David Hockney, one of the most celebrated British artists of the 20th century, died on June 11, at age 88 at his home in London.
Since the early 1960s, Hockney has been a fixture in the contemporary art world, first rising to prominence as British Pop artist, who unabashedly explored queer desire at a time that homosexuality was still illegal in the UK. In the ensuing decades, he ventured across painting, drawing, printmaking, and iPad compositions, often painting the people and places that he spent time in, including London, Los Angeles, East Yorkshire, and Normandy. He often painted intimate portraits of friends, lovers, and figures famous in the art world and beyond, like artist Andy Warhol, filmmaker Dennis Hopper, and, most recently, singer Harry Styles.
His most celebrated works depict the sun-drenched swimming pools of LA, with works from that series commanding millions at auction, and residing in the permanent collection in several museums. His most famous work from that series, A Bigger Splash, is in the permanent collection of the Tate Britain, which is set to mount an exhibition of the artist’s work next year, alongside a multimedia installation in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. Another work, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972), sold at Christie’s New York in 2018 for $90.3 million—at the time a record for a living artist at auction. (That record was broken a year later by Jeff Koons’s Rabbit (1986), which sold for $91.1 million, also at Christie’s New York.)
Hockney’s benchmark has yet to be surpassed at auction, though that’s not for a lack of blockbuster results from the auction block. Now as then, Hockney’s work commands some of the highest prices the market has to offer. Below, a list of his top auction results.
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THE SPLASH, 1966
Image Credit: Michael Bowles/Getty Images for Sotheby’s Sold for: £23.2 million ($29.9 million)
In February 2020, as the world began to shut down, Sotheby’s London sold this six-foot by six-foot canvas at its Contemporary Art Evening sale. The work is considered a companion piece to his famed A Bigger Splash (1967), in the collection of the Tate. The work had previously set a record for Hockney when it sold for £2.9 million ($5.4 million), also at Sotheby’s London, in 2006. There is one other “Splash” painting in the series, A Little Splash (1966), which has never been sold publicly and remains in a private collection.
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Nichols Canyon, 1980
Image Credit: AFP via Getty Images Sold for: $41 million
In December 2020, Phillips New York sold this seven-by-five-foot canvas during the house’s 20th-century and contemporary art evening sale, with an estimate of $35 million, which it ably passed. The work is one of two monumental works executed by the artist in 1980. (The other, a horizontal landscape Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio, is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.) It has been included in his 1988 retrospective at LACMA and a 2017–18 Hockney show that first appeared at the Tate Britain, before traveling to the Centre Pompidou and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The 1980 work is unique in that it is the only true landscape to feature in Hockney’s top results at auction.
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Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, 1968
Image Credit: Daniel Leal/AFP via Getty Images Sold for: $44.4 million
Just last November, one of Hockney’s most celebrated double portraits, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968), hit the block at Christie’s New York’s 20th=century evening sale, where it sold for $44.4 million. The work was the first of Hockney’s double-portraits and was most recently exhibited in “David Hockney 25,” last year’s survey at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, as well as the 2017–18 show.
In 2018, on the occasion of the show’s run at the Met, writer Michael Cirigliano II wrote that the painting shows an “unapologetic homosensuality” and “a seminal perspective” for Hockney, a triangulation between two subjects and the viewer. While the consignor, nor the buyer have yet been revealed, the painting had been in the same collection since 1985 up until last November’s sale.
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Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott, 1969
Image Credit: AFP via Getty Images Sold for: £37.7 million ($49.5 million)
In March 2019, Hockney set a record for the most expensive painting ever sold by a living artist in Europe with this double portrait, which sold at Christie’s London. The seller was Barney A. Ebsworth, a travel industry executive who died in 2018. The painting attracted four bidders, with one underbidder, London dealer Hugh Gibson, telling the Art Newspaper at the time that he considered the work “more important” than Hockney’s famed pool portrait, which set the overall record for a living artist a year earlier. The portrait depicts Geldzahler, who was at the time a highly influential curator of 20th-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Scott, his then-boyfriend and a painter.
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Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972
Image Credit: Photo Jenni Carter, Art Gallery of New South Wales/©David Hockney/Art Gallery of New South Wales Sold for: $90.3 million
In November 2018, Hockney’s monumental 1972 canvas Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at Christie’s New York for $90.3 million after nine minutes of bidding, setting a record as the most expensive work by a living artist ever sold at auction—surpassing the previous mark of $58.4 million set by Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog in 2013. (It was surpassed a year later by another Koons work, 1986’s Rabbit, which sold for $91.1 million.)
The seven-by-ten-foot painting shows one figure standing at a pool’s edge gazing down at another swimming beneath the surface. It had been estimated in the region of $80 million and was offered without a reserve. The winning bidder was on the telephone, represented in the room by Christie’s US chairman Marc Porter. The seller was British billionaire Joe Lewis, who had acquired the work in 1995 from entertainment mogul David Geffen. The painting had just completed a triumphant world tour as part of Hockney’s retrospective, with stops at Tate Britain, the Centre Pompidou, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was later revealed that the buyer of the work was Taiwanese tech billionaire Pierre Chen.
