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.
A landmark in Hockney's career and recently featured as a centrepiece of David Hockney 25, the major survey exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, this extraordinary painting is the first of his renowned double portraits, a series celebrated as his supreme triumph. Only seven double portraits by Hockney exist, four of which are held in institutional collections and two of which constitute the artist's world record and second highest price achieved at auction. Held in the same private collection for the last forty years, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy can be considered the last remaining double portrait.
Painted in 1968, the work depicts English novelist Christopher Isherwood, one of the most celebrated literary figures of the 20th Century, renowned for his 1964 novel A Single Man, famously adapted by Tom Ford into a celebrated feature film in 2009, as well as for his 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin, which served as the basis for Cabaret. Isherwood is seated aside his partner and native Californian, artist Don Bachardy, in an intimate, sunlit moment in their Santa Monica living room. Isherwood's crisp attire and composed posture contrast with Bachardy's direct and assured gaze, creating a dynamic interplay between the two figures. The composition, framed by gleaming shutters and enriched with symbolic objects, highlights Hockney's remarkable talent for capturing personal relationships through his inventive use of perspective, spatial arrangement, and texture.
Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy has been prominently featured in David Hockney's major international retrospectives, including David Hockney: A Retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1988; David Hockney at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, in 1992-1993; and the 2017-2018 survey David Hockney, which opened at Tate Britain before touring to the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where it was displayed in a room dedicated to Hockney's celebrated double portraits.
Created between 1968 and 1975, Hockney's double portraits are among the most celebrated achievements in modern art. American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman) (1968) hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, Le Parc des Sources, Vichy (1970) at Chatsworth House in Bakewell, UK, while Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970-1971) and George Lawson and Wayne Sleep (1975) are both in the Tate Collection. Christie's set a world auction record for a living artist in November 2018 with Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) selling for $90,312,496 in New York and set Hockney's second highest price shortly after with Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott selling for GBP 37,661,248 ($49.5m) in London. These large-scale works showcase the artist's mastery of realism, light, perspective, and formal construction, and Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy is considered among the most important of this groundbreaking group.
Main Image: David Hockney, ‘Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy’ (1968) © Christie’s Images Ltd