Francis Bacon's triptych of friend Lucian Freud has become the world's most expensive painting, fetching an eye watering $142million (or, a mere £89million) in 6 minutes of bidding!
Bacon, well known for his wonderful triptychs, painted Three Studies of Lucian Freud at London's Royal College of Art in 1969, after his studio was destroyed in a fire.
I love Bacon's paintings - I love the posterised, graphic style he has. The way he frames his characters, the texture and patterns he uses and the blocks of pure, luminous colour. His style dazzles and defies and doesn't conform to any other artist. His figures look like they are slabs of meat, ripped apart to reveal a gory mass of flesh and then kind of put back together, but not! You really do need to see his work, up close and personal to understand just how sublime, how magical, and quite disturbing his art really is. He is a genius.
And if you can get to The Ashmolean in Oxford before 19 January, you can see a selection of Bacon and Henry Moore's works in the "Flesh and Bone" exhibition. It is truly worth seeing.
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