Картина Дэвида Хокни «Большее брызжение» стала иконой современного искусства за способность передавать сложные эмоции

Are paintings advertisements for feelings? Hockney’s 1969 A Bigger Splash certainly feels like one. To a contemporary viewer, the painting is mid-20th-century Los Angeles envisioned. A world of carefree, dizzy summers, open-top car rides, Mies Van der Rohe boxes – a sensationalised montage of images from modern renditions of the epoch and pop culture contemporary to it. At a first glance, this painting might look like yet another addition to the time capsule. But what makes A Bigger Splash’s legacy so lasting is its ability to capture the very feeling that underpinned the cultural moment it was made in. Like all enticing paintings, it works with tension to provoke both dissonance and satisfaction; to pique the viewer’s curiosity. The image follows a uniform scheme of straight lines and blocks from which the wild splash is the only relief. Curiously, this tension does not pit the two opposing forces against each other – there is no narrative of good versus evil – rather, the painting creates tension between two equally pleasurable things: the man-made, manufactured pleasure the house offers, and the unfettered visceral pleasure of surrendering oneself to nature’s chaos in the pool. It does not prize one of its components over the other, it presents the two in unison. In this way, A Bigger Splash is a masterpiece of irony. Rather than bemoan or relish the jaded pleasures of modernity, this painting is bemused by them. It does not preach or slyly suggest a moral stance on the act of leisure it depicts; it simply embodies it. For me, this is part of the painting’s ingenuity: like the pool, the luxurious villa, it does not need to exist – but this does not mean that it must justify its existence. A Bigger Splash is a masterpiece of irony. This type of frivolous pleasure is cleverly immortalised in the splash. In this world, moments of fleeting joy can last forever. Does this defeat their purpose, relegate them to the same soulless regime of eternal perfection that the buildings embody? By giving us perpetual access to two types of beauty – one reproducible, the other ephemeral – Hockney presents us with the ultimate dilemma of modern times. We are now long accustomed to the play pool of pleasures that is the Western world’s quotidian; the labyrinth of instantly gratifying distractions that we wander into every day. But somehow this painting distills the modern age into two key components: joyous natural sensations, arbitrary and uncontrolled, and the reassuring solidity of a human edifice. Another way in which the painting jars delightfully: it evokes the modern onslaught of pleasure with an unexpectedly sterilised scene and the isolated liquid rupture that breaks its silence. Perhaps the compositional and aesthetic irony even represents the paradox of America: artificial environments; rules; the fairytale dream of homogeneity, versus the inevitable overspill of hedonism that a society based on the individual provokes; the indelible stain of inconsistency that characterises the human experience, no matter how well planned the setting in which it takes place. At this point A Bigger Splash would probably tell me to cool off. This painting does not wed itself to any one concept or message, rather it makes covert suggestions through aesthetics. A Bigger Splash reconciles the nonlinear narrative panels of Ancient Eastern art and the European Renaissance single-point perspective technique to create a composition truly revolutionary. It appears to fall in between two- and three-dimensionality, resembling both a montage of shapes laid on top of each other and a comprehensible scene as if seen from the human eye. This near optical illusion is key to the work’s greatness. The splash does situate itself in the foreground, the diving board protrudes into the middle ground, the glass doors of the villa reflect what we assume to be behind the canvas’s eye, but the sequence of events and the space in which they occur can still be read as one continuous plane. Precisely because total realism is not on A Bigger Splash’s conceptual or aesthetic agenda, it manages to engage the senses in multiple interesting and effective ways. It is even blocks of muted colour that convey the overwhelming sensations of hot and cold. The cream and nude house is dry; just looking at the dehydrated salmon strip of the patio burns the soles of one’s feet. It is a relief, then, thirst-quenching even, to see the splash rebel in a both cooling and ecstatic vision of uncontrolled movement. Morally, it is tantalisingly impartial. A Bigger Splash captures two vehicles of pleasure that modern life offers. That Hockney achieved this in one of the cradles of modernity, at a time when it was just becoming apparent what a glorious and conflicting age America, and humanity, had walked into, makes this painting iconic. A Bigger Splash does not use the tactics the Don Drapers of the time used to sell products as feelings, it does not offer its centrepiece as a refuge from the noise of the outside world. Instead, it presents the uncanny product of the combination of material and carnal pleasures. In this sense, this work is an answer to the advertising industry; a visual fulfilment of the myriad joys that advertising professes to offer. Morally, it is tantalisingly impartial. Hockney’s most famous work is literally groundbreaking. And constructed with the striking modernist lines of 1960s L.A., dressed in the haze of a baking Californian summer, more than half a century later it is impossible to resist contemplation of it. Rest in peace, and fun, and sun, David Hockney.