UPDATE: THIS MADE £16,035,000
This storied self portrait by Francis Bacon leads one of the finest groups of School of London paintings ever brought to market. No less than four museum quality works by Bacon, Freud and Kossoff are at Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary evening auction in London on March 4. The Bacon portrait was painted in 1972 in the shadow of a devastating personal loss. Struggling to cope following the death of his partner George Dyer, he obsessively painted himself again and again. Two career-defining portraits by Lucian Freud, and Leon Kossoff’s Children’s Swimming Pool—widely considered the artist’s masterpiece—complete the group. The School of London was a small group of free spirited artists who pursued their separate but related visions. Fully engaged with the world around them, they up-ended tradition and created a completely new path forward for figurative art.
