Key Background
Hockney was formally trained as a painter in his teenage years at the Bradford School of Art and, by his early 20s, was making professional sales and starring in major exhibitions. He came out as gay when he was 23 years old—seven years before homosexuality was decriminalized in the U.K., where he was born—and several years later emigrated to California where he would go on to take inspiration in pop culture and California’s year-round summer. Many of Hockney’s best-known paintings feature Los Angeles swimming pools and those works helped identify him as “the quintessential artist of Southern California’s nouveau riche leisure life,” the New York Times wrote. His early works openly depicted domestic gay life at a time when few other artists dared to do so, and he once described his paintings as “homosexual propaganda.” “Portrait of an Artist,” the record-holding painting, depicts a male swimmer in white trunks while Hockney’s former lover, painter Peter Schlesinger, looks on from the side of the pool while fully clothed. Of his five most expensive works, the top three are portraits of gay men.
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Crucial Quote
“What one must remember about some of these pictures is that they were partly propaganda of something that hadn’t been propagandised, especially among students, as a subject: homosexuality. I felt it should be done. Nobody else would use it as a subject because it was a part of me,” Hockney famously said.
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What To Watch For
How Hockney’s paintings continue to sell. There are currently three works by the artist for sale at Christie’s, two digital drawings and a charcoal sketch priced between $20,000 and $200,000.
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