Francis Bacon's Figure in Movement Heads to Christie's New York with $50M Estimate

Christie's 20th Century Evening Sale on November 9, 2023 at Rockefeller Center in New York will feature Francis Bacon's Figure in Movement, estimated at $50 million. Painted in 1976, the work is part of Bacon's output following the 1971 death of his lover George Dyer. It comes to auction for the first time after nearly half a century in a single collection. The painting was exhibited alongside the black triptychs at Bacon's first solo show at a French institution outside Paris, the Musée Cantini in Marseille, and later featured in retrospectives at Tate Gallery, Museo Correr, and Centre Georges Pompidou, as well as the 2018 Bacon – Giacometti exhibition at Fondation Beyeler in Basel. Figure in Movement dialogues with the black triptychs, exploring love, loss, and mortality. The composition merges Dyer's features with Bacon's own on a black background. Dyer and Bacon met in a pub in 1963; Dyer became Bacon's muse and was found dead in their hotel room at the Hôtel des Saints-Pères days before Bacon's 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris.