The Swim of Things

When filled with water, the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel’s pool resembled the California oases in David Hockney’s acrylic paintings. After a two-week restoration in 2018, the pool, now designated a Historic-Cultural Monument by the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission, was conserved for another season of swimmers, whose movements turn the static pattern of Hockney’s mural into a dancing vision of blue.

Alongside a public pool in the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center, at Carmine Street and Seventh Avenue South in Greenwich Village, is a vibrant mural of stylized swimmers, mermaids, and anthropomorphic sea life in blue, white, and yellow. Keith Haring painted the dynamic scene over one hot August day in 1987 during what the artist called a “dance party at the pool.” DJ Junior Vasquez brought his speakers, and people crowded in to cool off in the water and watch the local art star.

One of the last works created by painter and sculptor Georges Braque was a pool for a new arts complex on the French Riviera. The Fondation Maeght was inaugurated in 1964, shortly after Braque’s death in 1963, and his Les Poissons pool mosaic of swimming fish is right outside a gallery dedicated to his art.

Inhotim is a sprawling contemporary art foundation set on a lush Brazilian plateau, with artwork embedded in about 5,000 acres of wilderness and botanical gardens. It finally opened to the public in 2006, and visitors are invited not only to explore the art but to immerse themselves in the work. Jorge Macchi’s pool is available for a dip, with steps like the alphabetical tabs on a phone book leading down into the water.

Located on the western edge of Paris, Piscine Molitor opened in 1929 as the most fashionable place to swim. In 1946, designer Louis Réard chose it to debut the first modern bikini. However, by 1989 it was closed and decayed beneath layers of graffiti. After a extensive restoration, the facility reopened in 2014 as a luxury hotel. Parisians can again enjoy not only a swim but original artistic details like stained-glass windows of bathers by Louis Barillet, while contemporary street-art murals nod to its years as a makeshift canvas.

Made during Sarah Crowner’s residency at the Fundación Casa Proal in Veracruz, Mexico—which invites artists to make permanent sculptural statements at its nineteenth-century house, built by French settlers—Swimming Pool undulates like two connected waves. Surrounded by a deck of unglazed Mexican terra-cotta with a mottled coral hue, the pool has a bright-blue tile basin and is bordered by a herringbone pattern of yellow tile.

In 1990, as part of its renovation, San Francisco’s legendary Caravan Lodge became the Phoenix Hotel, and artist Francis Forlenza painted a mural titled My Fifteen Minutes/Tumbling Waves on the bottom of the pool. White and light-blue curls of paint, appearing like question marks or sixes, are overlaid on a dark-blue background, with touches of red and yellow and tributes to art figures such as Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp along the surface.

Ed Ruscha has a passion for the vernacular architecture of the American West, seen in works like his 1968 book Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass. He even got a chance to design his own pool in Studio City, California, at the home of his brother Paul. After purchasing the house in 1989, Paul invited his artist brother to create some work for the pool, and Ed used tiles to make an underwater registration form inquiring swimmers of their names, addresses, and phone numbers.

Guests at the plush Hôtel Métropole can lounge alongside a mural of glamorous models draped in classical Greek garb. The sixty-five-foot installation of glass panels is part of the late fashion mogul Karl Lagerfeld’s 2013 redesign of the hotel’s pool area. Lagerfeld was inspired by Homer’s ancient Greek epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, in superimposing these modern odes to mythology against 1850s photographs of the Greek coastline. At night, lights illuminate the bottom of the pool like a constellation.