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David Hockney: 8 Canvases, 4 Sitters, Each Split at the Waist

David Hockney painted David, Celia, Stephen and Ian, London, 1982 on 8 equal canvases after his composite Polaroids. It comes to auction for the first time at Phillips New York on November 17, estimated at $10 million to $15 million.

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In the early 1980s David Hockney put painting aside and built pictures out of grids of Polaroids, each print taken from a slightly different place and moment. When he returned to the canvas in London in 1982, the lesson came with him. David, Celia, Stephen and Ian, London, 1982 is made of 8 canvases of equal size, 4 across and 2 high, and each sitter is divided into an upper and a lower half.

The seams do the work the Polaroid borders did. Each figure sits on its own pair of panels against its own ground: pale blue, deep blue, a blue grid, black. Because the break falls at the waist, the top and bottom of each body read as 2 separate looks rather than 1 frozen pose, and the eye moves across the group the way it moves across a contact sheet. Phillips places the painting in a breakthrough group of multi canvas works made in London that year, in which Hockney translated photographic discoveries about perception, time and simultaneity into paint, and calls it a decisive moment in his long experiment with Cubism.

The painting has never been offered at auction. It is a lead lot in Phillips' Modern and Contemporary Art Evening Sale in New York on Tuesday, November 17, 2026, with an estimate of $10 million to $15 million. It was shown first in London and has been on view at Phillips in New York since November 7.

It shares the evening with Modigliani's stone Tête, Alexander Calder's Snow Flurry, May 14, 1959, a mobile of 25 white discs that Calder gave to the Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa, estimated at $4 million to $6 million, and Jackson Pollock's Constellation of 1946, which passed from Peggy Guggenheim's collection to the critic Harold Rosenberg.

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