Results tagged “francisbacon”

       

The long holiday weekend is here, and what better way to spend the sunny hours than with an escape into the demented mind of Francis Bacon? The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just opened their Centenary Retrospective on the artist, the first major New York exhibition on him in twenty years. The NY Times notes that it "won't do much to alter the polarities of opinion around Bacon" but it does dispute the belief that his art declined throughout the years, "indicating that it often improved as his colors brightened, his paint handling gained muscularity. It was equally important that he began to focus on people he knew and cared about, giving them faces that seem simultaneously masked, gouged out of wet clay and recognizably individual." It may be a good opportunity to reevaluate his work, which the museum notes has been seen in a new light following his death in 1992.

Last night, the 81" by 55.5" Mark Rothko painting White Center, owned by David Rockefeller for 47 years, was sold for $72,840,000 at Sotheby's contemporary art auction. The painting's sale broke auction records for both Rothko and contemporary art, and Sotheby's gamble of offering Rockefeller a rumored $46 million guarantee that the painting would see (risky, because the previous Rothko auction record was $22.4 million) seemed to pay off. Rockefeller previously stated that he would use the painting's proceeds for other philanthropic efforts (he originally bought it for $8,500 or $59,000 in today's dollars); he said about the sale, "I am very pleased that it did so well. I'm sorry to see it go.''