13/06/2025 Friday Compline Today I saw “The Room, Tarzana” by David Hockney. In the second room of the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s current Hockney exhibit, side by side with the famous brilliant azure swimming pools of Hockney's California period, a toned youth’s exposed buttocks immediately catch the eye of the gallery-goer, thrust upward toward the heavens in a postured erotic seduction that feigns languid nonchalance. For all the dynamism of his Yorkshire landscapes, the way Hockney brilliantly captures the stuffy static stillness of a heatlogged summer afternoon in this particular painting is what has been bouncing around my head the most since leaving the gallery. The subject of the painting, Peter Schlesinger, is depicted as a gleaming androgyne. He lies prone upon the bed, arms lying motionless by his sides. His buttocks and legs are smooth and epilated, and the slightly uneven angle of his hips indicates effeminacy and receptiveness of penetration. Importantly, we cannot see his chest, or his genitals, leaving the model's sex implied but never explicitly shown. He is all smooth buttock and toned leg, the androgynous desire-object of a sodomite. His socked feet dangle off the edge of the bed in luxurious relaxation. Under the bright saturated Hockney sun, you can imagine the light fragrance emanating off his bare legs, hot skin mingling with dried chlorine from a morning swim.

The sun is high, casting the shadows of the window frame on the slats of the drawn-back white wooden shutters; it is mid-afternoon, the drowsy, overheated period of cloistered solitary withdrawal to the bedroom between the morning’s activity and the evening’s revelry. The afternoon nap on summer vacation is a liminal middle ground of rest and stasis but also eroticism, where a beautiful, narcissistic ephebe like Hockney’s Schlesinger, aroused by his own taut, sunkissed body, may indulge in self-pleasure. Indeed the young man’s lolling, lazy, languid gaze, half-open eyes casting an unfocused line of sight out into the distance, is masturbatory, acknowledging and revelling in his own erotic allure. This beautiful autoeroticism may be a fantasy of the lecherous and leering Hockney, who manufactured the scene from a photo of an empty room taken from a magazine, adding his lover Schlesinger because the backdrop “begged for a presence”. Whether true to the real-life Schlesinger or simply David Hockney’s own little pornographic daydream (or projection of my own sexual experience, which, of course, it is), the painting had me transfixed, and I stood there looking at it for so long that the security guard began to cast me funny looks. The end.


"The Room, Tarzana", by David Hockney (1967). Photo taken by me today at the Fondation Louis Vuitton

-A