The world has a new most expensive living artist

Hockney smashed records with the $90.3 million sale of
Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures).
ASSOCIATED PRESS

• The sale of David Hockney’s work smashes auction
  estimates with $90.3 million sale
• Hockney is now the most expensive living artist in the
  world, overtaking Jeff Koons. 

A British currency trader turned billionaire just
catapulted David Hockney to status as the world’s most
expensive living artist after selling one of the artist’s most
famous works
for a record $90.3 million. 

Joe Lewis, the East End-born owner of financial firm
Tavistock Group and the Tottenham Hotspur football team, 
sold
“Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),” putting
Hockney, 81, now above American Jeff Koons, 63, who held the
title since 2013, when his orange balloon dog sold for $58.4
million. The painting broke its $80 million estimate at a
Christie’s auction on November 15. 

Lewis has an estimated net worth of $5 billion and also owns pieces by Picasso,
Degas, Klimt, and Freud. 

The painting was bought by a client of Marc Porter,
chairman of Christie’s Americas. Bidding started at $18 million
and finished at $80 million with the final price including a
buyer’s premium, Christie’s said in a release. Hockney’s 1972
work depicts a landscape reminiscent of the South of France
containing two men including the artist’s former lover Peter
Schlesinger.

Another of Hockney’s works, a 1990 landscape “Pacific Coast
Highway and Santa Monica,” fetched $28.5 million at Sotheby’s in
May.