Hockney’s unrelenting concentration on producing paintings continues into the new year. Particularly labor intensive and emotionally harrowing is Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which starts with two snapshots that Hockney notices lying adjacent on the floor of his studio: one of a figure swimming underwater; the other of a standing figure with eyes downcast, who becomes Peter Schlesinger in Hockney’s painted version. 

Just two months before it is to be exhibited at André Emmerich Gallery in New York, Hockney entirely reworks the seven-by-ten-foot canvas, flying to Le Nid du Duc, to better capture, specifically at Tony Richardson’s pool, a figure swimming underwater, with Mo McDermott posing as Schlesinger.[NESTED] Writing in the New York Times, James Mellow assesses the Emmerich show as “distinctly a performance. [Hockney] is an artist with a keen eye, both for the social scene in which Pop art made its stand—that is, the world of fashionable and eclectic modern taste—and for the stylistic vagaries of the art world in general.”

Back in the studio, Hockney is stalled on a double-portrait of George Lawson and Wayne Sleep, which will remain unfinished (ultimately, Hockney donates it to Tate Britain in 2014). The painting marks a need for closure on his several years of working in a naturalistic style, which he has come to consider as too reliant on a photo-realism.

In the summer, Hockney keeps busy sketching while traveling to Baden-Baden, Nice, and Corsica with Henry Geldzahler and Nicky Rea. His internationalism is evident in his December solo show at John Kasmin’s gallery in London, where his two weeks in Japan the previous autumn are evoked in Japanese Rain on Canvas—with liquid drips across its surface—and the mannerist Mt. Fuji and Flowers—which shows a jonquil arrangement, sampled from a florist’s manual, in front of a landscape, adapted from a postcard.