The pedigree pool: from Matisse to Joan Didion (and a few drops of politics)

Reading Tip: These lines can be accompanied by any song by Joni Mitchell, whom Norman Seeff photographed floating in a Los Angeles pool.

"I'm going to build my own pool." These words were not said by someone heated after spending an August morning on a beach in Alicante. Matisse pronounced them when he returned from a swimming pool in Cannes and suffered its “scorching sun”. That day in 1952 he had gotten up saying: "I want to see people diving." Lydia Delectorskaya, his right-hand man and model, took him to his favorite swimming pool, but the painter must not have liked the experience and on his return he uttered that phrase, which was the origin of one of the most curious swimming pools in the history of art. Matisse wanted his pool and he had his pool. He built it with paper and

, his famous

.

He asked Delectorskaya to wrap white paper around the wall of a room in his house at the Hotel Regina in Nice;

on it he was cutting and pasting figures of swimmers, aquatic creatures and those bathers that he had insisted on seeing.

This work is called

, it is guarded at MoMA and is rarely exhibited.

When this happens you have to go see it: it is a rarity.

More information

• Picasso, journey in times of covid

• Matisse behind the window

All pools designed or drawn by artists are. The strange thing is that there is no more. A swimming pool is a blank (or blue) canvas that is rarely used as such. Now that the billionaires are building mansions with private spas and rooms for Zoom, it would be the occasion to commission artists' signature pools. Here is that idea. To inspire we launched a close example. It is El Martinete, a Marbella property that belonged to Antonio El Bailarín and which has a pool by Picasso himself. This phrase has something of a trap. The painter did not go inside to paint it, but as a headline he imposes. The story began on Picasso's 80th birthday; At that party Antonio danced before him and the painter, enraptured, drew a portrait of him and gave it to him.Years later, the dancer decided that he would transfer it to the pool floor of his estate, which was sold in 2018 for 15 million euros. This pool, another rarity, brings together a myth within a myth. Perhaps that is why an image of her was the publication that most

received on the Instagram of

magazine

in all of 2020. It makes sense that the year we live locked up, Picasso's Mediterranean pool will take away the digital love of 14,000 people.

Henri Matisse's work 'The Swimming Pool' during an exhibition dedicated to the French artist at MoMA in 2014. Anadolu Agency / Getty Images

And here, like every summer, David Hockney, the great pool painter of the 20th century, appears. He did go into an (empty) pool to paint it. One morning in 1988, he stood at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles with a yellow armhole shirt, a hat, a can of blue paint, and four hours later the hotel had its Hockney. Years before, this British artist pronounced a phrase of those that are born with the vocation of appointment. "It took me two weeks to paint a two-second jump." He was referring to the

, the water splashed after a jump from the

painting

, the most famous of the series of swimming pool paintings that he painted in the mid-1960s. Hockney, as a good Briton, was fascinated with the piscinil culture of California;

he saw in her hedonism, heat, eroticism, modern architecture and movement.

With all that and with the inheritance of two names that appear above, Picasso and Matisse, Hockney created his own language.

The water in his paintings splashes on us.

On hot days like these, you want to find your pools and stand in front of them.

It seems that the temperature drops 10 degrees;

or go up, depending on how you look at it.

Scene from the film 'The Swimmer', 1968.Columbia Pictures / Entertainment Pictures / ContactPhoto / Columbia Pictures / Entertainment Pictures / ContactPhoto

If Hockney was the painter of the Californian swimming pools, Cheever was its writer. But this year we are going to leave it alone; We take the poor man out for a walk every summer. The fault is his: who can think of writing a story in which the protagonist crosses his county swimming from pool to pool. As not to use it every August. Not this one, this one we will turn to Joan Didion, another ideologist from the pool. On Pinterest you can find quotes from him on the subject. The most popular says: "A swimming pool is water made available and useful and, as such, it is infinitely relaxing to the Western eye." For this Sacramento writer, a pool is order and desire and here is another of her famous phrases: "I've always wanted a pool and I've never had one." And one more: "Water is important for those who do not have it, like control."His obsession with water permeates much of his work. It's funny: in Google Images there are no images of her in any pool. It's easy to imagine her on her curb, dressed, watching, silently smoking.

Back when Didion wrote about swimming pools and Hockney painted them, there were many in California. According to an article by Frank Mulkahi published by the

in March 1961, that year some 150,000 swimming pools occupied seven square miles of the region's surface. That is a lot of water. This brings us to Cheever, who seems impossible not to grab by the shirt at this time. The protagonist of

gives name to a concept that appears in

, the great essay by Jorge Dioni López (Arpa, 2021). He talks about the Ned Merrill index, the number of pools per 100 residents. The thesis of the book is that urbanism creates ideology and that swimming pools, like roundabouts, speak of a country model that favors individualism, competitiveness and that leads to dispersed cities, to self-sufficient and isolated bubbles. This index gives clues of how and who lives in each place. For Dioni the pool is political; for Hockney it is hedonism; for Didion order and for Cheever (promised, this is the last time), metaphor. A pool is never innocent, even if it looks good.