LONDON – A Francis Bacon triptych sold tonight for $ 84.6 million in fees at Sotheby’s inaugural digitally broadcast live auction of impressionist and contemporary art that replaced its postponed May sales in New York. A global online audience saw the company’s star auctioneer, Oliver Barker, receive offers from international colleagues on screens in an empty sales room in London specially adapted for the coronavirus pandemic.
After a 10-minute duel, the Bacon was finally purchased by a telephone bidder in New York against determined competition from an online opponent in China. The price is the third highest ever reached by the artist at auction.
The famous British artist triptych “Inspired by Aeschylus’ Oresteia” (1981), was sold by Astrup Fearnley Museet, a private museum in Oslo founded by Norwegian collector Hans Rasmus Astrup. Entered into the auction before the coronavirus closed, Sotheby’s had guaranteed that Bacon would sell for at least $ 60 million, making it the most valuable work offered so far at auction this year. The pandemic has made wealthy owners wary of selling trophy pieces.
“It’s a bit late, but it’s an important work from a good collection,” James Holland-Hibbert, a leading 20th-century British art dealer in London, said of the Bacon triptych, whose most treasured works date from the 1990s. 1950, 1960s and 1970s. The pre-sale estimate of $ 60 million “was not unreasonable,” given that the museum had previously tried to sell the work privately for more than $ 100 million, Holland-Hibbert said. “It was not completely new to the market.”
Bacon’s signature depiction of three claustrophobic indoor animal-like figures was the first large-scale triptych to appear on the auction market since 2014. A year earlier, the artist’s 1969 triptych, “Three Studies by Lucian Freud,” It sold for a record $ 142.4 million, at the time the highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction.
