Hockney set to make $80m splash
A POOL painting by pop-art artist David Hockney is expected to break the record price for an artwork by a living artist when it is sold at auction later this year.
Portrait Of An Artist (Pool With Two Figures) will be auctioned at Christie’s in November and has been estimated at $80million (€68.4million).
The previous record for a work by a living artist was set by Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog, which sold for $58.4million (€49.9million) in 2013. The 1972 painting by British-born Hockney, 81, is ‘the holy grail of his work, from both the historical and the market perspectives,’ said Alex Rotter, co-chairman of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s in New York.
He noted it reflects both the European and the American perspectives of an artist who lived in California in the 1960s, and saw himself as living on both continents.
‘It has all the elements you would want in a Hockney painting,’ Mr Rotter said. ‘The California landscape, the beautiful trees and flowers and the sky, and then what we know him most for, the pool.’
The painting has been held by a private collector, and ‘we have been trying to get it for a very long time’, Mr Rotter said.
The work depicts two men – one swimming, the other standing by the pool looking down – and was inspired by two photos Hockney found on his studio floor, one of a swimmer in Hollywood, and another of a boy staring at something on the ground.
The standing figure is said to represent Peter Schlesinger, whom the artist met in 1966, when the younger man was a student in Hockney’s art class. For five years, according to Christie’s, he was both ‘the great love of Hockney’s life’ and one of his favourite models.