Tidied Up Beach

Tidied Up Beach (1982) is a chromogenic print on Kodak photographic paper that belongs to David Hockney’s Twenty Photographic Pictures series. The picture depicts an empty beach in Viareggio, the Italian seaside town visited by Hockney with his lifelong friend and influential museum curator, Henry Geldzahler. A white gate with a name Excelsior on top occupies the forefront of the picture, separating an empty concrete square and, what appears to be a summer boarding house, from the street. A view of the sea stretches far in the back, a few tones darker from the colour of the sky that expands majestically above the horizon. Seen through the white gate, the sea, empty square, and beach umbrellas far in the back, are all infused with melancholy.