The Bacon estate is believed to be selling this 1987 Triptych for $65m. It goes on display at Tate this month as part of the gallery’s retrospective. Credit: The Estate of Francis Bacon Courtesy of Faggionato Fine Arts Photo credit: Prudence Cuming © Estate of Francis Bacon. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2007

As Tate Britain opens a major travelling retrospective, we examine the factors underpinning the meteoric rise in prices for the artist’s work and reveal the identity of his biggest collectors

In London last July, Study for Head of George Dyer, 1967, by Francis Bacon was the highlight of Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale. The sensuous portrait of the artist’s most significant muse was painted four years before Dyer killed himself in an alcohol-driven drugs overdose in a Parisian hotel. Depictions of Dyer tend to sell well. The auctioneer opened the bidding at £7m. In the third row, Pierre Chen, a dapper businessman from Taipei with a stellar collection of British art, batted the quarter-million pound increments back to a trio of collectors on telephones with Sotheby’s reps. When the bidding got sticky at £12m, Chen pulled out and the poignant profile went to a phone bidder who, some affirm, was an established American collector and others are certain was Russian tycoon Roman Abramovich. Either way, the work sold for a cool £13.8m with buyer’s premium.

After years of being perceived as a bloody good British painter, Bacon has become the most sought-after international artist of the post-war period. Andy Warhol may account for more volume, but it is a monumental Bacon triptych that now holds the record for the highest price ever paid for a post-war work of art at auction. Triptych 1976, a fabulously gruesome picture whose central panel depicts a black bird of prey devouring the innards of a headless human, sold in May for a staggering $86m.

The 1976 triptych definitely went to Abramovich. For some, buying works is so much easier than borrowing; it appears that a major Bacon exhibition is in the making. Entitled “Death Shadowing Life: Francis Bacon: The Late Paintings, 1971-1992” and curated by Martin Harrison, the author of the forthcoming Bacon catalogue raisonn?, it will open in 2010 in the new CCC gallery in Moscow set up by Abramovich’s girlfriend Daria Zhukova. The show will also travel to the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

So the Bacon boom is not just about a billionaire with a girlfriend who has intelligent taste. The buyers are incredibly diverse. Last year, Sheikha Al Mayassa, daughter of the Emir of Qatar, threw down $53m on Study From Innocent X, a Pope with a red background from 1962. Then in February, the British currency trader and principal owner of Tottenham Hotspur, Joseph C. Lewis, acquired Triptych 1974, an exquisitely composed work featuring male nudes and black umbrellas on a purgatorial beach, for what now looks like the bargain price of £26m. Most recently, word has it that an Irish billionaire was the winner of the 1975 triptych Self-Portrait with Parisian provenance which sold at Christie’s for £17m in June.

Gerard Faggionato, who represents the Bacon estate in Europe and whose exhibition “Francis Bacon’s Women” opens on 8 September, explains, “The Bacon market is not one that has players in the same way as Warhol for the simple reason that there isn’t enough material. If someone owns four Bacon paintings, they are considered a major collector.” Indeed, Bacon was a ruthless editor of his own work. He destroyed paintings throughout his life and, after his death, excavators discovered 98 slashed canvases in his studio. His entire oeuvre consists of only 600 or so paintings.

While the market for post-war art may be soaring, prices for Bacon are skyrocketing. Last year, the artist came in third place behind Warhol and Picasso in ArtPrice’s auction turnover rankings whereas, in 2003, he languished in 77th place. Even if more Bacon paintings are now being traded publicly rather than privately, there are clearly stronger forces at work here.

Changing tastes

With the Bacon market, we are witnessing a genuine shift in cultural sensibility. What used to be perceived as “difficult” now feels “real” and where Bacon paintings used to be viewed as morbid and distressing, they are now seen as exhilaratingly raw. This shift relates to two other cultural trends: a swing in the epicentre of the art market from New York to London and the long, slow return of figurative painters to the canon of the avant-garde. As Ivor Braka, a dealer who has bought and sold over 40 Bacons since the 1980s, explains, “For decades, there was a lot of resistance to buying Bacon at the prices of his American peers. Bacon is laden with content, whereas American buyers were brought up on a Greenbergian diet of abstraction or the cool commercialism of Pop rather than the more emotionally disturbing art of Europe.”

Bacon’s work is both hugely influential and superbly inimitable.