David Hockney’s Most Iconic Double Portrait Is Going Up for Sale at Christie’s

A rare piece of Hollywood art history is about to hit the auction block — and low estimates put its value at $60 million. It’s a painting by David Hockney, the British master who first landed on our shores in 1964 and turned swimming pools into high art. After a retrospective of his work closed last month at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, a private European collector who’d lent the exhibition one of Hockney’s most valuable works decided it was time to part with the double portrait of author Christopher Isherwood and his partner, artist Don Bachardy, painted in 1968.

Isherwood, whose books have been turned into several films (1972’s Cabaret2009’s A Single Man), was 30 years Bachardy’s senior when they met in 1948. Hockney, who met the couple decades into their relationship, had been accustomed to hiding his sexuality in the UK But he was fascinated to observe Isherwood and Bachardy’s “ordinary, domestic way of living as a couple,” says Katharine Arnold, Christie’s vice chairman 20th/21st century art. “Hockney admired them. He looked to them as a model. You forget how radical that was for the time — to live as two men together.”

The painting took a year to finish. Isherwood, then 63, posed for Hockney in their Santa Monica home, but Bachardy, 33, was overseas at the time, and so Hockney painted him from a photograph. Hockney made no effort to conceal that in the painting. “You can see an anxiousness in Isherwood’s expression, the distance,” Arnold says. “That’s part of the human condition — there are always little things left unsaid.” Isherwood and Bachardy remained together until Isherwood’s death in 1986. Bachardy, now 91, visited the painting while it was on display last week at Christie’s Beverly Hills gallery.

Hockney, now 87 and living in Normandy, last had one of his works at auction in 2018. That one — Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) — sold at Christie’s New York for $90 million, breaking the $58 million record set by Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog (Orange) for the most expensive artwork by a living artist sold at auction. Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, as the piece is titled, will go on the block next month as a lead highlight of Christie’s Fall Marquee Week in New York (Nov 17-20). It remains to be seen if it can break Hockney’s personal record.

“It’s the highlight of my career,” says Arnold of the upcoming sale.

This story appeared in the Oct. 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.