polity united states cold warconcept:era contemporary
Pool with Two Figures
Acrylic on canvas by David Hockney, 1971. A large-format painting depicting two figures at a Los Angeles swimming pool: a swimmer underwater observed by a standing figure gazing down through the water surface. Completed in a frenzy of focused work after Hockney accidentally found, side-by-side, a photograph of a swimmer underwater and a Francis Bacon photograph of a child on grass. Sold at Christie's New York on November 15, 2018 for $90,312,500 — a then-record for a living artist at auction.
Scholarly Significance
Anchor the Hockney market record cluster with Pool with Two Figures — the 1971 canvas that set a living artist auction record at $90.3M (Christie's, 2018).
Notes
- ·Hockney has described the painting's origin: he accidentally placed two photographs next to each other — one of a swimmer underwater, one of a boy running on grass from a Francis Bacon-owned book — and immediately saw the composition.
- ·He painted the work in two weeks of intense concentrated effort to meet a deadline for the André Emmerich Gallery show in 1972.
- ·The standing figure looking down into the pool is widely interpreted as a psychological double — the observer and the observed, desire mediated by glass and water.
- ·The 2018 Christie's sale price of $90,312,500 (including buyer's premium) set a record for a living artist at auction. The previous record had been Jeff Koons's Rabbit (1986), which later sold for $91.1M in May 2019.
- ·The painting is considered the apex of Hockney's Los Angeles pool period, combining his interest in optics, water, and the representation of bodies in space.