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.
Reviews
The spirit of E. M. Forster is alive and well in James Cahill.
— Edmund White on James Cahill's writing
So much to enjoy, to contemplate, to wonder at, and to be lost in.
— Stephen Fry on James Cahill's writing
Sensual, treacherous, and elegiac.
— Maggie Hambling on James Cahill's writing
I love this book. It is truly illuminating, and seems to inhabit that particular quality of Californian light—an extraordinary way of navigating friendship, place, and collecting.
— Edmund de Waal
Cahill's history of a painting doubles as a portrait of Los Angeles—the quiet protagonist of twentieth-century culture that gave Hockney, and all of us, so many images, myths, desires, and delusions that still shape the way we see the world today.
— Alex Israel
In order to understand David Hockney, you need to know about Betty Freeman. With novelistic and poetic skill, this book evokes an all-but-lost universe.
— Sir Norman Rosenthal
Contributors
James Cahill
Author
James Cahill is a British art critic, curator, and author. He has written for Apollo, CURA, Elephant, Frieze, The Burlington Magazine, Times Literary Supplement, and others, and is the author of Tiepolo Blue, Lives of the Artists: David Hockney, and Ways of Being: Advice for Artists by Artists.
