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Even David Hockney, that most celebrated of British Pop Art painters, couldn’t have envisaged so fanciful a notion as a canvas he left incomplete some 47 years ago one day commanding a record sum at auction, while being universally hailed as a modern-day masterpiece. Inconceivable or not, fact has outpaced fancy, with Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), the unfinished fine art-ery in question, fetching a truly monumental winning bid of US$90.3 million (HK$706 million) when it came up for auction at Christie’s New York.
<figure id="attachment_41840" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-41840" style="width: 700px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-41840" src="//www.gafencushop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/1-6.jpg" alt="David Hockney" width="700" height="466" srcset="https://www.gafencushop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/1-6.jpg 700w, https://www.gafencushop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/1-6-200x133.jpg 200w, https://www.gafencushop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/1-6-421x280.jpg 421w, https://www.gafencushop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/1-6-120x80.jpg 120w, https://www.gafencushop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/1-6-500x333.jpg 500w, https://www.gafencushop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/1-6-400x266.jpg 400w, https://www.gafencushop.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/1-6-600x399.jpg 600w" sizes="(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-41840" class="wp-caption-text">Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) by David Hockney</figcaption></figure>
Bidding for this half-finished Hockney opened at a more-than-respectable US$18 million, before rapidly soaring to US$90 million, a figure some US$72.3 million higher than its clearly conservative reserve. Pretty much in one bound, this established Hockney’s experimental piece as one of the high-water marks of post-World War II creativity, while catapulting the artist himself to the all-time pantheon of preeminent painting practitioners. One can only wonder how much it would have fetched had David Hockney ever actually deigned to complete his design.
Photos: Renaud Camus

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Unfinished sketch by David Hockney fetches US$90.3 million