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Bacon papal portrait sold for record $27.6 million
2007-02-08
A 50-year-old painting by Dublin-born artist Francis Bacon set an auction record for his work on Thursday when it was sold at Christie's for 14.02 million pounds ($27.56 million). "Study For Portrait II," an oil on canvas work Bacon painted in late 1956, is one of Bacon's famed papal portraits. It smashed the previous record of $15 million set in November at Sotheby's in New York for the work "Version No. 2 of Lying Figure With Hypodermic Syringe." According to Christie's, Bacon painted more than 50 paintings of popes, beginning in 1946, and was obsessed by Diego Velazquez's 1650 "Portrait of Pope Innocent X." Unlike his more dramatic "screaming Popes" from the early 1950s, Bacon's 1956 work is a more sympathetic image of the pope as a tragic hero.
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