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Christie’s is to sell David Hockney’s first double portrait — his 1968 painting of the English novelist Christopher Isherwood and his younger partner, the artist Don Bachardy — and expects it to make more than $50mn in New York in November.
The work is the first in Hockney’s celebrated series of seven double portraits produced between 1968 and 1975 — four of which reside in museum collections. The series, which captures relationships through sharp realism and the soft light that Hockney celebrated when he moved to California in 1964, is seen by many critics and collectors as the triumph of the British artist’s varied, and ongoing, career.
The glowing, vast painting — more than two metres high and three metres wide — comes to market straight after appearing in the Hockney’s largest ever exhibition, David Hockney 25, held at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris this year. That show’s guest curator, Sir Norman Rosenthal, describes the Isherwood and Bachardy painting as a “masterpiece” that “encapsulates a moment in life, when they both have great histories behind and after them”.
Drenched in Santa Monica sunshine, the painting’s pared-down, geometric format harks back to art history, Rosenthal says, comparing the double portrait series to works such as Jan van Eyck’s “Arnolfini Portrait” (1434) and Thomas Gainsborough’s “Mr and Mrs Andrews” (c1750), both in London’s National Gallery.
Hockney’s record at auction stands at $90.3mn, for his 1972 “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)”, a prized swimming painting also in the Paris exhibition, which sold at Christie’s in New York in 2018. A more conventional double portrait from 1969, of the New York-based curator Henry Geldzahler and his partner Christopher Scott, took the second spot when it sold for £37.7mn ($49.5mn) in London in 2019.
The $50mn-plus price tag for the Isherwood and Bachardy painting is “the right estimate for one of the greatest double portraits”, says Katharine Arnold, Christie’s head of Post-War & Contemporary Art, Europe. She describes Hockney as an artist who “delivers in every single decade of his life and paints ordinary things in beautiful colours, making them available to everyone”. Part of Hockney’s appeal, Arnold says, is that “he is one of the greatest treasures ever to come out of Britain, while others feel he belongs to them too.” This is especially true in the US, because of his time in California, and in France, where Hockney now lives (in Normandy). The artist gets another solo showing next year when London’s Serpentine has its first Hockney exhibition, of recent paintings made on an iPad (March 12-August 23).
The work is being sold by European collectors who bought it privately after an auction at Sotheby’s in 1985 where it had been estimated around $500,000 (a then record for the artist) but failed to sell on the night. This time around, the painting has a guarantee to sell, backed by an unnamed third party.
The consignment of the Hockney to November’s crucial season of sales adds to a gathering of good news for the struggling art market. This week, Sotheby’s said it will sell the collection of the cosmetics magnate Leonard A Lauder, expected to realise more than $400mn.