Good morning, it’s Thursday, June 25, you can expect slightly cooler weather with a high of 79°.
The fight to preserve David Hockney’s squiggly pool mural
The Tropicana Pool at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in 2014. The bottom was initially painted by British painter David Hockney in 1987 but was immediately in danger of being painted over when state inspectors thought the pool violated California pool safety rules. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for AFI)
The mural that the British painter David Hockney created on the bottom of the Hollywood Roosevelt's Tropicana Pool in 1987 was an apt pairing of artist and obsession. Hockney — a true Hollywood booster and pool aficionado who died June 11 at the age of 88 — was at the peak of his celebrity in Los Angeles in the late '80s.
His work was the subject of a sprawling 1988 retrospective at LACMA that became the most well-attended exhibition of a contemporary artist in the museum's history to that point.
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