Art market
A painting by David Hockney becomes the most expensive creation by a living artist to be sold at auction and a major collection of Irish art is sold
Even if I had money to tie up and space to display it, I would not give house room to what was, until a couple of weeks ago, the most expensive creation by a living artist to be sold at auction. That was the Balloon Dog (Orange) by Jeff Koons, who, when his name has been long forgotten, will no doubt come to be referred to by art historians as il Maestro del Superficiale.
By contrast, I think that it would be a considerable pleasure to house the new world number one, David Hockney’s 1972 Portrait of an Artist (Pool with two Figures) (Fig 1), which recently sold for more than $90.3 million (£70.2 million) at Christie’s, new York. The more I contemplate it (if only in reproduction), the more I find to enjoy.
I am not an uncritical admirer of Mr Hockney. Often, his colours seem garish and jarring, especially when he is trying out ipads and the like. When he discovered watercolour comparatively late in life, it might have been better if he had taken longer to get to know the medium before making the results public.
On the other hand, Mr Hockney is a great draughtsman and his big charcoal woodland scenes are wonderful. Also, to my surprise, I have enjoyed several of his videos.
Other paintings in the ‘Swimming Pool’ series from his early period in California are consciously flat and poster-like; this 84in by 120in acrylic on canvas is a picture with depth— in the landscape as well as the water. It was painted in the aftermath of a great love affair and the strict geometry of the composition reinforces rather than detracts from the emotion.
The sight-lines of the pool’s sides and the slopes of the Renaissance-like hills beyond come together on a patch of empty water rather than the swimmer, which perhaps suggests that the standing figure, Peter Schlessinger, is bidding farewell to their past life. The swimmer is, apparently, not intended to be Mr Hockney; might it be Mr Schlessinger in his own thoughts?
Mr Hockney has said that he ‘always loved swimming pools, all the wiggly lines they make. If you photograph them, it freezes them, whereas if you use paint, you can have wiggly lines that wiggle’. The distortions of the swimming figure, whose left leg could have been painted by Bacon, similarly appear natural, as do the hillsides in the middle distance, built up of stippled colours on flat grounds.
As the subject is separation, it seems fitting that the standing figure was painted some time later than the rest, from photographs taken in Kensington Gardens. This echoes the painting’s original inspiration, the
accidental juxtaposition of two photographs on the studio floor: ‘One was of a figure swimming underwater and therefore quite distorted—it was taken in Hollywood in 1966—and the other was of a boy gazing at something on the ground; yet because of the way the photographs were lying, it looked as though he was gazing at the distorted figure.’
Rowan Gillespie’s famous group of figures distorted by famine beside the Liffey in Dublin is probably what brought the sculptor to the attention of Brian P. Burns. The successful American businessman has celebrated his Irish heritage in a very positive manner by using his collection of Irish art to ‘inform the American Irish diaspora about the beauty and the visual tapestry that Irish art has bequeathed to the world’.
Together with the 18th- to 20th-century paintings that he bought, he commissioned Mr Gillespie to produce a considerable body of work for him— sometimes representational, as with his busts of the four Irish Nobel Laureates for literature, elsewhere more allegorical.
Mr Gillespie repaid his patron by recording a perceptive video introduction for the Brian and Eileen Burns sale at Sotheby’s in London last month. In it, he mentions that a reproduction of Jack Yeats’s A Misty Morning
(Fig 3) had hung in his boyhood home and that, later, he made a bronze of its main figure
(Fig 4). Brought together in the Burns collection, the 9in by 14in painting sold for £286,000 and the 14¼in bronze for £27,500. Another Gillespie bronze, The
Settlers, reached £65,000. Both Mr Gillespie and the catalogue note suggest that a fascinating, slightly naïve, painting of a ball, St Patrick’s Hall, Dublin Castle (Fig 5), by the otherwise unknown F. J. Davis gains poignancy by contrast with the famine raging outside.
I am not sure that this is quite the case. The details of dress and furnishing are very accurate, dating the work to between 1826 and 1857, and, although the figures are stilted, some may well be intended as portraits, including the Lord Lieutenant, his lady and the married ladies flanking them.
Only two Lords Lieutenant of the period had abundant hair, as opposed to high, bald foreheads, so perhaps these are the Earl and Countess De Grey and their two married daughters, dating the ball to between 1841 and 1844, at least a year before the arrival of potato blight.
In any event, the painting went to another private American collector at £243,750.
The most expensive painting in the sale was by Roderic O’conor (1860–1940), whom Mr Gillespie rightly likens to Munch. His 25½in by 21¼in
Romeo and Juliet (Fig 2) sold, again to a private collector, at £364,000.
Sir John Lavery’s 30in by 25¼in Armistice Day, November 11th 1918, Grosvenor Place,
showing the triumphal arch crowned by the statue of Peace Descending with celebrating crowds milling towards Buckingham Palace, went to the Imperial War Museum at £250,000. Next week Begin the year in the Cotswolds