NEW YORK, NY.- Christie's will present David Hockney's Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (1968) as a major highlight of the 20th Century Evening Sale taking place this November in New York. A landmark in Hockney's career and recently featured as a centrepiece of David Hockney 25, the major survey exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, this extraordinary painting is the first of his renowned double portraits, a series celebrated as his supreme triumph. Only seven double portraits by Hockney exist, four of which are held in institutional collections and two of which constitute the artist's world record and second highest price achieved at auction. Held in the same private collection for the last forty years, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy can be considered the last remaining double portrait.

Painted in 1968, the work depicts English novelist Christopher Isherwood, one of the most celebrated literary figures of the 20th Century, renowned for his 1964 novel A Single Man, famously adapted by Tom Ford into a celebrated feature film in 2009, as well as for his 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin, which served as the basis for Cabaret. Isherwood is seated aside his partner and native Californian, artist Don Bachardy, in an intimate, sunlit moment in their Santa Monica living room. Isherwood's crisp attire and composed posture contrast with Bachardy's direct and assured gaze, creating a dynamic interplay between the two figures. The composition, framed by gleaming shutters and enriched with symbolic objects, highlights Hockney's remarkable talent for capturing personal relationships through his inventive use of perspective, spatial arrangement, and texture.

Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy has been prominently featured in David Hockney's major international retrospectives, including David Hockney: A Retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1988; David Hockney at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, in 1992-1993; and the 2017-2018 survey David Hockney, which opened at Tate Britain before touring to the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where it was displayed in a room dedicated to Hockney's celebrated double portraits.

Sir Norman Rosenthal, Guest Curator, Fondation Louis Vuitton, David Hockney 25: “Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy is the first of David Hockney's iconic 'realist' double portraits, completed in 1968, to later include American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman) (1968), Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott (1969), and finally Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, completed in London in 1971. All these paintings exude the spirit of David Hockney's California, even if two of the scenes are in fact situated in New York and London. They are all pictures of persons in culturally glamorous society, friends of the artist, in their own environments and above all there is always a unique sense of painted light. And nowhere more than in this painting that with its three complex evocatively painted still lives on the table in front of the sitters themselves (two piles of unnamed books, a bowl of fruit dominated by a massive banana); the sitters themselves with all their complicated personal histories behind and in front of them; the implied unexceptional homosexual relationship between the two sitters in their separate armchairs, in an age and time even in Los Angeles not to be taken for granted. This and so much more is implied in a precisely dramatic painting – a moment in time held here for ever by one of the greatest painters of his time.”

Katharine Arnold, Vice Chairman 20th/21st Century Art and Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art, Europe, Christie's London remarks: “Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy is a masterpiece by David Hockney. The very first of the artist's celebrated double portraits, it represents a pivotal moment in his career, combining the subtle exploration of his subjects' personal relationship with his own groundbreaking use of space, sightlines, and surface. The work's considered geometry - evoking the staged iconography of early Renaissance artists like Piero della Francesca, who Hockney had studied alongside many others at the National Gallery in London - also reflects the artistic context of 1960s American minimalism. In this spectacular double portrait, Hockney captures the brilliance of Californian light and the freedoms of the west coast culture he fell in love with. It also celebrates fellow Englishman and émigré Christopher Isherwood, one of the greatest literary figures of the 20th century whose home with Don Bachardy provided the salon for a dynamic community of artists, writers, and intellectuals including W.H. Auden, Aldous Huxley and Truman Capote. This painting is both a deeply personal and formally innovative achievement. As one of the only privately held double-portraits remaining, it offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to acquire a defining masterpiece from one of the most significant chapters in modern art. Recently returned from the triumphant exhibition, David Hockney 25, at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, it is a privilege to offer this iconic painting as a centrepiece of our forthcoming New York auction.”

Created between 1968 and 1975, Hockney's double portraits are among the most celebrated achievements in modern art. American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman) (1968) hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, Le Parc des Sources, Vichy (1970) at Chatsworth House in Bakewell, UK, while Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970-1971) and George Lawson and Wayne Sleep (1975) are both in the Tate Collection. Christie's set a world auction record for a living artist in November 2018 with Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) selling for $90,312,496 in New York and set Hockney's second highest price shortly after with Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott selling for GBP 37,661,248 ($49.5m) in London. These large-scale works showcase the artist's mastery of realism, light, perspective, and formal construction, and Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy is considered among the most important of this groundbreaking group.