About this Event
Rizzoli Bookstore is delighted to welcome James Cahill to celebrate his book, The Beverly Hills Housewife: Hockney's Californian Muse and the World Beyond the Pool. He will be in conversation with Patrick Monahan, followed by a signing.
PLEASE NOTE: RSVPs are encouraged but not required. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served. Doors open at 5:30 pm.
Can't attend?(please specify that you would like it signed in the comments box at checkout).
The Beverly Hills Housewife offers a panoramic view of 1960s Los Angeles and Californian culture through the eyes of artist and subject: the youthful fascination of David Hockney and the seasoned gaze of enigmatic socialite Betty Freeman.
In the summer of 1966, David Hockney paid a visit to a wealthy Los Angeles art collector. Her name was Betty Freeman. He had intended to paint her swimming pool, but was rapidly entranced by Freeman herself.
Hockney, soon to embark on a series of Los Angeles paintings that would become icons of their time and place, immortalized Freeman in Beverly Hills Housewife (1966–67), a sunlit vision of the collector on the terrace of her modernist home. Evoking the light and easy glamour of 1960s Los Angeles, the painting is one of the artist's most seductive works, but it has always carried an air of mystery. Who was the woman in pink?
Like Hockney driving through the Hollywood Hills, James Cahill meanders—interweaving the artist’s discovery of Los Angeles with Freeman’s own evolution from aspiring pianist to photographer, philanthropist, and collector—but never loses focus on the art. Oscillating between art history and anecdote, this is an eclectic study of an artist, his enigmatic muse, and the beginning of a friendship that would shape the course of each of their lives.
“A strange and wonderful book… Brilliantly digressive.” – Los Angeles Times
“A nuanced melding of biography and criticism.” – Kirkus Reviews
Photo Credit: Marc Vallée
James Cahill is a British author and critic. He originally studied classics and English at Magdalen College, Oxford, followed by a master’s degree in contemporary art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and a PhD in classics at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Violet Hour (2025) and Tiepolo Blue (2022, shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and selected for H.M. The Queen’s Reading Room), and writes regularly for publications including Artforum, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement, and The Spectator. Cahill has curated several exhibitions spanning contemporary art and classical antiquity. He divides his time between London and Los Angeles.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Patrick Monahan
Patrick Monahan is a writer and an independent art advisor to museums and private collectors, with a special interest in British Art from the 18th Century to the Present. He contributes regularly to Vanity Fair, Country Life, Air Mail, and The Paris Review, and advises the Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico, which holds perhaps the most important collection of Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite art outside the UK. In 2015, he wrote a Vanity Fair article on Flaming June, the most reproduced Victorian painting, and its extraordinary journey from London to Puerto Rico. This began an ongoing collaboration with the Museo de Arte de Ponce, culminating in the loan of Flaming June to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2022 and to the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2024. A native New Yorker, Patrick makes regular visits to London advising on the purchase, sale, loan, and exhibition of works of art. He holds degrees from the University of Chicago and Cambridge University, both in art history. He is also a regular speaker at the Royal Oak Foundation, the US fundraising arm of the UK’s National Trust. Outside the art world, Patrick has a passion for Old Hollywood and the Golden Age of Broadway. Many of the actors and actresses of that time were his personal friends, whose stories he has recorded in Vanity Fair and other publications.
Event venue & nearby stays
Rizzoli Bookstore, 1133 Broadway, New York, United States
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