of an Artist （Two-person pool) from 1972 sold for $90.3 million, which at the time was the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by a living artist (a record later broken by Jeff Koons). For Hockney, swimming pools represented a space in which to explore the male figure, the surface of water, and the flickering light. His fascination with the subject reached such an extent that he painted the floor of the pool with the blue waves he depicted in his paintings, something he did for the pool at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The story goes that he showed up at the hotel one day in 1988 with a box of paint and a brush mounted on a broom handle: in less than four hours he had painted the bottom of the then-empty pool, creating a sense of being there. A true work of art.
In the history of 20th century art, there are many works with swimming pool as the theme, starting with Matisse – his works swimming pool He cuts the outlines of sea creatures from a roll of blue paper and attaches them to white ribbons that run horizontally along the restaurant walls, and these are the photos of jet-setters and poolside celebrities taken by Slim Aarons. As in the case of Hockney, this spot gave birth not only to paintings and photographs, but also to a veritable library of artists. Georges Braque designed a mosaic with stylized fish as early as 1963, PiscesA pool in the gardens of the Magette Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, southern France, while a painting by Picasso of the flamenco dancer Antonio Ruiz Soler, known as El Bailarín, is reproduced on the bottom of the pool. A dance floor at his villa El Martinete in Marbella.
Today, especially those hotels that are most interested in contemporary art are committed to creating unique environments for their customers, where originality and attention to detail also define the spaces reserved for sports and wellness. A recent example is Le Sirenuse, a historic boutique hotel in Positano on the Amalfi Coast, which entrusted the renovation of its swimming pool to Nicolas Party, a Swiss artist living in New York, born in 1980 and a star of the art market. Using Bisazza mosaics, Party created abstract patterns on the floor and walls of the pool in a palette between green and blue, reminiscent of waves and water, sky and clouds. The golden disk in the center recalls the sun. “Diving into the pool is like diving into the sky”, explains the artist. His portraits, landscapes and still lifes have won over collectors with their timeless style, sinuous lines and surreal colors: his works have been valued at more than 5 million euros at auction.
However, just one piece was installed this summer, by the poolside of the Belmond Hotel Castello di Casole on site It was designed by Daniel Buren, who intervened in four other hotels of the group, from Copacabana to Cape Town, in 2024. It is a large circle with the typical black and white vertical stripes – the logo of the French conceptual artist – that together with two other geometric figures, a square and a triangle, compose the beauty of the Tuscan landscape, creating three new focal points. In 2012, Karl Lagerfeld created a very different environment around the Odyssey pool at the Hotel Metropole Monte-Carlo: 15 glass panels printed with photographs representing the journey of Ulysses form a kind of contemporary frieze.
The artist’s swimming pool is a precious piece of furniture that also appears in many villas and private foundations, an approach that reveals a holistic tendency for art to permeate every living environment. Back in California, several conceptual creatives who have made history on the West Coast have already ventured into this field, from Lawrence Weiner, who created a series of iconic works, to Edward Ruscha, who also created an artist’s book that includes photographs of motel swimming pools (Nine swimming pools and a broken glass), has copied a registration sheet from the floor of his brother Paul’s bathtub in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles, with white tiles forming the words “Name,” “Address,” and “Phone.”
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