David Hockney is man of the moment in the museum world, and now the art market is catching up. In New York in November, Sotheby’s is to sell the first painting in Hockney’s Woldgate Woods series to appear at auction. Woldgate Woods, 24, 25 and 26 (2006) carries an estimate of $9m to $12m—the artist’s record at auction currently stands at $7.9m, although works have been selling privately for more than $10m, according to Oliver Barker, the co-chairman of Sotheby’s Europe.
“From an artistic perspective Hockney has always been celebrated; he’s immensely popular in the public eye,” Barker says. “But commercially he is under-appreciated.” Barker says there are a number of reasons for this: “Many works have been bought by US museums, private collectors are devoted to him and have been reluctant to sell and Hockney has hung onto a sizeable collection of his own paintings.”
Woldgate Woods, 24, 25 and 26, which was shown in the artist’s 2012 Royal Academy show and is being sold by a private US collector, was painted over a four-day period in 2006 when Hockney was in Yorkshire caring for his elderly mother. The work was painted on six canvases, partly because the staircase at his Bridlington studio was too small to fit a large-scale work down it. “He was also very influenced by photography at that time,” Barker says.
The Yorkshire-born, California-based artist’s portraits are currently on show at the Royal Academy in London (until 2 October) following his acclaimed exhibition of landscapes there in 2012, which pulled in 600,000 visitors. Meanwhile, a major retrospective is due to open at Tate Britain in February and there is talk of setting up a space in Bridlington to house the paintings he has kept, as well as his old studio.
In February, two paintings by Hockney fetched high prices at Christie’s in London. Beach Umbrella, painted in 1971 after his famous Pop art period, doubled its estimate at £2.7m (£3.1m with fees).
