Freud’s Bacon Portrait Could Fetch $12M
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A Lucian Freud portrait of Francis Bacon may fetch up to $12.4 million at a London auction, Christie’s International said Sunday.
The unfinished oil-on-canvas work, one of only two oil portraits Mr. Freud painted of his fellow artist, will be offered in the October 19 Contemporary art sale, the auction house said in an e-mailed statement.
Mr. Freud started the 14-inch-square portrait in 1956. By the following year, only the face of the planned head-and-shoulders work was completed. Bacon left suddenly, most probably to pursue his lover Peter Lacy in Tangiers, Christie’s said.
“It’s a painting of the most important friendship in 20th-century British art,” Christie’s head of contemporary art in London, Pilar Ordovas, said. “Although it’s incomplete, Bacon’s whole face and presence is in the canvas.”
The picture hadn’t been finished because Mr. Freud requires his sitter to be present at all times during the painting process, Ms. Ordovas said in a telephone interview.
“It’s essential to his working method,” she said. “He thinks the sitter’s presence influences everything around them.”
The work is being offered from a family collection, having been acquired from a London gallery in 1972. It has rarely been seen in public, Christie’s said.
