Francis Bacon’s portrait of Lucian Freud sold for a record-breaking price – $ 52.8 million, to be exact!
According to Paint, this is the highest value single-panel Bacon painting sold. It was initially predicted to sell for $ 42.2 million, though it ended up making a huge profit.
The Francis Bacon masterpiece sold for $ 142 million, when his portrait of Lucian Freud’s three-panel three Studies Studies sold during the 2013 New York Christie Auction.
The recently sold painting, officially known as the Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud, was sold by Sotheby’s London at an auction entitled British Art: The Jubilee Auction. The Bacon painting, which created din 1964, was one of the highest profile pieces in the collection.
Before arriving at the auction, the statue was part of the same European collection for more than four decades. Collector ID has not been disclosed. The statue was last exhibited at the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin in 1965, and has not been seen in public since.
It is not yet clear who the new buyer is, and what they plan to do with the iconic artwork.
The auction began on June 29, though it did not take long for the photo to reach the buyer. Other notable paintings sold during the auction include David Hockney’s Woldgate Woods II (created in 2006), and Banksy’s Turf War, a portrait of Winston Churchill.
Bacon and Freud were close friends during their lifetime. They met in 1944 and were remarkably close during the 50s and 60s, with Freud a continuing feature of the artist’s work. However, rumors say that the couple’s relationship became strained when Freud became jealous over Bacon’s international success.
People still pay good money for art these days. In April, one of Andy Warhol’s portraits of Marilyn Monroe sold for $ 195 million, though we initially expected to download more than $ 200 million. Earlier this year, paintings of Monet, Picasso, and Van Gogh were put up for auction by Sotheby’s and are expected to sell for $ 47 million.
It’s not just artowkr sales that are historic at high prices. The digital art that is in the form of NFTs is also being sold for millions at a time, like the meme “Charlie Bit My Finger”, which sold for about $ 1 million in May.
