‘One of the greatest achievements of modern art’: The story behind David Hockney’s $44 million painting

On November 17, during an evening dedicated to the major artistic movements of the 20th century, Christie’s auctioned the first of the double portraits that British painter David Hockney created in the mid-1960s. This painting is the last of the series of works that remained in private hands and which changed the course of his painting, becoming a landmark of Pop Art and of gay visibility.

Only seven of these portraits exist. Four of them are owned by public institutions, and two others have recently changed hands, successively becoming the two highest prices ever paid at auction for Hockney’s works. It was therefore expected that this one, which has been in the same collection for 40 years, would break the artist’s records again.

The painting was finally sold for $44,335,000 (approximately €38,495,000), far from the highest prices the artist has fetched in the past, but still beyond the budgets of public institutions. The unknown buyer likely appreciated the exceptional history of the painting and the two figures portrayed: a pair of men who maintained a publicly known romantic relationship — the British writer Christopher Isherwood and the American artist Don Bachardy.

To understand the significance of this work, we must go back to 1964, when the British painter David Hockney decided to leave England and move to Los Angeles, California. He had neither a job nor a place to live there. The painter has never fully explained the reasons that led him to move, but in retrospect, leaving London and going to a place more receptive to his social and emotional needs was a decision that made a lot of sense.

Before his move, Hockney was already a well-known name. Between 1960 and 1961, he participated in the famous Young Contemporaries exhibitions with works where pale pinks and blues peeked through the blacks and grays of the abstract expressionism that dominated those years. In 1962, he graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts with a painting of a male nude inspired by those in the men’s magazine American Physique, winning the gold medal that year. Still in London, at his home studio in Notting Hill, he began painting scenes of intimacy between men in domestic interiors, with floral-patterned furniture and a closed, claustrophobic atmosphere. He also made his first trip to New York, where he met Andy Warhol and Henry Geldzahler, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum.

But Hockney needed broader horizons and brighter colors. So in 1964 he moved to Santa Monica, set up his studio, and realized that the bicycle wasn’t the right way to get around the United States, so he got his driver’s license and bought a car.

California dreaming

The truth is that California had become the preferred destination for several generations of outsiders. The climate and its distance from more traditional U.S. cities, with their very closed social structures, had attracted first people from the film industry at the beginning of the century and then, after World War II, the beatniks and the counterculture.

Hockney’s painting underwent a significant transformation upon encountering the light and colors of the American West Coast. Skies turned a clear blue, showers opened to the outdoors through large windows, and swimming pools became his preferred subjects. As Julio Pérez Manzanares, Professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) and author of several books on Pop Art, explains: “It’s a return to very classical figuration, but one that also reflects a media-saturated society. The importance of his California works lies in the perspective they offer on a world that, for him, is far more modern than England, a world symbolized by those swimming pools and the much freer atmosphere, even in sexual matters, that he finds on the American West Coast.”

Hockney became a chronicler of an idealized homosexual society, of gay men with the financial means to own beautiful, modern houses with gardens and swimming pools, where they experience seemingly normal relationships. These might now be considered heteronormative, but at the time, traditional domesticity between two men was considered revolutionary and groundbreaking.

Double portraits

Over the following years, Hockney devoted himself to creating a series of portraits of couples that emphasized the normalization of a new type of romantic relationship. By using the resources of the traditional double portrait, he transferred all its validated weight to homosexual relationships. “These portraits, which have a certain enigmatic air, are actually reflections and mirrors of contemporary intimacy. The fact that many of the couples depicted are men is nonetheless radically important in documenting — and making historical — this type of couple […] they clearly have a queer gaze that becomes physical on the canvases themselves, whose relationships are fundamentally established through the gaze of the subjects and the viewer,” explains Pérez Manzanares.

Between 1968 and 1975, Hockney painted seven of these works: American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman), currently in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, portrays the famous collector couple in front of their ultra-modern cube-shaped house, between a Native American totem pole and a sculpture by Henry Moore. Tate Britain in London owns the iconic Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy (1971), which depicts the painter’s friends in their modern Notting Hill apartment with their cat, and George Lawson and Wayne Sleep (1972) again features friends, this time a pair of men. Finally, in the exceptional collection at Chatsworth House, alongside drawings by Raphael and Leonardo, is Le parc des sources, Vichy (1970), in which another couple, with their backs to the viewer, contemplates the wooded vista of the French garden.

As the press kit for the auction notes, these paintings are considered by Christie’s to be among ”the greatest achievements of modern art.” The last three had remained in private hands until recently and, upon their sale, fetched the highest prices ever achieved by the artist at auction.

In Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972), a male figure appears at the edge of a swimming pool, watching a man swimming underwater. It is an iconic image that has entered the popular imagination and was recreated by the Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar in a scene from Bad Education. It contains all the elements characteristic of Hockney’s work from that period: the light and nature of California, the swimming pool, and the male nude. The painting alludes to his breakup with his partner at the time, Peter Schlesinger, who watches another man, the swimmer. The scene is actually based on photographs Hockney took at the French villa of filmmaker Tony Richardson, the bisexual director of Britain’s Free Cinema movement. The painting sold at Christie’s New York in 2018 for $90 million, setting a record for a living artist at auction. The relationship between Hockney and Schlesinger was the subject of the celebrated documentary A Bigger Splash, from 1974.

In Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott (1969), the Metropolitan Museum’s art curator and his partner appear in a New York interior decorated with contemporary furniture. This work sold for $49 million.

Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968) is the last of the double portraits that remained in private hands. It is also the first one he painted. Furthermore, it is the most personal and significant of the paintings in this series because, as Pérez Manzanares says, “it represents the culmination of his encounter with a culture — U.S. culture — which, while by no means idyllic in terms of homosexual relationships in the 1960s, did present an idea of modernity in which sexual liberation was, in some way, included.”

The people portrayed were of fundamental importance to Hockney. The writer Christopher Isherwood, also British, had settled in the United States at the beginning of World War II. Author of the stories on which the musical and film Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972) were based, and also of the novel A Single Man, adapted for the screen by Tom Ford, Isherwood had everything to become Hockney’s spiritual and intellectual guide, especially around his Santa Monica home, which he shared with his partner, the very young artist Don Bachardy.

The painting depicting them was shown in Madrid at the retrospective exhibition dedicated to him by the Juan March Foundation in 1992, which had a great impact on Spanish artists of the time. For Beatriz Ordovás, Director and International Specialist of the Post-War and Contemporary Art Department at Christie’s, the painting “is a work that marks a key moment in Hockney’s career and in the history of modern portraiture. Isherwood and Bachardy appear as two ordinary individuals depicted in an everyday scene, but at the same time they are two figures of extraordinary influence on the culture of their time.”

Even before the final auction price, economic expectations had been very high because “the work has remained in the same private collection for more than 40 years, making it an exceptional appearance on the market and a rare opportunity to acquire a fundamental piece of 20th-century art. Everything suggests that this painting will continue to connect with the public and collectors because of its beauty, its history, and the message of human connection that remains relevant today.”

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