A FRANCIS BACON MASTERPIECE LEADS CHRISTIE'S LONDON POST WAR & CONTEMPORARY ART SALE IN FEBRUARY Appearing at auction for the first time and offered from a private collection, Triptych 1974-77 is the last in the great series that Bacon painted in response to the tragic death of his lover
News-Antique.com - Jan 11,2008 - London – Perhaps the most important triptych by Francis Bacon (1909-1992) to ever
appear at auction leads Christie’s Post War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale on
Wednesday, 6 February 2008. Appearing at auction for the first time and offered from a
private collection, Triptych 1974-77 is the last in the great series that Bacon painted in
response to the tragic death of his lover George Dyer in 1971 (estimate on request).
“Painted just in time for his 1974 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as a tribute to
George Dyer, Triptych 1974-1977 is the most important triptych by Francis Bacon to appear ever at
auction,” said Pilar Ordovas, Head of Post War & Contemporary Art, Christie’s
London. “It is a privilege and an honour to be able to work with such a monumental work and present it
for sale in London”
Triptych 1974-77 is one of the finest and most mysterious of Bacon’s paintings from the
1970s. Painted between May and June of 1974, this great, strangely open, Baconian
landscape was the last work the artist made before a major retrospective of his work held at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1974. As the most recent and also one of
the most elaborate and ambitious of the artist’s paintings to be included in this exhibition, it
formed the culmination of this important survey of Bacon’s career from the late 1960s
onwards and was immediately recognised as both a major landmark and also perhaps a
turning point in Bacon’s career.
With its sequential images of dark ominous umbrellas and his lover George Dyer writhing
and struggling on a near deserted beach overlooked by the spectre of two terrifying
monochrome Orwellian witnesses, the subject-matter and the open-air landscape setting of
this work, appeared to mark this work as both a conclusion and, a new departure in Bacon’s
art.
The exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was the first major survey of the Bacon’s
work to take place since his major retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971. It was
on the eve of the opening of this exhibition that George Dyer had committed suicide alone
in the Paris hotel room that he and Bacon shared. Many of Bacon’s works since then -
marking what David Sylvester maintained was the absolute ‘peak period’ of Bacon’s entire
career - had been preoccupied with Dyer and the tragic and ugly manner of his death.
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Visit Christie’s at www.christies.com
A selection of images is available on request
Notes to Editors
Record for Francis Bacon
The current record for any work by Francis Bacon is Study from Innocent X, 1962 sold at
Sotheby’s New York in May 2007 for $52,680,000 / £26,581,895.
Exhibition Tour
• Christie’s New York: 14 & 15 January 2008
• The Post War and Contemporary Art Sales including The Collection of R.B. Kitaj will
be on public view from 1 February 2008 at Christie’s South Kensington, 85 Old
Brompton
