Why David Hockney’s 1967 masterpiece is newly poignant after his death

Though A Bigger Splash appears, on its surface, to be a meticulously observed moment in time, it was, in fact, a fusion of personal and borrowed experience. The painting owes its most immediate origin to the artist’s chance discovery of a technical manual about swimming pool construction. A photograph of a splash made by an unseen diver and diving board in Swimming Pools, published by Sunset Books in 1959, stripped of a pair of poolside onlookers, was soon fused on Hockney’s canvas with a stylised version of the building behind them, similar to ones he had recently been committing to his drawing pad.