The Brooklyn Museum Is Selling This Rare Francis Bacon Pope Painting at Sotheby’s to Raise Money for Other Acquisitions

The Brooklyn Museum is selling
off a rare and major painting by Francis Bacon next month to raise
money for its collections fund.

The eerie work being
deaccessioned, Bacon’s Pope (1958),
is one of just six
surviving canvases made by the artist while he was living in
Tangier. It will hit the auction block at
Sotheby’s Contemporary art evening
auction in New York on November 14. 

Sotheby’s estimates that the
painting will rake in $6 million to $8 million, though there’s a
good chance it will fetch a higher sum. The last time a work from
this series came to auction was 11 years ago when another Pope painting sold for $7.3 million at Sotheby’s
Paris, more than doubling its $3.2 million low estimate. This
spring, an earlier “screaming pope” painting by the artist brought in $50.4
million at Sotheby’s during New York auction
week. 

The museum declined to comment
on what, specifically, it will do with the proceeds from the sale,
saying only that it will use the money to “more sharply focus on institutional collection
priorities.”

“While the work is exceptional,
post-war European art is not a focus of our collection,” a
representative from the museum said.

In the mid 1950s, Bacon made
several trips to Tangier, where his lover, Peter Lacy, had recently moved. Though the
artist is thought to have produced a great deal of work during this
time, he destroyed much of it after his notoriously tumultuous
relationship with Lacy dissolved. Of the six paintings that
survived from the period (Bacon gave the entire suite to his
friend, Nicolas Brusilowski), four are now in private
collections. 

“Pope offers an exceedingly rare glimpse into Francis
Bacon’s psychological state during a prolific but ultimately
tortured time in his life and career,” Grégoire Billault, the head
of Sotheby’s Contemporary art department in New York, said in a
statement. “Tangier represented the artist’s first travels outside
of Europe, and the promise of an open life with Peter Lacy. But
their relationship proved volatile and violent, which found
expression in Bacon’s anguished Popes of the period.”

The painting was acquired
from Brusilowski in 1967 by New York businesswoman Olga H.
Knoepke, who in turn gifted
the work to the Brooklyn Museum in 1981.

Pope will go on view to the public at Sotheby’s New
York starting on November 1.

The post The Brooklyn Museum Is Selling This Rare Francis
Bacon Pope Painting at Sotheby’s to Raise Money for Other
Acquisitions appeared first on artnet News.