Hockney got only $23,000 when painting was resold for $149 million
David Hockney has said he has to ignore the ‘‘madness’’ of the art market as he revealed that he received only US$14,000 (NZ$23,000) from the recordbreaking sale of one of his paintings.
The artist, 82, who has spent the past two months recording the changing season at his Normandy farmhouse on his ipad, said he had to turn a blind eye to the prices his work fetched, or he would stop working.
In 2018 Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) fetched US$90.3 million, then a record for a work of art by a living artist sold at auction. It first sold for about US$18,000 in 1972. Under resale rights artists receive a small per centage of the value of their works when they are sold on. In an interview with Mail Plus, Hockney said that amounted to US$14,000 for his record-breaking portrait.
‘‘It is just amadness tome but I can’t do anything about it so I just ignore it,’’ he said. ‘‘I don’t get any money from it but I am not going to worry about that because otherwise it affects your work.’’
Hockney said he was still energised by working and hoped that his latest project would be exhibited next year. ‘‘I am making it like the Bayeux Tapestry,’’ he said, adding that he wanted about 100 pictures to be shown in a line capturing the ‘‘narrative’’ of spring.
‘‘Here I am right in the middle of it. I don’t leave the garden. There are cherry trees, apple trees, pear trees, apricot trees, plum trees all blossoming. Or they were. It is just one of the most lovely things to watch. Everything is changing daily.’’
Hockney added that the lockdown had made working easier. ‘‘It is marvellous . . . because there are no visitors. I can just draw whenever I want to,’’ he said. ‘‘[The pandemic] is a sad thing but I haven’t felt much here because I have been observing the spring.’’
Hockney, an advocate of smokers’ rights, also spoke about the death of his father, Kenneth, who was a vocal antismoking protester. ‘‘He worried about the smokers too much and he died from eating chocolate biscuits,’’ Hockney said. ‘‘He became a diabetic.’’
The artist said that his father would go into comas which weakened his heart, causing his death in 1978.
‘‘It is just a madness to me but I can’t do anything about it so I just ignore it.’’
David Hockney