Hockney makes £70m splash in nine minutes
Frenzied bidding pushes painting to record price paid for a living artist
IT TOOK just over nine minutes for David Hockney to make history when one of his paintings fetched more than £70 million at auction last night.
Portrait Of An Artist (Pool With Two Figures) started out at $18 million (£14 million) but a frenzied seven-way bidding battle at Christie’s in New York drove the sale price to $90.3 million (£70.2 million) — the most ever paid for a work by a living artist.
The 1972 painting, which was the centrepiece of last year’s record-breaking Tate Britain retrospective, shows the Yorkshire artist’s former lover Peter Schlesinger peering into a swimming pool at a figure in the water.
The sale eclipsed the previous auction record for a living artist — $58.4 million (£45.6 million) for Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog (Orange), set in 2013.
It a l s o s ma s h e d Ho c k n ey ’s ow n auction record of $28.4 million (£22.2 million) for Pacific Coast Highway And Santa Monica, set earlier this year.
After a slight delay due to snow, a packed auction room watched in silence during a tense bidding process lasting nine minutes and 22 seconds.
The room broke into applause after Jussi Pylkkänen, Christie’s global president and auctioneer, put the hammer down on the sale at $80 million — the price before the buyer’s premium was added — which was made by phone to an undisclosed buyer.
The painting was put up for sale by billionaire Tottenham Hotspur owner Joe Lewis, whose art collection includes work by Lucian Freud, Gustav Klimt, Paul Cézanne and Picasso.
It is reported to travel with him on a series of super yachts he uses as floating offices and personal art galleries.
Loic Gouzer, co-chairman of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s, said: “This was the best work by the artist and it’s an icon, everybody knows it. This is a work that you can show to your friends, to your taxi driver, to anyone in the street will recognise the work.
“They probably may not immediately recognise it’s David Hockney, but they’ll say, ‘Hey, I’ve seen something like that.’ It has a rare quality, this little va-va-voom I would say, that makes it very special.” Mr Gouzer said the Tate Britain exhibition — which was seen by almost half a million people in London before touring to the Met in New York and Centre Pompidou in Paris — “definitely helped” the sale, but that the painting was “already famous”. He added that the value of Hockney’s work will “continue to rise”.
Other works sold in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale — which made $357.6 million (£278 million) — included Hockney’s Sprungbrett mit Schatten (Paper Pool 14); Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum) by Mark Rothko; Study Of Henrietta Moraes Laughing by Francis Bacon; and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Discography Two.
The sale could encourage other Hockney collectors to offer works for auction. Eight of his works were sold in 2016 compared with 25 so far this year.
Hockney, 81, has lived in Yorkshire, London and Los Angeles. He recently said he plans to move to Normandy next year to paint the emergence of spring and be close to the Bayeux Tapestry after he was taken with it during a visit.