Francis Bacon's Triptych 1986-7 will be the star lot of Christie's 20th and 21st Century Art Evening Sale on 1 March. First unveiled in 1987 at the Marlborough Gallery in New York, the work remained in the possession of Marlborough before being purchased in 2007 by a private collector. Today, Triptych 1986-7, which has been featured in numerous exhibitions between Minneapolis and Moscow, is offered for the first time on the auction market, with an estimate between £35-55 million.
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"Francis Bacon is unmistakably one of the greatest painters of the 20th century," said Katharine Arnold, Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie's Europe. "He captured everything it is to be human, unafraid to elevate rapturous love or bring to the fore the deep anguish of grief. His ability to translate the full gambit of our emotions is perfectly encapsulated in this masterpiece, Triptych 1986-7. The rare, large-scale triptych format offered Bacon the opportunity to trace his life back through the historic events of the 20th century, instilling the canvases with his lived experiences, his triumphs and his traumas."
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Bacon designed the left panel of Triptych 1986-7 after a 1919 press photo, which shows President Woodrow Wilson leaving negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles. The motif on the right is based on Leon Trotsky's bloodied desk after his assassination. The character in the central panel is said to be John Edwards, Bacon's partner at the time, and his portrayal resembles a pose of George Dyer (Bacon's great love who committed suicide in 1971) in Triptych August 1972.
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Triptych 1986-7 is one of Bacon's few large-scale triptychs to remain in private hands. His current record at auction was set in 2013 with the sale of the 1969 triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud, which fetched $142.4 million (then £88.7 mil) at Christie's, becoming the most expensive painting in auction history at the time.
Among the other key works at Christie's London sale scheduled for 1 March, collectors will be able to find Lucian Freud's Girl with Closed Eyes, produced during the same period as Bacon's triptych (estimated at £10-15 million) and Foxes by Franz Marc, returned last year to the heirs of its former owners (estimate on request).
