A painting by David Hockney sold for £13.15 million at Sotheby’s on Bond Street this week. During this flat time for the art market, that’s a highly impressive number. Yet it is dwarfed by the £70.3 million price recorded at Christie’s six years ago in New York for his 1972 painting, Portrait Of An Artist (Pool With Two Figures). That remains the most expensive work by any living British artist, and was for a fair while the most expensive by any living artist.
Such auction results make a splash: all those zeros. Plus they further cement the status of Hockney, now 87, as the greatest blue-chip brand name in the pantheon of modern British art. His most popularly beloved phases of painting – the California pool scenes of the 1960s, the evocatively contemporary portraits of the 1970s, and the more recent, epically scaled landscapes – are as instantly recognisable as the in-his-pomp, owlishly-preppy flair of the artist himself. Hockney (no David required) is a bona fide national treasure and global art celebrity.
