A work by the British painter Francis Bacon auctioned by the major house Sotheby’s was sold on Monday for 25.7 million euros during the first evening of the spring sales in New York.
This is the first time that this portrait by Francis Bacon of his then partner, George Dyer, has been put up for auction. It is part of a series of ten other portraits, produced between 1966 and 1968 by the British artist.
Sotheby’s, which belongs to Franco-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi, estimated its sale at between 27 and 46 million euros.
This first evening of auction brought in a total of 217.4 million euros.
Other works up for auction include those by American painter Joan Mitchell. His work, “Noon”, was purchased for more than 20.9 million euros. Its latest record amounts to 26.9 million euros.
Other records were broken, such as the 17.6 million euros paid for a four-handed work by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, or the almost 21.3 million paid for a work by the Italian Lucio Fontana.
Another artist on the rise, the African-American artist Faith Ringgold, who died in April, whose work was sold for more than 1.4 million euros, three times her last record.
Sotheby’s is organizing a new evening of art auctions on Wednesday, including works by Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, René Magritte and the British artist Leonora Carrington.
The prestigious auction house hopes to raise between 508 and 726 million euros with the sale of 700 works, a range “slightly” higher than that of May 2023.
