Figure in Movement, a 1976 painting by Francis Bacon that expressively reveals the artist’s pain after the death of his lover and muse, George Dyer, is expected to achieve about US$50 million this November at Christie’s in New York, the auction house announced early Tuesday.
With the news, Christie’s lineup of major works for its series of major 20th-century and 21st-century sales is beginning to take shape. Last week, the auction house announced it would offer Claude Monet’s Le bassin aux nymphéas, circa 1917-19, with an estimate of about US$65 million, and three paintings by Paul Cézanne that are being offered by the Museum Langmatt in Baden, Switzerland.
Cézanne’s Fruits et pot de gingembre, circa 1890-93, is estimated to achieve between US$35 million and US$55 million.
The Bacon work, rendered in oil and dye transfer lettering on a six-and-a-half-foot tall canvas, is among a series of paintings the artist created after Dyer’s death in 1971. It’s never been sold at auction and was owned by the same anonymous family for nearly 50 years.
“It is a painting in which a whole range of Baconian devices are brought together with a compelling mastery,” the critic David Sylvester wrote of the work, according to Christie’s.
This 1976 Figure in Movement (other Bacon works have had the same title) was first displayed in a solo exhibition at the Musée Cantini in Marseille, France, along with the artist’s black triptychs, which were painted shortly after Dyer died. The painting has been widely exhibited since, most recently in 2018 at the Beyeler Foundation.
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