{"id":1987409,"date":"2026-06-12T21:17:29","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T18:17:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1987409"},"modified":"2026-06-12T21:17:29","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T18:17:29","slug":"most-expensive-works-by-david-hockney-sold-at-auction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1987409","title":{"rendered":"Most Expensive Works by David Hockney Sold at Auction"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\tDavid Hockney, one of the most celebrated British artists of the 20th century, died on June 11, at age 88 at his home in London.<\/p>\n
\n\tSince 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tHis 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,\u00a0A Bigger Splash<\/em>, is in the permanent collection of the Tate Britain, which is set to mount an exhibition of the artist\u2019s work next year, alongside a multimedia installation in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. Another work, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)<\/em>\u00a0(1972), sold at Christie\u2019s New York in 2018 for $90.3 million\u2014at the time a record for a living artist at auction. (That record was broken a year later by Jeff Koons\u2019s Rabbit<\/em> (1986), which sold for $91.1 million, also at Christie\u2019s New York.)<\/p>\n
\n\tHockney\u2019s benchmark has yet to be surpassed at auction, though that\u2019s not for a lack of blockbuster results from the auction block. Now as then, Hockney\u2019s work commands some of the highest prices the market has to offer. Below, a list of his top auction results.<\/p>\n
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THE SPLASH<\/em>, 1966<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Michael Bowles\/Getty Images for Sotheby’s\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Sold for: \u00a323.2 million ($29.9 million)<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tIn February 2020, as the world began to shut down, Sotheby\u2019s 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)<\/em>, in the collection of the Tate. The work had previously set a record for Hockney when it sold for \u00a32.9 million ($5.4 million), also at Sotheby\u2019s London, in 2006. There is one other \u201cSplash\u201d painting in the series, A Little Splash<\/em> (1966), which has never been sold publicly and remains in a private collection.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Nichols Canyon<\/em>, 1980<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: AFP via Getty Images\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Sold for: $41 million<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tIn December 2020, Phillips New York sold this seven-by-five-foot canvas during the house\u2019s 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<\/em>, is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.)\u00a0It has been included in his 1988 retrospective at LACMA and a 2017\u201318 Hockney show that first appeared at the Tate Britain, before traveling to the Centre Pompidou and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.\u00a0The 1980 work is unique in that it is the only true landscape to feature in Hockney\u2019s top results at auction.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy<\/em>, 1968<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Daniel Leal\/AFP via Getty Images\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Sold for: $44.4 million<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tJust last November, one of Hockney\u2019s most celebrated double portraits, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy<\/em>\u00a0(1968), hit the block at Christie\u2019s New York\u2019s 20th=century evening sale, where it sold for $44.4 million. The work was the first of Hockney\u2019s double-portraits and was most recently exhibited in \u201cDavid Hockney 25,\u201d last year\u2019s survey at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, as well as the 2017\u201318 show.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn 2018, on the occasion of the show\u2019s run at the Met, writer Michael Cirigliano II\u00a0wrote that the painting shows an \u201cunapologetic homosensuality\u201d and \u201ca seminal perspective\u201d 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\u2019s sale.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott,<\/em> 1969<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: AFP via Getty Images\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Sold for: \u00a337.7 million ($49.5 million)<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tIn 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\u2019s 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<\/em> at the time that he considered the work \u201cmore important\u201d than Hockney\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n
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Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)<\/em>, 1972<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Photo Jenni Carter, Art Gallery of New South Wales\/\u00a9David Hockney\/Art Gallery of New South Wales\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Sold for: $90.3 million<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\tIn November 2018, Hockney\u2019s monumental 1972 canvas\u00a0Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)<\/em>\u00a0sold at Christie\u2019s 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\u2014surpassing the previous mark of $58.4 million set by Jeff Koons\u2019s\u00a0Balloon Dog<\/em>\u00a0in 2013. (It was surpassed a year later by another Koons work, 1986\u2019s Rabbit<\/em>, which sold for $91.1 million.)<\/p>\n
\n\tThe seven-by-ten-foot painting shows one figure standing at a pool\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/226786FLV.jpeg?w=1024″] 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1987409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1987409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1987409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1987409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1987409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1987409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1987409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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