Record bid at Christie's auction in New York. Last night Irish artist Francis Bacon's triptych 'Three Studies of Lucian Freud' sold for $142,4 million, the highest price ever paid for a work at an auction.
Seven offers to arrive at the final purchase price, 142.405.000 dollars, a price that exceeded the almost 120 million dollars paid to Sotheby's in the spring of 2012 for the legendary 'Scream' by Edvard Munch, even after taking inflation into account . The auction also surpassed another record set by Sotheby's in 2008 when it sold a 1976 Bacon triptych for $86 million to Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.
The 'record-breaking' painting depicts friend and rival artist, Lucian Freud, seated in a wooden chair against an orange background. The triptych was part of a group of works by Bacon sold by an anonymous collector in Rome to a consortium of American investors. By the 70s the three panels had been sold separately.
And it was the collector from Rome who brought them together after twenty years of research. He bought the central panel in Paris from an art dealer in the early 80s. Then at the end of the same decade the left and right panels from a collector in Japan. The work is the only triptych dedicated to Freud, the artist nephew of Sigmund Freud, still in circulation. The other, dated 1966, has been lost.
