The Beverly Hills Housewife

Hockney’s Californian Muse and the World Beyond the Pool

Free UK delivery on this item.

This brand new item is available with free UK delivery using Royal Mail tracked services.

Please note: the price advertised is as low as we can go — we do not accept or respond to offers. We're also unable to accommodate special requests added in your order notes at checkout. If you have a specific request or requirement, please contact us before ordering so we can check if it's something we can help with.

‘Truly illuminating’ Edmund de Waal ‘With novelistic and poetic skill, this book evokes an all-but-lost universe’ Sir Norman Rosenthal A panoramic view of 1960s LA and Californian culture through the eyes of artist and subject: the youthful fascination of David Hockney and the knowing gaze of enigmatic socialite Betty Freeman. In the summer of 1966, David Hockney paid a visit to a wealthy Los Angeles art collector. Her name was Betty Freeman. He had intended to paint her swimming pool, but was rapidly entranced by Freeman herself. Hockney, soon to embark on a series of Los Angeles paintings that would become icons of their time and place, immortalized Freeman in Beverly Hills Housewife (1966–67), a sunlit vision of the collector on the terrace of her modernist home. Evoking the light and easy glamour of 1960s Los Angeles, the painting is one of the artist’s most seductive works, but it has always carried an air of mystery. Who was the woman in pink? Like Hockney driving through the Hollywood Hills, James Cahill meanders – interweaving the artist’s discovery of Los Angeles with Freeman’s own evolution from aspiring pianist to photographer, philanthropist and collector – but never loses focus on the art. Oscillating between art history and anecdote, this is an eclectic study of an artist, his enigmatic muse and the beginning of a friendship that would shape the course of each of their lives.

Product Details