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 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.
His 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, A Bigger Splash, is in the permanent collection of the Tate Britain, which is set to mount an exhibition of the artist’s work next year, alongside a multimedia installation in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. Another work, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972), sold at Christie’s New York in 2018 for $90.3 million—at the time a record for a living artist at auction. (That record was broken a year later by Jeff Koons’s Rabbit (1986), which sold for $91.1 million, also at Christie’s New York.)
Hockney’s benchmark has yet to be surpassed at auction, though that’s not for a lack of blockbuster results from the auction block. Now as then, Hockney’s work commands some of the highest prices the market has to offer. Below, a list of his top auction results.
