The last “papal study” by Francis Bacon was auctioned off. This Thursday for 46 million dollars, within expectations, in a sale of contemporary art at Sotheby’s in New York that did not shine. for his spirits and that he finished with the most outstanding works sold for the lowest estimated price.
The haunting “Study of Red Pope 1962, 2nd version 1971”, which has been in private hands since 1973 and has a tra gic history, managed to Today a new owner after starring in a disappointing episode five years ago at Christie’s in London, who made an overly optimistic assessment and failed to win. sell it.
The Irish-born modernist painter depicts on this canvas a “creepy encounter” between the Pope and his own lover, George Dyer, who committed suicide & oacute; two days before the work was unveiled to the public at his retrospective exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1971, which marked the pinnacle of his career.
It is the last papal portrait in a series of several dozen that Bacon painted. obsessively inspired by the “Portrait of Pope Innocent X” from the Spanish Diego Velázquez, but its historical meaning did not help him. to approach the price of the artist’s most expensive painting, “Three Studies of Lucien Freud”, sold in 2013 for 142.4 million.
This Bacon was left behind. closer to its minimum value of 40 million than to the maximum of 60 that Sotheby´s had predicted, and that was the general tone of the auction, which contained three dozen pieces, most pictures.
Buyers bid so calmly that the person responsible for the hammer, Oliver Barker, president of Sotheby’s in Europe, arrived at the hammer. to sigh and say exasperated in one of the last offers: “I need a drink, come on, come on, it’s been a long week.”
The next most outstanding work was that of the American Cy Twombly: an untitled painting with a dark gray background and circular scribbles in wax, which garnered a lot of attention. $38 million; and already far away he continued Andy Warhol’s “Elvis” silkscreen, in which the rock and roll star points guns at the viewer, which he raised. 21.6 million.
A huge painting of Ed Ruscha that read in white letters on a cloud background “Cold Beer Beautiful Girls” (Cold beer and pretty girls) 18.82 million, and a tribute by his compatriot David Hockney to the Grand Canyon of Colorado, the colorful “Grand Canyon III”, raised $18.82 million. 11.03 million.
Perhaps the only surprise was the record achieved by the German Georg Baselitz with his sculpture of a wooden head painted yellow, “Women of Dresden”; , which was estimated at 4 million at the most and was sold for 11.24 million.
In the end, a previous auction of the afternoon dedicated to the art of “now”, whose most expensive work was “Beauty examined” Kerry James Marshall, for 13.54 million, but who scored several records for female artists, who were the majority in the sale.
Among them was Simone Leigh, winner of a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, whose sculpture of a bust feminine, “Birmingham” for $2.17 million; or Christina Quarles, whose painting “Night Fell Upon Us Up On Us” raised 4.5 million, multiplying the estimates.