Topline
David Hockney, a legendary English painter known as a leading figure in the 1960s Pop Art movement, has died at the age of 88 after breaking auction records and building a massive fortune over his seven-decade career.
David Hockney standing in front of his “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures).”
picture alliance via Getty Images
Key Facts
Hockney broke the record in 2018 for the most expensive painting ever sold at auction by a living artist with his 1972 work “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),” which sold for $90.3 million at Christie’s New York after nine minutes of bidding.
The next year, Christie’s sold Hockney’s painting “Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott,” considered by some to be the most important work in his famous double portraits series, for $49.52 million.
Just last year a Hockney painting titled “Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy,” the first of his double portraits series, sold at Christie’s for $44.34 million.
A rare Hockney landscape painting called “Nichols Canyon,” depicting the route leading from his Hollywood Hills home on Montcalm Avenue to his studio on Santa Monica Boulevard, sold for $41.07 million in 2020.
“The Splash,” one of Hockney’s most famous paintings, joined the list of the artist’s most-expensive works in 2020 when it sold to billionaire media mogul David Geffen for $29.92 million.
‘Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott’ by David Hockney.
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David Hockney’s “The Splash.”
Getty Images for Sotheby’s
Key Background
Hockney was formally trained as a painter in his teenage years at the Bradford School of Art and, by his early 20s, was making professional sales and starring in major exhibitions. He came out as gay when he was 23 years old—seven years before homosexuality was decriminalized in the U.K., where he was born—and several years later emigrated to California where he would go on to take inspiration in pop culture and California’s year-round summer. Many of Hockney’s best-known paintings feature Los Angeles swimming pools and those works helped identify him as “the quintessential artist of Southern California’s nouveau riche leisure life,” the New York Times wrote. His early works openly depicted domestic gay life at a time when few other artists dared to do so, and he once described his paintings as “homosexual propaganda.” “Portrait of an Artist,” the record-holding painting, depicts a male swimmer in white trunks while Hockney’s former lover, painter Peter Schlesinger, looks on from the side of the pool while fully clothed. Of his five most expensive works, the top three are portraits of gay men.
“Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy” by David Hockney.
AFP via Getty Images
“Nichols Canyon” by David Hockney.
AFP via Getty Images
Crucial Quote
“What one must remember about some of these pictures is that they were partly propaganda of something that hadn’t been propagandised, especially among students, as a subject: homosexuality. I felt it should be done. Nobody else would use it as a subject because it was a part of me,” Hockney famously said.
What To Watch For
How Hockney’s paintings continue to sell. There are currently three works by the artist for sale at Christie’s, two digital drawings and a charcoal sketch priced between $20,000 and $200,000.