Francis Bacon Works To Be Auctioned For $49 Million



The Corsair is neither a fan of Modernist (Africanized Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, Modigliani and Singer-Sargent excepted), nor of the Post-Modernist enterprise with their astonishingly adolescent Avante Garde manifestos. How myopic is it to arrogantly believe that Art, Eternal, could be subject to whimsy, brief. Much of the time Postmodernist "Art" or -- as we like to call it -- "Bizarrechitecture (Exaggerated cough suggesting feigned detachment)" is naught else but simple shit done up in a busy, hyperkinetic, style to mask the robust lack of intellectual substance (Averted Gaze). We prefer teh Mannerists. Art-wise we are profoundly and happily ultra-conservative.

But we do appreciate Bacon's expressions of erosion and decay which are doubly ironic because Bacon -- a Supreme Master always in constant reference to Velasquez and Rembrandt -- was, unfortunately, spiralling into death his own existential decline, and, second, because he was depicting, subconsciously, the bleakness of life the decline of the British empire (An event that The Ugandan-born Corsair applauds, wholeheartedly).

Anyhoo: This, from Bloomberg:

''Christie's International and Sotheby's -- whose sale totals for last year were neck-and-neck at around $6 billion each -- will offer Francis Bacon works estimated at about $49 million each at the February contemporary-art sales in London.

''Two and a half weeks after Sotheby's said it would include Bacon's 1969 `Study of a Nude With Figure in a Mirror' in its Feb. 27 auction, Christie's said that it will offer `Triptych 1974-77' on Feb. 6. For the first time, London's two major auction houses will hold their main February contemporary sales during different weeks.''