Francis Bacon: "Triptych", 1974-77

Source: Christie's

A FRANCIS BACON TRIPTYCH SELLS FOR MORE THAN $50 MILLION AT CHRISTIE'S LONDON, FEBRUARY 2008

February 8th 2008 - Triptych 1974-77 by Francis Bacon (1909-1992) sold for £26.3 million ($51.7 million/€35.2 million), becoming the most expensive work of art ever sold at Christie’s in London and the most valuable Post-War and Contemporary work sold in Europe.

Appearing at auction for the first time and offered from a private collection, Triptych 1974- 77, is the last in the great series that Bacon painted in response to the tragic death of his lover George Dyer in 1971. Many of Bacon’s works after that date - marking what David Sylvester maintained was the absolute ‘peak period’ of Bacon’s entire career - were preoccupied with Dyer. Painted between May and June of 1974 and revisited in 1977, this great, strangely open, Baconian landscape was immediately recognised as a major landmark in his oeuvre.

Triptych 1974-77 is one of the finest and most mysterious of Bacon’s paintings from the 1970s. Painted between May and June of 1974, this great, strangely open, Baconian landscape was the last work the artist made before a major retrospective of his work held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1974. As the most recent and also one of the most elaborate and ambitious of the artist’s paintings to be included in this exhibition, it formed the culmination of this important survey of Bacon’s career from the late 1960s onwards and was immediately recognised as both a major landmark and also perhaps a turning point in Bacon’s career.

Further highlights at Christie’s sale this evening included Zwei Liebespaare, 1966 by Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) that sold for £7,300,500 ($14,323,581 / €9,768,069), a monumental Concetto spaziale, Attesa by Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), 1965, sold for £6,740,500 ($13,224,861 / €9,018,789), and Palm Springs Jump, 1982 by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), an electrifying work made in a surge of creativity when he had just broken through to star status, was a further highlight selling for £6,516,500 ($12,785,373/€8,719,077)

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