A marquee lot in the Christie’s 20th-century evening sale in New York in November will be David Hockney’s Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968), a double portrait of the storied English writer and his American artist partner in their home in Santa Monica, California.
The work is the first of seven double portraits by Hockney, including the 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which broke the record for the highest-priced work by a living artist when it sold for $90.3 million in 2018, and Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott (1969), which sold for $49.5 million in 2019.
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Christie’s did not announce an estimate for Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, which also featured in “David Hockney 25,” a survey at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris that opened this past April and closed last month, and in a 2017–18 Hockney show that opened at Tate Britain and traveled to the Centre Pompidou and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In a statement alluding to Hockney’s “realist” double portraits (including others of Fred and Marcia Weisman; Geldzahler and Scott; and designers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell with their cat Percy), Norman Rosenthal said, “All these paintings exude the spirit of David Hockney’s California, even if two of the scenes are in fact situated in New York and London. They are all pictures of persons in culturally glamorous society, friends of the artist, in their own environments, and above all there is always a unique sense of painted light.”
Katharine Arnold, vice chairman of 20th/21st-century art and head of postwar and contemporary art, Europe, at Christie’s London, said the painting “represents a pivotal moment in his career, combining the subtle exploration of his subjects’ personal relationship with his own groundbreaking use of space, sightlines, and surface. The work’s considered geometry—evoking the staged iconography of early Renaissance artists like Piero della Francesca, who Hockney had studied alongside many others at the National Gallery in London—also reflects the artistic context of 1960s American Minimalism.”
Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy is also notable for its representation of what writer Michael Cirigliano II called the couple’s “homosensuality” in a piece for the Met’s website around the time of the 2018 Hockney survey there. “While the painting’s composition would become a seminal perspective for Hockney—a triangulation among the two subjects and the viewer, with one figure facing front while the other is presented in stark profile—the portrait’s subjects represent a new dimension to the unapologetic homosensuality that pervades Hockney’s work: the couple depicted here were just as unapologetic in the honesty and openness of their gay relationship, a daring feat in conservative mid-century America,” Cirigliano wrote.
The couple are also the subject of a book, The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, published in 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.