For at least 10 minutes Christie’s overflowing salesroom watched in rapt
attention as a 1969 triptych by Francis Bacon sold for $142.4 million, described
as the highest price ever paid for an artwork at auction.
Seven bidders vied for the painting – “Three Studies
of Lucian Freud” – that depicts Bacon’s friend and rival, Lucian Freud, sitting
on a wooden chair against an orange background. Lock Kresler, head of private
sales at Christie’s London, took the winning bid by telephone. The hammer went
down on the piece at $127 million. With the buyer’s premium added, the final
price of the work was $142,405,000.
The price surpassed the nearly
$120 million paid at Sotheby’s in the spring of 2012 for Edvard Munch’s
fabled pastel of “The Scream,” even after
adjusting for inflation. It also topped the previous high sale for the
artist at auction set in at Sotheby’s in 2008, just as the art market was
peaking, when Sotheby’s
sold a 1976 Bacon triptych to the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich for $86
million.
The triptych was part of a group of works by Francis
Bacon that were sold by an unidentified collector living in Rome to a consortium
of investors. One member of that group, whom officials at Christie’s declined to
name, is said to be the seller of the triptych.
Sometime in the 1970s the three panels were sold
separately. The right-hand panel was bought by a collector in Rome who spent 20
years trying to reunite the triptych. He bought the middle panel from a Paris
dealer in the early 1980s. Then, in the late ‘80s, he bought the left and final
panel from a collector in Japan. It is also one of just two full-length
triptychs that Bacon painted of Freud — the other, from 1966, is missing
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