The Sotheby's auction house is about to auction off an extremely famous painting by Francis Bacon. Link:
Francis Bacon - Portrait of George Dyer Crouching
The pre-auction estimate is a whopping 30,000,000 - 50,000,000 USD. This market resolves YES if the final sale price listed on the Sotheby's website is >$50 million USD.
Resolution details:
Example from a past auction: This painting by Vigée Le Brun sold for 3,085,000 USD. This is the equivalent number I will use.
Note that the final listed sale price typically includes the buyer's premium (beyond the bid you hear during the auction.
If the lot is withdrawn before the auction, or it fails to sell, this market resolves NO. It only resolves YES if it successfully sells with a listed price >$50 million.
Painting details
Passionate yet tumultuous, Francis Bacon’s romance with his muse and lover George Dyer was a profound influence throughout the artist’s life and work, with his portraits of Dyer standing among the most powerful of his works. This May, Sotheby’s will offer Francis Bacon’s 1966 Portrait of George Dyer Crouching - the first from a critical cycle of 10 monumental portraits of Dyer created between 1966 and 1968, marking the inauguration of a momentous corpus of beautiful yet agonizing masterworks dedicated to his most significant muse...
A striking masterwork from the apex of the artist’s practice, Portrait of George Dyer Crouching provides a haunting glimpse of George Dyer through the eyes of his lover, simultaneously as a hero and as a figure of vulnerability. (link)
For more auctions, check out the dashboard.
1,000
3.00Monday evening’s most expensive lot was Francis Bacon’s 1966 painting Portrait of George Dyer Crouching, the first of 10 full-scale portraits by Bacon depicting his lover George Dyer. The work on offer had been in the same collection for 54 years, having sold to its consignor in 1970, just four years after Bacon finished it. It came to auction with a $50 million high estimate, a number that seemed poised to put the painting among the most expensive ones by Bacon ever sold publicly.
Unfortunately for Sotheby’s, it was a big flop, failing even to meet its low estimate; it ended up selling for $27.7 million. (All figures reported here include premium, unless noted otherwise.) Murmurs abounded; many seemed awed by this hyped work’s implosion on the block.
YIKES
@traders AUCTION OVER. Bacon took an enormous L—final sale price of 27,735,000 USD, well below the estimate even including buyer's premium. YIKES. That's not great. This resolves NO.
In the meantime, check out this auction for an utterly hideous handbag:
/Ziddletwix/will-this-hideous-hermes-handbag-se
Or this two million dollar (rather ugly) ring:
I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think the artist was a knight ("Sir"), that was another Francis Bacon.
@MichaelLatowicki Oooh of course thanks for the correction, will fix. Yeah if I thought about it for a second, given what I know about the artist & his lifestyle, wouldn't make much sense for him to have been knighted. but somehow the "Sir" got transferred from one famous francis bacon to the other. oops .