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David Hockney

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Text: David Hockney

David Hockney

The English painter David Hockney is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century. He was born on the 9th of July in 1937 in Bradford, West Yorkshire in England. His parents Laura and Kenneth had five children. David was their fourth child. After the primary school and grammar school in Bradford he went to the Bradford College of Art.

Hockney visited California for the first time in January 1964 after a successful first solo exhibition at the John Kasmin gallery. The United States fascinated him, and Los Angeles in particular, partly because of the influence of Hollywood cinema. "I instinctively knew I was going to like it," Hockney said, "and as I flew over San Bernardino and saw the swimming pools and the houses and everything and the sun, I was more thrilled than I have ever been in arriving in any city."

Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) is a large acrylic-on-canvas pop art, completed in May 1972. It measures 7 ft × 10 ft (2.1 m × 3.0 m). This work brings together two of Hockney's themes from his paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s: the swimming pool, and the double portrait. It depicts a male figure in white trunks swimming breaststroke underwater, and the painter Peter Schlesinger, Hockney's former lover and muse, fully clothed and standing at the edge of the pool looking down at the swimmer. The painting is set in southern France, near Saint-Tropez. In characteristic Hockney style, the foreground is simplified and flattened with a view of tree-clad hills in the background.

The composition was inspired by a serendipitous combination of photographs that Hockney noticed on his studio floor: one of a man swimming underwater, taken in California in 1966, and the other of a man standing looking at the ground. Juxtaposed, it appeared as if the standing person was looking at the swimmer. Hockney's relationship with Schlesinger had ended abruptly in 1971, following a fight in Cadaqués. "By showing another young man swimming towards Peter, the artist acknowledges lost love and his boyfriend’s desire for a new partner".

Hockney worked on the painting for four months in late 1971, but dissatisfied with the composition, in particular with the angle of the pool, abandoned the work and started afresh. In April 1972, Hockney flew to the south of France to better visualise the figure swimming underwater, using the pool at film director Tony Richardson's villa at Le Nid du Duc near Saint-Tropez to do so. Hockney said of the painting, "I must admit I loved working on that picture, working with such intensity; it was marvellous doing it, really thrilling"

On 15 November 2018, Hockney's 1972 work Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at Christie's auction house in New York City for $90 million (£70 million), becoming the most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction. This broke the previous record, set by the 2013 sale of Jeff Koons' Balloon Dog for $58.4 million.