David Hockney was 29 years old when he came to Betty Freeman’s house to photograph her swimming pool. Scouting locations for the pool paintings that would make him a household name, he took preparatory snaps of his partner, Peter Schlesinger, emerging naked from the water. And yet something about his aloof and quietly eccentric host, who dusted the hunting trophies while a handsome young man padded around her patio in the altogether, intrigued the artist. So he asked whether he might photograph her too, and she agreed.
Completed a year later, Beverly Hills Housewife (1966/7) shows a beautiful woman standing outside a beautiful house. The scene is lit by an unbroken sun, her blond bob is undisturbed by any breeze, a lush fern sets off her popping pink dress. She is surrounded by the symbols of mid-century American prosperity: a chair by Le Corbusier, a tasteful modernist sculpture. We don’t need the title to know the place and time, because Hockney’s paintings have come to define them in our imagination: shimmering water and scattered light, bright colours and reflective surfaces, a clean and impassive contentment.
In this comparably polished mix of anecdote and art history, James Cahill uses Hockney’s painting as a “primary source” for his own multifaceted portrait of the working-class Yorkshireman who fell in love with Los Angeles, of the wealthy art collector who became his friend and ally, and of the city that would go on to shape the culture in which we now live. After potted introductions to these central characters, Cahill starts by unpacking the “lifestyle-magazine version of bourgeois affluence” that Beverly Hills Housewife presents to us.
In doing so, he provides an object lesson in how to read a picture, drawing the reader’s attention to the details that illuminate it. Note, for example, that Freeman’s face is doubled by the stuffed head of an antelope shot by her husband and mounted on the wall. Recast as a cultured woman trapped in a loveless marriage with a conspicuously absent big-game hunter, Freeman’s blank expression comes to seem melancholy rather than merely vacant (that the self-deprecating title was her idea suggests a disillusioned kind of wit). Hockney at his best was a narrative painter, and his pictures invite and are animated by such interpretations.
Yet a portrait always tells us as much about its maker as its muse, and so Cahill moves on to what this painting might reveal of the artist’s own ideas and affinities. Most instructively, he shows how Hockney adopted the compositional model of the annunciation, in which the Virgin Mary receives news of her fate from the angel Gabriel, and painted Freeman into Mary’s place. This allows Cahill to elaborate on the artist’s debt to the early Renaissance masters, and then to speculate on the dynamic between this young, gay man and the glamorous older woman he represents (with gentle irony) as the Madonna: victim and mother, protector and icon. Like all good criticism, the simple observations underpinning these speculations seem so obvious once pointed out that they cannot be unseen, and change the picture for ever.
The difficulty the book runs into is that there is only so much to unpack. Hockney was a painter of enclosed worlds, from which the otherwise inescapable facts of Los Angeles life – the Watts riots, choking smog, Vietnam – are excluded. This does not diminish him as an artist any more than it diminishes Vermeer, and Cahill is justified in arguing that “meaning might reside in so-called veneers” as much as in what lies beneath them. But it does make his work a difficult subject for the kind of ekphrastic exercise that requires hidden layers of meaning to excavate.
So, recognising that Hockney was more interested in the “concealments of portraiture, its feints and deflections” than in exposing any hidden truth, Cahill follows his lead. Rather than digging up the painting’s glossy surface, he glances off it into anecdotal histories of vanguard American music (of which Freeman was an influential supporter), the mythologised Los Angeles art scene (with Edward Kienholz’s darkness as counterpoint to Hockney’s light), and much else besides. There are heroes (the hobo composer Harry Partch) and villains (the painter Clyfford Still, whose egomania and vanity is entertainingly monstrous even when set against the high bar maintained by the abstract expressionist movement).
At times this can feel tendentious, and the connections that link the period back to the painting somewhat strained. But it is testament to the agility of his prose and the lightness of Cahill’s touch that the reader is unlikely to mind, and so this portrait of multiple subjects continues to feel enlightening and engaging long after the painting at its heart has been exhausted. His book is in this respect much like its primary source: charming, clever, and difficult to pin down.
• The Beverly Hills Housewife: Hockney’s Californian Muse and the World Beyond the Pool by James Cahill is published by Thames and Hudson. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
