Bacon masterpiece fetches record £43m

A Francis Bacon masterpiece broke the artist’s record at auction when it sold for £43m (€53.9m) in New York, Sotheby’s said today.

The sale of 'Triptych', 1976, for $86.3m US (€56m) eclipsed the previous record set in 1962 by the $52.7m (€34m) paid for 'Study For Innocent X'.

The three-panelled picture depicts a headless human form surrounded by three vultures and flanked by two portraits of disfigured human faces.

Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s worldwide head of contemporary art, said: “It is a masterpiece of the 20th century. The world has been waiting for a great triptych, and this is it.”

The piece was sold by a private European collector who has owned the work since it was first exhibited in Paris in 1977.

Bacon used Ancient Greek legends as inspiration for the masterpiece. The central figure alludes to the legend of Prometheus, who has his liver perpetually devoured by an eagle.

Greek dramatist Aeschylus’s trilogy 'The Orestia', where Orestes is plagued by three furies after murdering his mother, was also an influence.

Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s London deputy director for contemporary art, described the work as a “totemic triptych”.

“It created an overnight sensation when it was first exhibited in Paris in 1976,” he said.

“It showed Bacon working in a new way. It is a watershed painting which sees him moving beyond personal grief on to a more universal scale.

“Bacon was heavily influenced by Greek tragedies where personal stories relate to grander, universal issues.

“He saw the large format triptych as the greatest vehicle for artistic vision and this work sees Bacon achieve a new level of complexity.”

Bacon (1909-1992) was born in Dublin to English parents and moved to London in 1926.

Although he had no formal training as an artist, he started to exhibit his work in the 1930s.

A decade later he became well known, causing sensation among the artistic community with his angst-ridden paintings of twisted and mutated forms.

Bacon would become one of the most prominent contemporary artists of his lifetime, with major retrospectives in Paris in 1971, the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1975 and the Tate in London in 1985.

Bacon died of a heart attack in Madrid in 1992. Today, his work is among the most popular of 20th-century art at auction.

On Tuesday, a life-size Lucian Freud painting of a naked London Jobcentre supervisor sleeping broke the world auction record for a work by a living artist when it sold for more than £17m at rival auction house Christie’s.

The masterpiece fetched 33.6 million dollars (£17.2 million) in the sale at New York’s Rockefeller Centre.

Benefits Supervisor Sleeping beat the previous world auction record for a work by a living artist, held by Jeff Koons’ Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold), which fetched 23.5 million dollars (£11.3 million) last year.