This article was updated with the final sale price and other details following the auction’s conclusion.
A rare portrait by celebrated painter Francis Bacon sold for £43.4 million ($52.8 million) at Sotheby’s London on Wednesday, the first time the artwork has been auctioned in its almost six-decade history.
The intimate paintings capture British artist Lucien Freud, who was at one time a friend of Bacon’s and later, by the mid-1980s, a foe. The three artworks were exhibited together in Stockholm and Hamburg in 1965, shortly after their completion. One side panel now belongs to a museum in Jerusalem and the other is in a private collection.
“Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud” on display ahead of Wednesday’s auction. Credit: Courtesy Sothebys
Experts initially predicted that the center painting would fetch up to £35 million ($42 million), though it smashed estimates on Wednesday to become the most valuable single-panel painting by Bacon ever to sell at auction, Sotheby’s said.
Prior to the auction, “Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud” had been hidden from public view in a private art collection for 40 years, according to Sotheby’s, which exhibited the painting in London last weekend.
By 1982, Freud and Bacon — two pillars of British contemporary art — were not on speaking terms. Bacon’s tender “Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud,” painted decades before their falling out, is all the more melancholic since becoming a symbol of friendship lost.
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According to Bella Freud, fashion designer and daughter of Lucien Freud, the soured friendship cast a long shadow.
“Francis was clearly somebody who he adored and admired. And there weren’t many people my father talked about in that way,” she said in a news release ahead of the auction. “The things he repeated about him were just dazzling, utterly disarming and breathtakingly wonderful, and silencing because of their brilliance. I imagine he must have missed that when he stopped being friendly with him.”
Bacon is known as a big hitter at art auctions, and his work often smashes pre-sale estimates. In 2020, his 1981 piece titled “Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus” sold for $84 million, surpassing the original estimate of between $60 and $80 million.
Update: A previous version of this article stated that Bacon’s “Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud” was part of a triptych. The story has been updated to reflect the painting was only briefly intended to become part of a triptych. Within a year of finishing the three works the artist changed his mind and numbered each painting as individual pieces.
Source: www.cnn.com