A David Hockney painting of his friend Henry Geldzahler and Geldzahler's then-partner Christopher Scott has sold at Christie's London auction house for $49.5 million.
The sale follows another whopper auction of a Hockney work featuring gay men in November, when the artist's 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) broke the auction record for a living artist, selling for $90.3 million at Christie's. It was painted three years after Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott, which launched the colossal portrait phase in Hockney's career.
Geldzahler was the first curator of the Modern wing at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and NYC's Commissioner of Cultural Affairs and became close with many of the artists he celebrated, including Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Francesco Clemente. Geldzahler died of liver cancer in 1994 at 59.