Thirty years after the death of Irish-born artist Francis Bacon, Sotheby’s Paris will hold a sale to include 20 works spanning over half a century of the life of the figurative painter.
Entitled Inside the World of Francis Bacon: Works from the Collection of Majid Boustany, the sale includes portraits of the artist by photographers such as Cecil Beaton, Don McCullin and Peter Beard, along with paintings by his acquaintances such as Roy de Maistre, Graham Sutherland and Louis le Brocquy, whose 1980 work, Image of Francis Bacon, is listed at €12,000–€18,000.
Bacon and le Brocquy first met when Bacon moved to London in the late 1940s, and the pair remained friends until Bacon’s death in 1992. They met regularly in the south of France where le Brocquy and his wife, Irish painter Anne Madden, had a house near Nice.
Bacon was a resident of Monaco from July 1946 until the early 1950s and continued to stay in the principality with family, friends and lovers until his death.
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Majid Boustany, a dedicated Bacon aficionado and collector, founded the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation in Monaco in 2014, which is the ‘only non-profit foundation dedicated to promoting a better understanding of Francis Bacon’s work, life and creative process’, according to catalogue notes.
The foundation provides support for research and artists through a scholarship to a doctoral student at the École du Louvre in Paris.
“When Bacon burst into my life, I was quickly fascinated by this singular, unclassifiable, self-taught and uncompromising giant, whose paintings raise burning questions,” recalls Boustany, whose sale will “support and perpetuate the various actions and missions of my foundation”.
Of interest, besides le Brocquy’s image of Bacon, is a plate that served as the artist’s palette at his studio, 14 Rue de Birague in Paris, where he stayed between 1974 and 1987.
Many photographs of Bacon show his penchant for using both upper and underside of a plate to mix oils. This particular plate – one of only three palettes known to have survived this period – comes from the collection of art historian Eddy Batache, who, along with partner Reinhard Hassert, became some of Bacon’s closest friends (€20,000–€30,000).
A very early piece, executed in 1929, when Bacon was just 20-years-old is Rug, ‘Composition’ (€90,000–€140,000), which forms “an important yet little known part of his artistic output” according to catalogue notes.
Bacon originally became known as a furniture designer, bringing modernist thinking to the London design set. He produced at least 25 rugs, though, as only ten are thought to have survived, it makes this rug a rare enough piece. It is said that the design for this particular pile was one of the artists’ favourites, as he used it to decorate his apartment in Chelsea, which is evident in a rare 1932 photograph.
The top lot in the sale is Bacon’s own Figure Crouching (€3.5m–€5m), which is coming to the market for the first time. Featuring a solitary half-human, half-animal figure, the work “brings together some of the most iconic motifs of Bacon’s oeuvre at their earliest conception”. sothebys.com
