Art market in shock as Christie's calls halt to Francis Bacon sale

[bijou]

A Francis Bacon self-portrait failed to sell at auction in New York last night, in a significant sign that the global financial tsunami is breaking over the international art market.

Bacon's 1964 "Study for Self Portrait" - billed as a highlight of Christie's contemporary art auction - was estimated to take in around $US40 million (£26.8 million). A Bacon triptych went under the hammer in New York last May for $86.2 million (£57.9 million), a record for the British painter and it was expected that the self portrait would fetch a similarly high price.

But when bidding reached $27.4 million (£18.13 million) the auction house dramatically halted the proceedings, to a chorus of gasps from a stunned audience.

...

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For those of us who remember the sale of Irises and the subsequent years it was clear that the art market was (like property in much of the world) a bubble waiting to burst.

[megimoo]

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For those of us who remember the sale of Irises and the subsequent years it was clear that the art market was (like property in much of the world) a bubble waiting to burst.

Great art is an 'no risk 'investment for the long term.It's value always returns when times rebound.

[Gingersnap]

I don't think this has a lot of merit myself.

[megimoo]

I don't think this has a lot of merit myself.

Francis Bacon
Study for Self-Portrait, 1985

http://www.francis-bacon.cx/self_portraits/self85.html actual series by Francis Bacon !

At the major retrospective in Paris in 1996-97 this painting hung in the last gallery of the Center Pompidou, almost as if it were the artist's farewell to the public. There is a simple grandure and a elegiac mood in this most beautyful work. Bacon uses a very smooth brushstroke and has airbrushed some areas of the face, arms, and hands, which when viewd under glass, as he always insisted his work should be, imparts to the whole a soft overall density akin to color field painting.

In each of the panels Bacon repeats, with variations, the familiar ill-at ease cross-legges pose; in the two outside panels, he clasps his knees, in the center one, he achieves an ungainly equilibrium, his hands melting into the canvas. Each panel has its own character and yet each gains by being juxtaposed with the other two. He used passport-sized photographs of himself taken in automatic booths over a period of many years. It was a form of self exploration, yet he hated his face, and in two of the heads in the triptych, he seems content to destroy part of it, while at the same time calling attention to his right cheek by inserting a small red arrow in two of them. This formal device helps to establish a unity.

He told David Sylvester: "I go on painting it [his face] only because I haven't got any other people to do...One of the nicest things that Cocteau said was 'Each day in the mirror I watch death at work'. This is what one does to oneself.'

Dennis Farr, Francis Bacon: A Retrospective, 1999

[expat-pattaya]

I must be a primitive. While I appreciate art, the concept that a painting is worth these sums astounds me. Are they saying there aren't similarly talented artists today turning out quality art? I don't get it.

But then, I never understood $100k for a landmark homerun baseball, or $300k for a 1959 Gibson Les Paul.

[JB]

For those of us who remember the sale of Irises and the subsequent years it was clear that the art market was (like property in much of the world) a bubble waiting to burst.

Like most things, when the economy is good, art is good.

I didn't know this about Irises though:

"His mother, Joan, bought it for $80,000 (£44,000) in 1947".

From 80 grand to 49 million in about 40 years or so. Not bad.

[SaintLouieWoman]

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For those of us who remember the sale of Irises and the subsequent years it was clear that the art market was (like property in much of the world) a bubble waiting to burst.

They probably should have taken the $27.4 million. They might be holding it for a very long time.

[bijou]

They probably should have taken the $27.4 million. They might be holding it for a very long time.

I would have been very tempted to take it. With the current economic climate it may be quite some time until enough people are interested in owning it to bid the price up to the amount they want.