The painting presents a swimming pool in the south of France, a day so still it seems to hold its breath, green hills folded behind like a promise.
Two figures inhabit this hush, destined never to meet. One is submerged, swimming toward the edge in white trunks, his body blurred by the water, rendered expressionless, faceless. The other stands at the rim in a pink jacket, dry, upright, rendered with the crispness of a photograph, gazing down at the swimmer with the idle absorption of a man skimming through a book.
Everyone holds their gaze at the pink jacket, because he is the one the eye can claim. Yet, I think that the painting belongs to the other, and that blurring effect of that chlorinated water might tell us something more.
Two Photographs on a Floor
David Hockney made it in 1972, conjured from an ending and a stroke of accident. Two photographs had tumbled together on his studio floor: one of a figure swimming underwater, the other of a boy gazing downward. In their accidental pairing, he glimpsed something he had not yet managed to say aloud.
He had tried once before, in the autumn of 1971, the very year Peter Schlesinger left him after five years together, but when the composition refused to yield, he destroyed the canvas. The following April, with a New York exhibition looming, he flew to a borrowed pool near Saint-Tropez. He photographed a friend swimming underwater, then returned to London and took a photo of Schlesinger in Kensington Gardens, pink jacket, eyes on the grass.
Out of these borrowed fragments, in a fortnight of eighteen-hour days, he assembled a scene that never existed: the swimmer was a stand-in, the garden pretended to be France, and the man at the pool’s edge was already gone.
The Only Eyes in the Picture
Notice what he did with the arrangement. To the one who left him, he gave everything the painting could bestow: dry land, upright stature, a profile cut clean as glass, and most of all, the only eyes in the picture
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He kept himself out of the frame, though the frame is nothing but him. He named it Portrait of an Artist, and the title suggests where the artist has gone: not at the edge, where love stands, crisp and intact, but in the water, where the one who was loved is quietly dissolving.
The Mother Who Stayed in Focus
There is a page in Italian literature that explains this geometry of loss and love. In 1915, in the first year of the war, Luigi Pirandello lost his mother, and instead of writing an elegy he wrote a conversation, the second of his Colloqui coi personaggi, in which her shadow returns to him and he tells her what her death has actually changed. Not her presence: tu sei viva, viva com’eri, he tells her, alive exactly as you were, alive with the same reality I gave you for years from far away, and alive for as long as I live. Her image in him has survived her completely; his grief has left it untouched, vivid, in focus.
What has died is something else, and he finds it with terrible precision: io non sono più vivo, e non sarò vivo per te mai più. I am no longer alive, and I will never again be alive for you. She keeps existing in his eyes; he has stopped existing in hers. And then the sentence that opens like a trapdoor under every mourner: quelli che si credono vivi credono anche di piangere i loro morti e piangono invece una loro morte.
Those who believe themselves alive believe they are weeping for their dead, and are weeping instead for a death of their own.
The Geometry of the Pool
This is the geometry of the pool. The man in the pink jacket stands clear and whole because that is what love does with its object: five years from the beginning and a year past the end, Hockney could still keep Schlesinger upright, dry, every hair in place, just as Pirandello held his mother. Nothing of the beloved is lost when the beloved leaves; the image lingers, pitiless in its clarity.
What dissolves is the other thing: the self that lived in the beloved’s keeping, the version of you that existed only in eyes that have now closed. That is the figure in the water: the artist as he survived in Schlesinger’s withdrawn gaze, a body losing its outline in the element that once bore it, a face that cannot be found because no one is searching for it anymore. When we mourn a love, it is not the person who remains that we mourn. We mourn ourselves, the one they carried, the one who drowned when they turned away.
With a Dead Man’s Eyes
Hockney died at his home in London on 11 June this year, at eighty-eight. Schlesinger is seventy-eight and lives in New York, so the man at the pool’s edge has outlasted the man who placed him there.
In the colloquio, before she fades, Pirandello’s mother leaves her son a single instruction: guarda le cose anche con gli occhi di quelli che non le vedono più, look at things also with the eyes of those who no longer see them, and the sorrow of it, she promises, will make them more sacred and more beautiful.
it’s art is free: one essay every few weeks, when something is worth saying.
If you know someone who always looks at the wrong figure first, send them this.
Well done! I have never seen this painting before, and I didn’t know the origins of it, so that was a very interesting read. There’s just something so formal about the standing figure and now I understand the possibilities about why that is.
I will not look at this painting the same way again.