Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures), 1972
‘By the end of the 1960s,’ wrote Jonathan Jones in his Guardian tribute to Hockney, ‘an eerie stillness dominated his paintings as he became more openly the observer, the looker-on. The loneliness of looking is the theme of what may be his greatest painting, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). It’s certainly his most expensive, selling in 2018 for $90.3m. In this huge 1972 canvas, an almost mystically radiant work, a young man in a pink jacket stands by an open air swimming pool watching a swimmer whose pale flesh flickers under translucent turquoise water. To give the kind of gossipy detail Hockney came to loathe, the man by the pool is Peter Schlesinger and the painting captures the end of their affair, a trauma that gives it painful authority’
Photograph: David Hockney
