News Archive

Appetite for Bacon still big 100 years from now.

27/11/2007

People will still be flocking to galleries to see Francis Bacon’s paintings 100 years from now, according to a new survey.
Bacon’s canvas art broke a new personal record this year when Study From Innocent X sold for £26.5m at Sotheby’s in New York. Another huge price followed in October when Study From the Human Body, Man Turning on a Light, a paining Bacon donated to The Royal College of Art in lieu of rent, sold for just under £8m.
The sales helped convince a panel of 30 museum experts writing for ARTnews magazine that Bacon deserved to be included in its list of artists who will still be famous is 105 years’ time.
Other contemporary art that made an impression on the judges included works by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Gerhard Richter.
The survey made headlines for artists the experts didn’t choose as much as for the ones it did.
Damien Hirst didn’t make it. Neither did Jeff Koons or Lucian Freud.
Bacon was born in Dublin in 1909. He held his first solo exhibition in 1934. He destroyed many of his own works from the 1930’s and early 1940’s before bouncing back with his first major show at the Hanover Gallery in London in 1949.
Much of his work, which can now be reproduced on high quality canvas prints, depicts people in distorted human and animal forms, in pain and in love, in bathrooms and bedrooms.
Bacon died of a heart attack in Madrid in 1992. He was 72.