Francis Bacon, Salvador Dali Works Boost Bumper Sotheby's "Looking Closely" Sale

Francis Bacon (1909 - 1992), Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud, (i) titled and dated 1964 on the reverse, oil on canvas in three parts, each: 35.5 by 30.2cm. Estimate 7,000,000—9,000,000 GBP. Lot Sold 23,001,250 GBP.

PROVENANCE: Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., London
Acquired directly from the above in 1964

EXHIBITED: Hamburg, Kustverein; Stockholm, Moderna Museet; Dublin, Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Francis Bacon,1965, no. 57

NOTE: Acquired prior to the breakthrough travelling exhibition in 1965 and executed at the very height of Francis Bacon's phenomenal career, Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud serves as testament to one of the most impressive artistic relationships of the Twentieth Century. In the 1950s and 1960s Bacon and Freud, then widely recognised as Britain's pre-eminent painters, met incessantly and were considered inseparable. From 1961 Bacon employed this fourteen by twelve inches canvas size exclusively for an epic portraiture cycle that depicted a coterie of close friends in a project that occupied him until the end of his life. While his friend Frank Auerbach has likened these fantastic portrayals to "risen spirits" John Russell has commented that "Just as a gunshot sometimes leaves an after-echo or parallel report, so these small concentrated heads carry their ghosts within them" (John Russell, Francis Bacon, London 1993, p. 99 and p. 152). Among these phenomenal character investigations, the brilliant colour, dramatic brushstrokes and analysis of facial landscape across the three canvases of the present work are truly exceptional. Highlights converge and dissemble to describe passages of light across the three versions of Freud's visage: just as our eye is attracted to the seeming organisation of one area it immediately shoots to the apparent dissolution of another.

Lucian Freud had first learned about Francis Bacon from Graham Sutherland towards the end of the Second World War, and the pair thereafter became close friends, even seeing each other on a daily basis for a time. Freud painted his extraordinary portrait Francis Bacon in oil on copper in 1952, conjuring an intangible air of distracted distance in the face of his friend which so perfectly narrates the dimensions of their unconventional friendship. Two years later in 1954 the pair represented Britain, together with Ben Nicholson, at the Venice Biennale, firmly cementing their reputations at the vanguard of contemporary painting. Having started with the large Portrait of Lucian Freud in 1951, Bacon created paintings that included Freud in their titles for over twenty years, and the shadow of his unnamed presence long after that. However, the present work contains an intensity and intimacy that is rarely seen elsewhere, together with the paint handling that defines Bacon's inimitable masterworks. It is archetypal of Bacon's seminal cycle of triptych portrait heads, capturing an intense presence in mid-movement. This is Bacon's detached yet doting depiction of one of his closest friends and a true artistic companion, and it confirms David Sylvester's description that "Bacon had something of Picasso's genius for transforming his autobiography into images with a mythic allure and weight" (David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, London 2000, p. 186).

Overlapping matrices of paint hatching, partly imprinted with Bacon's idiosyncratic use of corduroy material, describe the modulations of texture across the subject's faces, while Freud's stylishly dishevelled hair is variously presented with dragged streaks of dry pigment. Bacon's extraordinary aptitude to shift through different modes of execution, from exactitude to expressivity, from the diagrammatic to the painterly, is here exhibited at its instinctive best. Bacon's portraiture is critically-defined and world-renowned for achieving uncanny likeness via a seemingly chaotic assault of violent brushstrokes. Between the rich paint strata here he has buried a deep affection for Freud, which slowly reveals itself together with the gradual appearance of the sitter's character on the surface of the canvas.

The portrait is loaded with physicality, both literally with the weight of oil paint and as the material record of the artist's own brutal assault. Out of a flurry of swipes and blows Freud's unmistakable presence emerges: with each loaded stroke on the three canvases this most focused of portraits unravels the sitter's psychological and emotional kernel across the surfaces. It is almost as if Bacon has attempted to hide this face and to camouflage it in paint, yet suffers the burden of knowing it too well to conceal its true identity. It is often noted that Bacon's portraits reveal their sitter's inner essence because he painted people he knew closely, and at this time Lucian Freud was perhaps the closest that Francis Bacon ever had to a likeminded artistic equal.

The variegated textures of the surfaces recount the story of this work's creation: the artist has brushed, smeared, flicked, lifted and thrown paint in his drive to define likeness; scraping, reworking, and layering to impregnate the painting with both painterly and psychological depth. While the powerful scarlet reds introduce a radical charge of colour, the sinuous sweeps of highly viscous strokes define the topography of Freud's physiognomy in a rhythmic pattern of textural variety. All this is set against a backdrop of depthless black, coarsely woven canvas that results in the sculptural character of bitumen. Bacon's rich hues have been soaked into the absorbent unprimed canvas, which contrasts brilliantly with the explosive plasticity of the impasto.

While the renowned critic and Bacon's great friend Michel Leiris describes the artist's portraits in strictly corporeal terms; "his work carries the signs of his actions rather as a person's flesh bears the scars of an accident or an attack" (Michel Leiris in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Marlborough Fine Art, Francis Bacon: Recent Paintings, p. 17), William Feaver appraises them as figures of speech: "Here we have the slap round the chops. Then a good seeing-to, followed by a succession of abrupt images; gobsmacked, browbeaten, dumped on, cold-shouldered" (William Feaver in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Marlborough Fine Art, Francis Bacon 1909-1992: Small Portrait Studies, 1993, n.p.). Because we see several aspects and angles of Freud's head all at once we are confronted by his character as a whole, rather than one specific snapshot. The representation is like an over-exposed photograph, or even some constantly adjusting oil-based hologram acting as a psychosomatic X-ray. Left on the canvas is the residue of the artist's impulsive action, simultaneously trapping different facets of facial expression and a sense of movement. However, rather than merely the few moments of a time-delayed photo, Bacon has caught Freud's character as he observed him over years, and thus the painting holds within it time, experience and the shadows of memory itself.

The celebrated Czech writer Milan Kundera has commented that "Bacon's portraits are the interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved being still remain a beloved being?" (Milan Kundera, Bacon: Portraits and Self-Portraits, London 1996, p. 12). Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud is an outstanding example of Bacon reaching that critical threshold between recognition and dissolution. He has navigated the precise point at which this head reveals both the character of Lucian Freud and the raw and seemingly arbitrary convergence of paint and brushstrokes. Indeed, within its extraordinary layers of execution lies the key to Bacon's portraiture project, as he defined to Hugh Davies in 1973: "In trying to paint a portrait I would like it to be all likeness – I would like it to be a universal image as well as a specific fact" (the artist interviewed by Hugh Davies, 7^th August 1973, cited in: Hugh Davies and Sally Yard, Francis Bacon, New York 1986, p. 45).

LONDON.- A triptych of British painter Lucian Freud by his friend Francis Bacon fetched 23 million pounds ($37 million) on Thursday at a Sotheby's auction in London, more than double its high estimate.

Combined with a new auction record for any surrealist work of art -- Salvador Dali's "Portrait de Paul Eluard" sold for 13.5 million pounds -- the sale of works from a private collection titled "Looking Closely" raised 93.5 million pounds.

That far exceeded expectations of between 39.3 and 55 million pounds and will undermine confidence among major auction houses that the booming art market can sustain its 2010 bull run after contracting sharply late in late 2008 and throughout 2009.

Dali's painting had been valued at 3.5 million to 5 million pounds before the auction, but the eventual price tripled the artist's auction record set earlier in the week.

Yet the real star of the show was Bacon's "Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud," which more than 10 bidders from four continents competed for before it sold to an anonymous bidder in the Sotheby's sale room.

Bacon and Freud met toward the end of World War Two and soon became close companions. They were at the vanguard of post-war British painting and, with Ben Nicholson, represented Britain at the 1954 Venice Biennale.

"This striking painting has everything a collector in the current market is looking for," said Cheyenne Westphal, Sotheby's chairman of contemporary art Europe.

"It is an artwork that radiates 'wall-power' with its brilliant color and dramatic brushstrokes. It narrates one of the most impressive artistic relationships of the 20th Century between two titans of British art and is desirably fresh to the market having remained in the same collection for almost half a century."

The high prices follow the 25.2 million pounds paid for Pablo Picasso's "La Lecture" earlier in the week, meaning Sotheby's boasts the three highest prices fetched so far during a major series of auctions being held in London in February. (Reporting by Mike Collett-White; Editing by Patricia Reaney)

Salvador Dalí (1904 - 1989), Portrait de Paul Éluard. Painted in 1929, signed Salvador Dali and dated 29 (lower left), oil on board, 33 by 25cm. Estimate 3,500,000—5,000,000 GBP. Lot Sold 13,481,250 GBP.

PROVENANCE: Salvador & Gala Dalí
Cécile Eluard, Paris (acquired from the above circa 1982)
Sale: Christie's, New York, 14th November 1989, lot 73
Acquired directly from the above

EXHIBITED: Paris, Galerie Goemans, Salvador Dalí, 1929, no. 9
Paris, Galerie Pierre Colle, Salvador Dalí, 1931, no. 6
New York, Gallery of Modern Art, Salvador Dalí, 1910-1965, 1965-66, no. 29, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Salvador Dalí, rétrospective, 1920-1980, 1979-80, no. 78, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
London, The Tate Gallery, Dalí, 1980, no. 50
Madrid, Museo Español de Arte Contemporaneo & Barcelona, Palau Reial de Pedralbes, 400 obres de Salvador Dalí, 1914 a 1983, 1983, no. 134, illustrated in colour in the catalogue
Martigny, Fondation Pierre Gianadda, De Picasso à Barceló. Les artistes espagnols, 2003, no. 11, illustrated in colour in the catalogue and on the front cover

LITERATURE AND REFERENCES: Salvador Dalí, La Conquête de l'irrationnel, Paris, 1935, pl. 2, illustrated
James Thrall Soby, Salvador Dalí. Paintings, Drawings, Prints, New York, 1941, mentioned p. 15
Salvador Dalí, La Vie secrète de Salvador Dalí, Paris, 1952, illustrated pp. 96-97
Robert Descharnes, Dalí de Gala, Lausanne, 1962, illustrated p. 153
William S. Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art, New York, 1968, mentioned pp. 220 & 226
De Deaeger (ed.), Dalí, Paris, 1968, no. 131, illustrated
Robert Descharnes, Salvador Dalí, New York, 1976, no. 19, illustrated p. 23
Salvador Dali, La vida secreta de Salvador Dalí, Figueras, 1981, pp. 194-195, illustrated pl. 2
Dawn Ades, Dalí, London, 1982, no. 67, illustrated p. 87
Salvador Dalí, La mia vita segreta, Milan, 1982, p. 198
Ignacio Gómez de Liaño, Dalí, Barcelona, 1982, no. 35, illustrated
Robert Descharnes, Salvador Dalí: l'œuvre et l'homme, Lausanne, 1984, illustrated in colour p. 84
Robert Descharnes, Salvador Dalí, London, 1985, no. 19, illustrated p. 21
Meryle Secrest, Salvador Dalí, New York, 1986, mentioned p. 115
Karin v. Maur, Salvador Dalí, Stuttgart, 1989, illustrated p. XXI
Robert Descharnes & Gilles Néret, Salvador Dalí. The Paintings, Cologne, 1994, vol. I, no. 306, illustrated in colour p. 138
Salvador Dalí: The Early Years (exhibition catalogue), Hayward Gallery, London, 1994, illustrated p. 155
Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, London, 1997, fig. 64, illustrated
Felix Fanés, Salvador Dalí, la construcción de la imagen: 1925-1930, Madrid, 1999, detail illustrated p. 157
Felix Fanés, El Gran masturbador, Madrid, 2000, detail illustrated p. 10
Grandes maestros de la pintura, Barcelona, 2001, p. 4
Luis Llongueras, Todo Dalí: vida y obra del personaje más genial y espectacular del siglo XX, Barcelona, 2003, p. LIX
Salvador Dalí, Obra completa. Textos autobiográficos 1, Barcelona, Figueres & Madrid, 2003, detail illustrated
Les Essentiels de l'art Dalí, Amsterdam, 2003, p. 83
Ricard Mas Peinado, Universdalí, Barcelona & Madrid, 2003, p. 132
Laia Rosa Armengol, Dalí, icono y personaje, Madrid, 2003, p. 26
Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Obra completa. Álbum Dalí, Barcelona, Figueres & Madrid, 2004, p. 63
Silvia Borghesi, Dalí, Milan, 2004, p. 37
Jean-Louis Gaillemin, Dalí the impresario of Surrealism, London, 2004, p. 55
Huellas dalinianas, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2004, detail illustrated p. 263
Felix Fanés, La Pintura y sus sombras: cuatro estudios sobre Salvador Dalí, Teruel, 2004, p. 89
Rafael Santos Torroella, El Primer Dalí, 1918-1929: catálogo razonado, Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Valencia 2005, p. 371
Salvador Dalí: La gare de Perpignan - Pop, Op, Yes-yes, Pompier (exhibition catalogue), Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2006, p. 221
Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Salvador Dalí, Catalogue raisonné of Paintings (1910-1939), no. 233, www.salvador-dali.org

NOTE: Painted in 1929, the present work is a masterpiece of Surrealism and arguably one of the finest Surrealist portraits. Reaching deeply into the psychology of portraiture, it displays many of the most important elements that were key to Dalí's rich visual vocabulary. It unites two of the movement's pivotal figures – Salvador Dalí and Paul Eluard – and reflects the untamed imagination and technical virtuosity of Dalí's first mature Surrealist paintings. Dalí and the French Surrealist poet Eluard met in 1929, around the time when the artist was staying in Paris where he assisted Luis Buñuel with the filming of Un Chien Andalou. During his stay in the capital, Dalí came in contact with the Surrealists and invited them to visit him in Cadaqués in the summer. Among those who spent the summer with Dalí were Paul Eluard with his wife Gala and their daughter Cécile, as well as Buñuel and René Magritte with his wife. This visit would soon prove to be a major turning point for the young painter, and was to change both his private and artistic life.

Robert Descharnes wrote: 'Dalí felt flattered that Paul Eluard should have come to see him. With André Breton and Louis Aragon, Eluard was one of the leading lights of the Surrealist movement. As for Gala, she was a revelation – the revelation Dalí had been waiting for, indeed expecting. She was the personification of the woman in his childhood dreams to whom he had given the mythical name Galuchka' (R. Descharnes, op. cit., 1994, pp. 148-149). During the summer, Dalí and Gala took long walks along the cliffs near Cadaqués; Dalí fell madly in love with Gala, who would become his legendary, life-long companion and muse. At the end of her stay, 'Dalí saw Gala off at the station in Figueras, where she took a train to Paris. Then he retired to his studio and resumed his ascetic life, completing the Portrait of Paul Eluard which the writer had been sitting for' (ibid., p. 153).

Besides these momentous events in Dalí's personal life, this period also brought a level of artistic recognition and financial success. The dealer Camille Goemans approached him with the proposition of buying three paintings of Dalí's own choice, as well as staging an exhibition of his work at his Paris gallery. In November-December of 1929, Dalí's first exhibition was held at Galerie Goemans, where the present work was included alongside other masterpieces from this period. Accompanied by a catalogue prefaced by André Breton, the exhibition was a great success and, as Simon Wilson pointed out, 'it marked the beginning of his public success and shot him into the front ranks of the Surrealist group at a difficult moment in the movement's history. Maurice Nadeau, the group's first historian later wrote "Yet new forces would replace the old ones. In the evening of this epoch rose the star of Salvador Dalí, whose personality and activity were to cause the entire movement to take a new step"' (S. Wilson in Salvador Dalí (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., 1980, p. 15).

Depicted with minutely executed details, the iconography of the present work combines all the major motifs of Dalí's early – and the most innovative – stage of Surrealism. Whilst Eluard formally sat for this portrait during his stay on the Spanish coast, the imagery that surrounds him is a complex web of Freudian symbols reflecting Dalí's own personal universe. Writing about the present work, Ian Gibson observed: 'It is impossible to resist the temptation to look for allusions to Gala. Perhaps relevant is the fact that the locust has lost its arms and legs and that the former are pushing up through the fingers of the delicate female hand on Eluard's forehead, which presumably are crushing the dreaded insect along with the moth. Might the suggestion be that Dalí senses that Gala could help to allay his sexual fears? One notes, also, the two hands clasping each other, affectionately it would seem, at the bottom of the portrait, linked by a mane of flowing tresses to the rocks of Cape Creus. Beside them a mop of hair suggests a maidenhead. An allusion, perhaps, to Dalí's seaside walks with Gala, to their growing intimacy, to his hopes for sexual potency and liberation' (I. Gibson, op. cit., p. 227).

Beside the bust of Eluard, who looms large over a desolate landscape and looks directly at the viewer, is another head, coupled with a grasshopper or praying mantis. The animal had a highly personal reference for Dalí, who had a youthful fantasy of being a 'grasshopper child', while the praying mantis was a favourite symbol for the Surrealists due to their ritual of the male being devoured by the female immediately after the sexual act. Eluard himself kept a large collection of praying mantises, and Dalí was able to observe their behaviour.

The sleeping head, which here appears to be metamorphosing into a toothed fish, has often been interpreted as the portrait of the artist himself. It features as the main protagonist of Dalí's masterpiece Le Grand masturbateur (fig. 1), as well as in several other paintings of 1929 (figs. 2 & 4), and ultimately in Persistance de la mémoire of 1931 (fig. 5), as part of a complex assemblage with underlying themes of desire and erotic tension. The head is always depicted with its eyes closed; as Dalí wrote in The Visible Woman, 'sleeping is a form of dying': the sleeping head, coupled with the praying mantis, becomes another symbol of the indestructible bond between love and death. The most explicit appearance of this head as a self-portrait is perhaps in L'Enigme du désir (fig. 4), where the rest of the amorphic body is filled with the inscriptions 'ma mere' ('my mother'), a direct reference to the Oedipal complex.

The head of a lion, a Freudian symbol of passion and violence, also appears in several paintings of 1929. Here it is seen in the upper right of the composition, confronted by a jug in the shape of a woman's face, a common Freudian symbol of woman as a receptacle. This confrontation of the male and female symbols has been interpreted as the artist's neurotic apprehension of his relationship with Gala. Furthermore, the image of a detached arm with fingers is in several places superimposed over the figure of Eluard. These fragmented body parts can be seen as phallic symbols, alluding to Freud's castration complex. In the distance behind the apparition of Eluard, minute figures of a man and a child possibly refer to Dalí's fear of the impending break with his father. This rich and complex symbolic imagery, along with its technical mastery and its importance as a document of this pivotal moment in the history of the Surrealist movement, set this painting apart as a true masterpiece of Modern art.

According to Robert and Nicolas Descharnes, the present work remained in the personal collection of Salvador and Gala Dalí for many decades. After Gala's death in 1982, the work was given to Gala's and Eluard's daughter, Cécile Eluard.

Fig. 1, Salvador Dalí, Le Grand masturbateur, 1929, oil on canvas, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

Fig. 2, Salvador Dalí, Les Plaisirs illuminés, 1929, oil and collage on board, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Fig. 3, Gala, Eluard, Dalí, Valentine Hugo and René Crevel in Montmartre, 1931

Fig. 4, Salvador Dalí, L'Enigme du désir, 1929, oil on canvas, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

Fig. 5, Salvador Dalí, Persistance de la mémoire, 1931, oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York