Francis Bacon’s ‘Portrait of George Dyer Talking’ sold for $70 million at Christie’s evening auction of Post-War and Contemporary Art on February 13 in London. The painting, which was the sale’s top lot and achieved the highest price ever paid at auction for a single panel by the artist, was expected to fetch around $49 million. Bacon’s triptych of Lucian Freud, which sold for $142 million at Christie’s in New York in November 2013, remains the most expensive work by the artist ever sold at auction.
The 6’ by 6’ canvas depicting Bacon’s lover, George Dyer, was featured in the artist’s monumental retrospective at Paris’ Grand Palais in 1971. The exhibition opened just two days after Dyer was found dead in a French hotel room due to an alcohol and drug overdose. Despite their famously tumultuous relationship, Bacon painted portraits of Dyer almost obsessively both before and after his death.
The sale at Christie’s garnered $206,158,720 -- the second highest total for a European auction of Post-War and Contemporary art in history -- and sold 83% by lot and 95% by value. Other highlights included Gerhard Richter’s ‘Abstraktes Bild,’ one of the artist’s finest abstract works to appear at auction, which sold for $32.5 million; a sculpture by Jeff Koons titled ‘Cracked Egg (Magenta),’ which fetched $23.4 million; and Damien Hirst’s spot painting of Mickey Mouse titled ‘Mickey,’ which sold for $1.5 million.
