Sotheby’s will auction a large portrait by Francis Bacon of his lover George Dyer with a $30 million–$50 million estimate as part of a marquee New York contemporary art evening auction in May.
The 1966 work, Portrait of George Dyer Crouching, is described by the auction house as the “very first full-scale single portrait of Dyer, and the first monumental single-panel portrait of Dyer to appear at auction in a decade.”
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“This painting is an inflection point to me in the history of art,” Lucius Elliott, Sotheby’s vice president and head of marquee contemporary art sales, told ARTnews. “It’s a tremendously exciting thing to bring to market.”
The painting shows a nude Dyer, crouched like a predator over his discarded shirt. Dyer’s head is shown three times as it turns toward the viewer; one of those times is a combination of Dyer’s face with Bacon’s, which Sotheby’s described in a press release as “nodding to their indivisibility.”
While Dyer would serve as Bacon’s muse for more than 40 paintings, the artist would also become “progressive unsympathetic” to Dyer’s “volatile bouts of purposelessness, alcoholism, and erratic behavior”.
Portrait of George Dyer Crouching also inaugurated a series of 10 full-scale portraits of Bacon’s lover made between 1966 and 1968. Only nine remain; one was destroyed in a fire in 1979.
This painting debuted at Bacon’s important solo exhibition at Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1966, and was also shown during the artist’s lifetime retrospective at the city’s Grand Palais in 1971-1972. Notably, Dyer died two days before the retrospective.
More recently, the painting was included in the 2022 exhibition “Francis Bacon: Man and Beast” at the Royal Academy of the Arts in London.
“There’s no painting that more eloquently sums up the entirety of the thesis of that show than this one,” Elliot told ARTnews. “This is Dyer as a man, but his pose is like an animal.”
The work was acquired by its current owner directly from Marlborough Gallery in 1970, and has never been offered on the market until now, remaining in the same family collection for more than five decades.
Bacon’s images of Dyer are considered particularly valuable, with Portrait of George Dyer Talking, a 1966 painting from this same series, having sold at Christie’s sold in London for £42.2 million ($70 million) in February 2014, blowing past its estimate of $50 million.
Yet the painting headed to auction in May is not likely to sell for a price that even nears Bacon’s auction record, which is still held by Three Studies of Lucien Freud (1969). That triptych sold at Christie’s for $142.4 million in 2013, briefly making it the most expensive work ever auctioned.
Portrait of George Dyer Crouching will go on view at Sotheby’s offices in Hong Kong from April 2 to 6, and will then travel to the house’s London and New York headquarters.
Source: artnews.com