Hockney painting sells for $90M

A painting by the British artist David Hockney fetched $90.3 million at Christie’s on Thursday night, easily breaking the record for a work by a living artist sold at auction. Among his famous “pool paintings,” Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) is considered one of his premier works. The previous record by a living artist was set by Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog, which sold for $58.4 million in 2013. (Figures in U.S. dollars.) The 1972 painting by Hockney, now 81, reflects both the European and the U.S. perspectives of an artist who came to live in sunny California in the 1960s, and saw himself as living on both continents.