PICTURE PERFECT
£38m ‘double portrait’ by Hockney breaks record
THE hammer came down on a final bid of almost £38million... and with it fell another art world record for David Hockney.
A double portrait was snapped up for the astonishing sum following a bidding war – making it the most expensive painting by a living artist sold in Europe.
It comes just months after another work by the Yorkshireman fetched a world record £70million in New York, cementing the artist’s reputation as Britain’s greatest living painter.
The most recent sale was held on Wednesday at Christie’s in London.
The painting, a double portrait of Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott, went for a ‘cheap’ £37.7million when it was sold to a mystery bidder.
Painted by Bradford-born Hockney in 1969, the 7ft by 10ft canvas is widely regarded as a breakthrough moment in his career. In November, another of the 81-year-old’s works from the same period vastly exceeded the world record for the most expensive painting by a living artist. Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) depicts his former partner, the artist Peter Schlesinger, peering down at an underwater swimmer.
But London-based dealer Hugh Gibson said art world figures regarded the Geldzahler than and Scott the piece painting which as ‘more broke important’ the world record. ‘Hockney is flavour of the month, and the [Geldzahler portrait] ended up quite cheap,’ he said. ‘But the air is quite thin at that level, there are few people who have £30million to spend on a painting.’ Not that Hockney is keeping count of his records. Speaking last month, the artist said he was not interested in the huge sums that his works have fetched.
‘The price of my pictures happens in auction houses, which is nothing to do with me,’ he said. ‘What I do is paint and look at the world, and find joy in what I see.’
The artist first met Mr Geldzahler, a curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, at Andy Warhol’s ‘Factory’ in 1963 where they bonded over a love of opera.
Hockney based the painting on multiple Polaroid pictures and sketches of Mr Geldzahler and his then partner Mr Scott at the curator’s Manhattan apartment in 1968. It was sold from a collection owned by US travel magnate Barney A Ebsworth.
The London sale comes a week after a new exhibition opened in Amsterdam in which Hockney’s work appears alongside those of Vincent Van Gogh. But it almost got off to a bumpy start when the artist found himself trapped in the cramped lift of a hotel on his way to the gallery.