The Beverly Hills Housewife

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 visited a wealthy Los Angeles art collector and dedicated patron of contemporary music. Her name was Betty Freeman. He had intended to paint her swimming pool, but was rapidly entranced by Freeman herself, a deadpan blonde with a dreamlike air. Hockney immortalized Freeman in Beverly Hills Housewife (1966–67), a sunlit vision of the collector on the terrace of her home. Evoking the light and glamour of 1960s Los Angeles, the picture is one of the artist’s most seductive works, but has always carried an air of mystery. Who was the woman in pink?

Shifting between the lives of the artist and subject, this book tells the story of the first in a celebrated sequence of large-scale portraits that spanned the following decade, and takes a fresh look at a seminal phase of Hockney's career. Simultaneously, it evokes the life and persona of the woman in the painting – the 'housewife' and art collector who went on to be hailed as ‘a modern-day Medici’. They came from radically different backgrounds, yet the Yorkshire-born artist and the Californian art lover were unlikely mirror images of one another, each poised in a moment of becoming.

Like Hockney driving through the Hollywood Hills, Beverly Hills Housewife meanders – interweaving Hockney's discovery of Los Angeles with Freeman’s evolution from aspiring pianist to photographer and philanthropist – but never loses focus on the art itself. Interweaving art history and anecdote, visual analysis and reminiscence, this is an eclectic and engrossing study of an artist, his subject and their converging worlds.