On November 17, as part of an evening dedicated to the great artistic movements of the 20th century, Christie’s auctioned the first of the double portraits that the 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 milestone of pop art and homosexual visibility.
Only seven of these portraits exist. Four of them are owned by public institutions and another two have recently changed hands, subsequently becoming the two highest prices paid at auction for Hockney’s works, so it was to be expected that this one, which has remained in the hands of the same collection for 40 years, would once again break the artist’s records.
Finally, the painting was sold for a total of 44,335,000 dollars (approximately 38,495,000 euros), far from the highest figures obtained by the artist on previous occasions but unattainable for the budgets of public institutions. The unknown buyer will have appreciated the exceptional story of the painting and the two characters portrayed, none other than a couple of men who had a publicly known romantic relationship: the British writer Christopher Isherwood and the American artist Don Bachardy.
To trace the importance of this work we must go back to 1964, when the British painter David Hockney decided to leave England to live in Los Angeles (California). I didn’t have a job there or a place to live. The painter has never completely clarified the reasons that led him to change country but the truth is that, seen in perspective, leaving London and going to a place more receptive to his social and emotional needs was a decision full of meaning.
Before his move, Hockney was already a household name. Between 1960 and 1961 he participated in the famous exhibitions Contemporary young people with works where pink and light blue colors slide between the blacks and grays of the abstract expressionism dominant in those years. In 1962 he graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts with a painting of a male nude inspired by those in Muscle Men’s magazine. American physicist, winning the gold medal that year. And again in London, in his home studio in Notting Hill, he began to paint scenes of intimacy between men, in domestic interiors, with floral-print furniture and a closed, claustrophobic atmosphere. He also made his first trip to New York, where he met Andy Warhol and the curator of the Metropolitan Museum, Henry Geldzhaler.
But Hockney needed broader horizons and brighter colors. So in 1964 he settled in Santa Monica, opened his studio and realized that the bicycle was not the right means of transport to get around the United States, so he got his driver’s license and bought a car.
Californian dream
The truth is that California had become the favorite destination for several generations strangers. The climate and remoteness of the more traditional American cities, with very closed social structures, had first attracted the men of cinema at the beginning of the century and then, after the Second World War, beatnik and the counterculture.
Hockney’s painting underwent a significant change when he came into contact with the light and colors of the American West Coast. The sky turned a clear blue, the showers opened outward through large windows mid-century and swimming pools became their favorite environment. As Julio Pérez Manzanares, professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at UAM and author of various books on pop art, says: “It is a very classic return to figuration but which also has something of a reflection of a mediated society. The importance of his Californian works is the gaze he casts on a world that for him is much more modern than England, and which for him is symbolized in those swimming pools and in the much freer, even sexually, environment that he finds on the American west coast.”
Hockney becomes a chronicler of an idealized homosexual society, of gays with the economic means to have beautiful houses, with modern architecture, with gardens and swimming pools, in which to experience apparently normal couple reactions. Now they might be called heteronormative but, at that time, traditional domesticity between two men was revolutionary and innovative.
double portraits
Over the next few years Hockney devoted himself to creating a series of portraits of couples that emphasized the normalization of a new type of romantic relationship. Using the resources of the traditional double portrait, he transferred all his validated weight to homosexual relationships. “These portraits, which also have a certain enigmatic air, are in reality reflections and reflections on contemporary intimacy. The fact that many of those couples represented are men does not cease to have the radical importance of confirming – and historicizing – these types of couples (…) clearly have a queer this becomes physical in the canvases themselves, whose relationships are fundamentally established through the gaze of the characters and the spectator,” explains Pérez Manzanares.
Between 1968 and 1975 Hockney painted seven of these paintings: American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman)currently in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, it portrays the famous collector couple in front of their very modern cubic house, between a Native American totem and a sculpture by Henry Moore. The Tate Britain in London has the legendary Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1971) which portrays the painter’s couple of friends in his modern Notting Hill interior with their cat, and Wayne Sleep and George Lawson (1972) is again about friends, but this time about a couple of two men. Finally, in the exceptional collection at Chatsworth House, it is displayed alongside drawings by Raphael and Leonardo The fountain park, Vichy (1970) in which another couple, turning their backs on the viewer, contemplates the tree-lined perspective of the French garden.
As underlined in the press dossier published on the occasion of the auction, these paintings are for Christie’s “among the greatest achievements of modern art”. The latter three remained in private hands until recently and, when sold, achieved the highest prices achieved by the artist at auction.
In Portrait of the Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) a male figure appears at the edge of a swimming pool watching a man dive. It is a mythical image that has entered the imagination of popular culture and that Pedro Almodóvar recreated in a scene of Bad education. It contains all the elements of Hockney’s work from that period: the light and nature of California, the swimming pool and the male nude. The painting refers to the breakup with her then partner, Peter Schlesinger, who watches another man, the swimmer, heading towards him underwater. In reality the screenplay is based on photographs taken in the French villa of director Tony Richardson, a bisexual director of British Free Cinema. The painting sold at Christie’s in New York in 2018 for $90 million, becoming the record for a living artist at auction. The relationship between Hockney and Schlesinger will be the subject of the famous documentary A bigger splash, from 1974, currently visible on Filmin.
In Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott (1969) the art curator of the Metropolitan Museum and his companion appear in a New York interior furnished with contemporary furniture. This work was sold for 49 million dollars.
Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968) It is the last of the double portraits remaining in private hands. It is also the first one he painted. Furthermore, it is the most personal and significant of the paintings that make up this series because, as Pérez Manzanares says, “it represents the synthesis of that encounter with a culture – the American one – which, without being anything less than idyllic in terms of homosexual relationships, still in those sixties, presented an idea of modernity in which sexual liberation was, in some way, included”.
The models themselves were of fundamental importance to Hockney. The writer Christopher Isherwood, also British, had settled in the United States at the start of World War II. Author of the stories from which the musical and the film were based Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972), and also from the novel Only one man, adapted to the cinema by Tom Ford, Isherwood had everything to become Hockney’s spiritual and intellectual guide, especially in his home in Santa Monica which he shares with his partner, the very young artist Don Bachardy.
The painting that portrays them was exhibited in Madrid in the retrospective exhibition that the Juan March Foundation dedicated to him in 1992 and which had a great impact among Spanish artists of the time. For Beatriz Ordovás, director and international specialist of Christie’s Department of Post-War and Contemporary Art, 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 represented in an everyday scene, but at the same time they are two figures of extraordinary influence on the culture of their time”.
Financial expectations were very high because “the work has remained in the same private collection for more than forty years, making it an exceptional appearance on the market and a rare opportunity to acquire a fundamental piece of 20th century art. All indications are that this painting will continue to connect with the public and collectors through its beauty, its history and the message of human connection that remains valid today.”
Regardless of the price reached, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy It is an exceptional work. A fundamental painting in the career of the artist, one of the great names of pop art who also portrays another of the fundamental characters of the culture of the century. As if all this were not enough, it also constitutes a milestone in the history of the representation of homosexual emotional relationships.
