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David Hockney’s $90.3m painting reminds us what great art looks like

a 1972 painting entitled “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),” by British artist David Hockney
David Hockney’s 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) was sold at Christie’s for $90.3m. Photograph: David Hockney/AP

Bittersweet – you don’t really know what that word means until you have contemplated David Hockney’s 1972 Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). This painting is a calm distillation of love and sorrow, a sad song about a broken heart – and that heart was Hockney’s. Its sale at Christie’s for an awe-inspiring $90.3m (£70.2m), a new world record for a living artist, adds more layers of bittersweetness. For Hockney at 81, this is a recognition of his place as one of the most remarkable artists of the past 60 years. Yet it comes with barbs.

For many people, including me, the first chance to see Portrait of an Artist – which has been in a private collection and seems now to be in another one – in the flesh was Tate Britain’s 2017 Hockney retrospective. It was a dazzling moment to finally come face to face with this legendary work. The scale takes you by surprise. When you’ve seen an image in reproduction so many times, it’s almost hallucinatory to encounter the real painting, large as life. It is the culmination of Hockney’s preoccupation with painting bodies in, emerging from, or diving into swimming pools. His creation of the pale underwater flesh of the swimmer through translucent veils of pale blue is a miracle. Hockney takes pop art to the level of the 15th-century master Jan van Eyck in the sheer subtlety of the light-filled glazes with which he creates the still pool, the paralysed onlooker and the landscape of psychedelic hues.

Although I hadn’t seen it in the flesh before, I knew it well, because it is at the heart of Jack Hazan’s uneasily intimate 1974 film about Hockney, A Bigger Splash. This poetic documentary not only shows how Portrait of an Artist was painted, but why. It reveals the pain of Hockney’s breakup with his lover Peter Schlesinger in a series of scenes that mirror the cool poise and underlying passion of his paintings. Out of this personal crisis – for it is apparent in the film and seems on all accounts true that Schlesinger was the love of his life – Hockney starts to paint this ambitious and brave canvas. Schlesinger posed as the man in a pink jacket gazing into the pool. The swimmer he’s looking at is not Hockney.

Hockney watches his watching and records his desire, the desire that’s taking him away. Yet, the painting gives this intimate event the stature of history. Just as the 19th-century history paintings you can see in the Louvre or National Gallery record bloody battles and brutal slayings, Hockney records the breaking of his own heart.

This painting is an insight into what makes a great work of art. The distillation of feeling it embodies, the transformation of raw anguish into refined painterly workmanship, is proof that art needs to drink deep of life.

If anything is worth such daft money, this is. But seeing it in Hockney’s retrospective was unsettling. After this and other masterpieces of beauty, lucidity and controlled intensity painted in the 1960s and early 70s, it was all too clear how much of the stuffing seems to have gone from later Hockney. After all, he’s had another five decades of painting since. Prolific, energetic and ingenious, he has experimented with cubist-style photomontages, made fax art when fax machines were the groovy new thing, designed operas and now does iPad paintings. He is even an accomplished art historian whose book Secret Knowledge offers a provocative perspective on the story of western art.

Hockney is a true cultural democrat whose art defies elitist snobbery while being boldly intellectual. He’s also a modern hero who portrayed gay life with simple frankness that so completely defied 1960s prejudices that it didn’t even feel like defiance.

Nothing he does is without interest, but he has never again equalled the power of Portrait of an Artist. This really does seem to be a work of art in which the artist tells everything, expresses everything and is emptied of a dimension by it. Hockney has turned away from confession and the portrayal of love since he painted it. The pain it records is all too real.

To me, it looks as if his later experiments are an escape from revealed feeling into art that’s about art. Then again, if Hockney has never regained the heights of this true modern masterpiece, who else has?

The most expensive work ever sold by a living artist now dates from 1972. This is not a kind comment on the art of this century. Hockney’s double-edged triumph proves that art is at its most potent when it speaks of truth and life from one heart to others. There isn’t enough newer work that does that. Perhaps artists just don’t suffer enough these days.

• Jonathan Jones is a Guardian columnist