"Bacon's Blessing" on the Block

The centerpiece of Christie's Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale in London on October 14th will be Francis Bacon's Study from the Human Body, Man Turning on the Light, carrying an estimate of £7 million to £9 million. And the auction house won't make a dime off it. However much the painting brings will go directly to the Royal College of Art, which consigned the painting to Christie's in order to raise money for a new campus in Battersea that will house the Schools of Fine and Applied Art and start-up spaces for new art and design businesses.

The "Rent-Cheque Painting" as Christie's is calling it, was meant to serve as Bacon's payment to the RCA for a studio it let to the artist in 1969 after his own burned down. In fact, Bacon originally gave the college Study for Bullfight No. 1. But when he asked that it be lent to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1975 for a retrospective of his work and offered Study from the Human Body, Man Turning on the Light as a temporary replacement, the RCA preferred it to Bacon's bullfight study and was allowed to keep it permanently. Painted with a roughshod hand, the piece reveals the artist's preoccupation with the transience of human flesh.

Thus far, it seems, there's been no outcry over the RCA divesting itself of this work, as happened when Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia decided to put The Gross Clinic by Thomas Eakins on the block and Fisk University in Nashville announced its desire to sell works from the Stieglitz Collection, a gift of artist Georgia O'Keeffe.

Bacon did give his approval of the sale to Sir Terence Conran, the college's provost, prior to his death in 1992. You might think that's why Christie's has also christened the painting "Bacon's Blessing" — a public relations attempt to head off charges that the RCA is deaccessioning one of its cultural treasures. The auction house tells us this isn't the case, but that the moniker is meant to convey the idea that Bacon's short tenancy at the college is going to benefit a large number of students.

In May, Bacon's Study from Innocent X fetched $52.7 million at Sotheby's.

Photo Credit: Christie's Images Ltd. 2007