The First of David Hockney’s Famous Double Portraits Is Heading to Auction
Featuring English novelist Christopher Isherwood and his partner, artist Don Bachardy, the painting is one of Hockney’s most celebrated
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Beginning in the late ’60s, David Hockney painted a series of seven large-scale double portraits featuring friends and lovers, mostly in the art world. This November, one of those paintings will go on sale at Christie’s.
Completed in 1968, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy was the first entry in the series. Experts expect it to fetch at least $50 million when it goes under the hammer at Christie’s 20th-century evening sale in New York, per the Financial Times’ Melanie Gerlis.
The last double portrait by Hockney sold at auction was 1969’s Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott, featuring famed art curator Geldzahler and his partner, which sold for $49.5 million in 2019. Before that, Hockney’s 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) became the most expensive work by a living artist when it sold for $90.3 million in 2018.
Quick fact: David Hockney’s swimming pools
In addition to Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures), Hockney depicted swimming pools in artworks such as A Bigger Splash (1967), Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool (1966) and Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool (1964).
Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy is a landmark painting in Hockney’s career, kicking off a series that many critics consider to be his strongest work. On one side of the portrait is Isherwood, the celebrated English novelist who wrote A Single Man, which was adapted into a 2009 film, and Goodbye to Berlin, the semi-autobiographical novella that inspired the musical Cabaret. Seated in a parallel armchair is American visual artist Bachardy, Isherwood’s partner for over 30 years. The couple is depicted in their sun-drenched Santa Monica home, behind a coffee table with stacks of books and a bowl of fresh fruit on it.
The couple “represent a new dimension to the unapologetic homosensuality that pervades Hockney’s work,” critic Michael Cirigliano II wrote for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s blog in 2018, when six of Hockney’s double portraits went on display at the museum. The two men, he added, “were just as unapologetic in the honesty and openness of their gay relationship, a daring feat in conservative midcentury America.”
The painting “represents a pivotal moment” in Hockney’s career, “combining the subtle exploration of his subjects’ personal relationship with his own groundbreaking use of space, sightlines and surface,” says Katharine Arnold, vice chairman of 20th- and 21st-century art at Christie’s, in a statement.
The painting has been featured in major Hockney retrospectives over the years, from Los Angeles to Brussels. It comes to market right after being a centerpiece of David Hockney 25, Hockney’s largest exhibition to date, which ran from April to September at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris.
“All these paintings exude the spirit of David Hockney's California, even if two of the scenes are in fact situated in New York and London,” Norman Rosenthal, a guest curator for David Hockney 25, says in a statement. “They are all pictures of persons in culturally glamorous society, friends of the artist, in their own environments, and above all there is always a unique sense of painted light.”
Four of the double portraits are in the collections of major museums. American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman), which depicts two Los Angeles art collectors, belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago. Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, a portrait of fashion designer Ossie Clark and the textile designer Celia Birtwell at their flat in London, is in the Tate’s collection, as is the unfinished George Lawson and Wayne Sleep. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art owns Shirley Goldfarb + Gregory Masurovsky, a portrait of two artists completed in Hockney’s Paris art studio in 1974.