There’s something quietly radical about a painter deciding to copy himself. Not to reproduce a work for commercial reasons, not to make a study or a preparatory sketch, but to revisit a painting made twenty-two years earlier and make it again — deliberately, consciously, and with full awareness of everything that had changed in the intervening decades. That’s exactly what David Hockney did in 1987 when he painted California Copied From 1965 Painting in 1987, now part of the permanent collection at LACMA, currently on view on the third floor of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum.
What makes the circumstances of this painting particularly compelling is where it was made: England. Hockney, born in Bradford in 1937, had famously decamped to California in 1964, falling almost immediately under the spell of its light, its geometry, its swimming pools. The early California paintings that followed — flat, luminous, saturated with a particular golden-hour optimism — defined his career and his relationship with Los Angeles. But by 1987 he was back in England, and it was from that distance, geographic and temporal, that he chose to reconstruct a California painting from 1965. The copy is therefore an act of memory as much as it is an act of painting — a reconstruction of a place and a moment from across an ocean and more than two decades.
The original 1965 painting captured something essential about Hockney’s early encounter with California — the flatness of the light, the architectural simplicity, the almost dreamlike quality of the landscape. The 1987 copy, executed in acrylic on a large canvas measuring nearly 60 by 72 inches, returns to that same subject with the full weight of everything Hockney had experienced and learned between those two dates. His explorations of Cubism, his celebrated photo-collage “joiners,” his deepening inquiry into optics and perception — all of this is present in the room even if it isn’t visible in the brushstrokes.
The title itself does much of the conceptual heavy lifting. By naming the work California Copied From 1965 Painting in 1987, Hockney makes the act of copying completely transparent. There is no pretense of originality, no attempt to disguise the source. The title functions as a document as much as a name — announcing the relationship between two moments, two versions of the artist, two different understandings of what California meant to him.
That Hockney later gifted the painting to LACMA feels like a natural conclusion to the story. The work came home to the city that inspired its source — a painting about California, made in England, now living permanently in Los Angeles. It’s an object that carries an unusual amount of narrative for a canvas covered in acrylic paint, and it rewards the time it takes to stand in front of it and think about what it means to copy yourself.
