You Will Soon Be Able Buy a Share of a 1963 Francis Bacon Triptych for $100
A triptych by famed British artist Francis Bacon will go on sale via an initial public offering in July—and you’ll get the chance to own a slice of it.
Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, a famous 1963 artwork comprising three portraits of Bacon’s lover George Dyer, will be offered to investors at a valuation of about $55 million and a nominal value of the euro equivalent of $100 a share, according to the Liechtenstein-based platform Artex MTF AG. Trading in the triptych’s shares are set to begin on July 21.
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“In terms of timing we are lucky, we could not have dreamed for a better to time to launch this,” CEO Yassir Benjelloun-Touimi, whose company aims to make fine art ownership more accessible, told Bloomberg. “People will be looking for alternatives to bonds and equities, especially during a period of inflation.”
The work, which sold for nearly $52 million at auction in 2017, is one of five Dyer portrait triptychs created by Bacon between 1963 and 1969. According to Artex, Dyer was a “seemingly strong but fragile character with a history of petty crime” with whom Bacon had a passionate and tormented relationship.
“The market for Bacon has always been very strong,” Gerard Faggionato of Faggionato Fine Arts, the gallery that represents the creative’s estate in Britain, previously told Robb Report. “His work is challenging not only visually but financially.”
Oliver Barker, a senior international specialist in contemporary art at Sotheby’s, credits Bacon’s rise to a turn-of-the-century scholarly reassessment that recognized him as one of the most significant artists of the past 100 years. Museum exhibits, such as a 2009 retrospective that appeared at Tate Britain in London, the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, helped publicize Bacon and attract collectors’ interest.
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