Bacon painting to fetch €45m

A PAINTING by Dublin-born Francis Bacon is tipped to fetch a record $70 million (€45m) when it goes under the hammer in New York shortly, Sotheby’s said yesterday.

The artist’s work, Triptych (1976), described by the auction house as “a masterwork of the first order” and rich in symbolism drawing on ancient Greek mythology, is to go on sale on May 14.

“This is undoubtedly the most important Bacon in private hands. It has been with the same collection ever since it was acquired 30 years ago,” said Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s worldwide head of contemporary art. “It is a masterpiece of the 20th century.”

Triptych was the centrepiece of Bacon’s show at the Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris in 1977, considered the artist’s most important display of new works of the 1970s. The painting’s three panels show Bacon’s lucid imagination, with allegorical depictions drawing on the myth of Prometheus, who, according to legend, was bound to a rock where his liver was repeatedly fed on by an eagle.

The current record for a Bacon was set last year in New York, when his Study from Innocent X (1962) sold for $52.7 million (€34m) at the time, also setting a record for any work by a British or Irish artist sold at auction.