UK: £25m painting could set new record
A Francis Bacon painting is expected to set a new record when it goes under the hammer next month.
'Triptych 1974-77' is being sold from a private collection and will appear at auction for the first time.
The painting, expected to fetch over £25m ( €33.4m), is the last in the series that Bacon painted in response to the suicide of his lover George Dyer in 1971.
The work shows sequential images of dark, ominous umbrellas and Bacon’s lover struggling on a near-deserted beach.
It was painted before a major retrospective of Bacon’s paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Dyer had committed suicide on the eve of the opening of Bacon’s last retrospective before the New York show, in Paris, in the hotel room he shared with the artist.
Many of Bacon’s works after this moment were preoccupied with Dyer and the tragic manner of his death.
Although the triptych is officially estimated at £25m (€33.4m), it is expected to smash the record for an auction sale of any Irish or British work.
Figurative painter Bacon (1909-92), who was born in Dublin, currently holds the record with 'Study from Innocent X (1962)', sold in May last year for £26,581 (€35,661).
The auction takes place at Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale on February 6 in London.
Sotheby’s is expecting its Bacon painting, 'Study Of A Nude With Figure In A Mirror', painted in 1969, to sell for more than £25m (€33.4m) as it goes head-to-head with Christie’s in the sales of contemporary art.
