Bacon self-portrait could fetch up to €18m at NY auction

A Francis Bacon triptych self-portrait is estimated to sell for up to $24m (€18.4m) at a sale in London next month.

It will be the first big test of the auction market for contemporary art after a record week in New York in November.

Sotheby’s 56-lot auction on Feb 12 carries a minimum valuation of $101m, the highest figure for one of the company’s February London contemporary sales since the previous art market boom of 2008, the New York-based company said yesterday in an email.

Wealthy individuals, concerned about continuing instability in the wider economy, are increasingly turning to contemporary art as an alternative investment, dealers said. Recent auctions of contemporary art have been dominated by high prices for classic works by gold-standard names such as Bacon, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Irish-born Bacon’s Three Studies for a Self-Portrait dates from 1980 and is one of 11 such smaller-scale triptychs. Painted when the artist was 71, it has been entered by a European collector.

Richter was the biggest-selling living artist at auction in 2012, according to the Artnet database in New York, racking up $298.9m of sales, a 48.8% increase on 2011.

Encouraged by this record year for the German artist, sellers are offering at Sotheby’s Abstraktes Bild (769-1) from 1992 and the 1976 photorealist painting, Wolke (Cloud). These contrasting Richters carry low estimates of £7.5m (€9.2m) and £7m.

Basquiat’s acrylic, oilstick and collage painting Untitled (Pecho/Oreja) had been owned by U2 until July 2008, when it was sold for £5.1m at Sotheby’s.

The painting, from 1982-1983, will be reoffered in February with an estimate of £7m to £9m.

Two 1965 monochrome “cut” paintings by the Italian postwar conceptual artist Lucio Fontana — another investors’ favourite — provide the sale’s other big-ticket highlights. The large white single-cut Concetto Spaziale, Attesa, is estimated at £2.2m to £2.8m, while the smaller blood-red Concetto Spaziale, Attese, with four cuts, is priced at £800,000 to £1.2m.