When David Hockney died on 11 June 2026 at the age of eighty-eight, the auction room's first answer was measured rather than feverish, according to MutualArt. Five of the seventy-seven Hockney lots on offer made £2,038,071, around $2.73 million, and the market digest pairs that headline with three works available now through partner galleries, each sitting well below its auction equivalent and each organised around a single thread: the line.

The thread runs from the etched line that made Hockney a serious printmaker long before he became a celebrity, through the ballpoint line Il Lee has drawn across paper and canvas for four decades in New York, to the ruled, repeated unit from which Victor Vasarely built Op art. Each work arrives through a MutualArt partner gallery in Mayfair, Tribeca and Braselton, Georgia, with the practical advantage that edition, condition and provenance can be put to a dealer before anything changes hands.

Hockney's The Old Guitarist (1976-77), an etching and aquatint, is offered through Gerrish Fine Art at £13,500, around $18,100, in the middle of what the digest calls a deliberately wide price ladder. Il Lee's BK-002 (2006), in ballpoint ink on canvas, comes through Art Projects International, the Tribeca gallery at 434 Greenwich Street that gave the Korean-born artist his first in-depth survey of ballpoint drawings in 1997. The gallery's current presentation, IL LEE: Works from the Collection, runs through 21 November 2026.

Vasarely's Gestalt - Bleu (1971), a heliogravure in which a blue cube twists against a black ground, measures just 25.4 by 25.4 centimetres and is priced at $635 through Braselton Art Gallery, which also lists a second Vasarely sheet, Kub-Stri (1972). For scale, the Hungarian-born artist's VEGA-ZETT-VA (1972) sold for €140,800, around $166,400, at Sotheby's. Together the three works describe a single arc, from Hockney's line as narrative, through Il Lee's line as accumulation, to Vasarely's line as system.