Bacon's triptych set a new auction record of 2.9 billion CZK

New York - The New York auction house Christie's on Tuesday evening local time (night into today CET) sold the triptych by the Irish-British painter Francis Bacon, Three Studies of Lucian Freud, for $142.4 million (almost 2.9 billion CZK). The record amount of more than $22 million (over 443 million CZK) surpassed the previous auction art record holder - Edvard Munch's The Scream.
    The auctioned triptych from 1969 had never been offered at auction before. It depicts the painter Lucian Freud, the grandson of the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, and is considered one of Bacon's greatest works. It was expected to fetch $90 million (1.8 billion CZK), but the final amount exceeded that estimate by a third.
    “This is a historic moment,” said the auctioneer Jussi Pylkkanen according to the AFP agency. The name of the new owner was not disclosed by the auction house, as per custom.
    The auction of this record item lasted just six minutes, and seven bidders competed by phone for the valuable triptych, placing million-dollar bids at one-second intervals. The auction house itself earned nearly $15 million (302 million CZK) in auction fees from its sale, according to the DPA agency.
    In 2008, another Bacon triptych was sold for $86.3 million (over 1.7 billion CZK), which was the highest amount for a post-war artwork at that time. According to British press, the buyer of the painting Triptych 1976 was Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich.
    Today, another Bacon triptych surpassed the previous absolute auction record from last year, when the famous Scream by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch was sold by an unknown buyer for $119.9 million (over 2.4 billion CZK). Interestingly, according to DPA, while Munch's painting is known by almost everyone, Bacon's works are primarily recognized by specialists. Moreover, the triptych had not been together for a long time, and its individual parts were located in different places.
    It consists of three paintings - each two meters high and one and a half meters wide - depicting a seated Freud in various positions. Freud's face is painted over on them, which was typical of Bacon's work.
    “It is a true masterpiece and one of the most incredible paintings that has been auctioned in this current generation,” stated Francis Outred, head of the post-war and contemporary art department at Christie's European office, according to the BBC.
    Francis Bacon, who became famous for his expressive paintings full of horror, violence, and absurdity, is regarded as one of the greatest painters of the 20th century. He was friends with Berlin-born Lucian Freud from 1945, and they portrayed each other multiple times. “It is a reminder of their relationship and pays tribute to the creative and emotional affinity between these two artists,” Outred commented on the triptych.
    According to DPA, it seems that the entire auction evening at Christie's also ended record-breaking, as works sold for a total of nearly $692 million (almost 14 billion CZK).
    Although Bacon's triptych became the highest-priced artwork sold at auction, the absolute most expensive sold work is Paul Cézanne's painting The Card Players, which the family of the Qatari emir bought in 2011 for reportedly over $250 million (about 4.7 billion CZK) from a private collector. This is followed, with a significant margin, by Pablo Picasso's painting The Dream, which American financier Steven Cohen purchased for $155 million (3.1 billion CZK) this March. The seller was another American billionaire and entrepreneur, Steve Wynn.