Hockney’s painting sells for $90.3mn, breaks living artist record

A celebrated and enigmatic painting of two men and a turquoise pool by David Hockney sold at Christie’s on Thursday night for $90.3 million with fees, shattering the auction record for a living artist and cementing a major broadening of tastes at the turbocharged top end of the market.

The price for the 1972 painting, “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),” easily surpassed the previous high of $58.4 million, held by Jeff Koons for one of his “Balloon Dog” sculptures.

Christie's did not name either the seller or the successful bidder.

The Hockney work was painted in 1972 and is one of the Yorkshire artist's most recognizable works.

The auction also produced new highs for works by two African-American artists, following highs for three African-American artists and a 42-year-old female painter at Sotheby’s the night before. Together the sales signaled a new inclusivity in the art world, driven by a generational shift toward artists who have been out of the mainstream and by stratospheric prices for more established names. That has forced collectors to expand their search for emerging names who might be undervalued.

The new demand for living artists, coupled with a dearth of masterworks for sale, has given greater exposure to non-white and female artists, with more museums exhibiting them and several of their works notching multimillion-dollar sales.

The Hockney painting is a different kind of trophy, by an openly gay artist about the emotional life of gay men. While the subject is hardly verboten in art, it is still rare to see same-sex themes in an artwork at this price point.

Hockney, a multi-talented painter, draftsman and set designer who burst onto the British art scene in the early 1960s, has become one of the most popular living artists, though his work was not always taken seriously. His colors were too bright, his figures too realistic — the octogenarian Hockney even described his younger self as a “peripheral artist, really.”

The painting was executed during a three-month period of intense creativity after the artist broke up with his American art student lover, Peter Schlesinger. Many viewers assume that the scene is set in California, where Hockney has lived for decades. But the canvas was painted in London, based on photographs taken at a pool in the South of France. The standing figure is derived from photographs the artist took of Schlesinger in London’s Kensington Gardens.