Iconic art under the hammer

The art market has seen a flurry of high-profile sales. Chris Carter reports

The spring auction season has arrived. Last week saw a flurry of high-profile sales, including the debuts of three modern masterpieces. First up was Pablo Picasso’s La fenêtre ouverte at Christie’s in London. The surrealist piece portraying Picasso’s muse and lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter, was painted on 22 November 1929, “in the midst of a heady moment of creativity”, according to Christie’s.

Picasso had met Walter just two years earlier. Forming part of the Atelier series of works, other examples reside in New York’s Museum of Modern Art and in the Musée National d’Art Moderne, in Paris. In the painting, Walter had yet to take on the appearance displayed in so many of Picasso’s later works. But even so, the young woman’s profile and neat 1920s bob are recognisable. Picasso, who put himself in the painting too, is much less so. The artist takes the form of two large feet crossed with an arrow. La fenêtre ouverte fetched

£16.3m on 1 March.

Later that same evening at Christie’s in London, Francis Bacon’s Triptych 1986-7 was also up for sale for the first time. A meditation on the passing of time and the solitude of the human condition, Bacon’s familiar format of three paintings together draws on events in 20th-century history and the artist’s own life and experiences. The lefthand panel was inspired by a photograph of US president Woodrow Wilson leaving the Treaty of Versailles negotiations in 1919, the right by a photo of Leon Trotsky’s study taken after his assassination in 1940. And in the middle, a figure resembling John Edwards, Bacon’s partner at the time, in a similar pose to one struck by George Dyer, his former lover, who took his own life in 1971, and whom Bacon immortalised in Triptych August 1972, that now hangs in the Tate gallery, in London. Triptych 1986-7 sold for £38.5m, slightly above its low estimate.

Several other big names also passed under the hammer that week. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Il Duce (1982), sold for ¥94.2m (£11.2m), again with Christie’s, but this time in Shanghai, underlining the growing importance of the Asian market. Back in London two days later, Self-Portrait on the Terrace (1984), by David Hockney, fetched £4.9m at Phillips. Singer Robbie Williams unloaded his two Banksy pieces, Girl with Balloon (2006) and Vandalised Oil (Choppers) (2006), for a combined £7m. The stand-out sale of last week, however, went to yet another auction debutante: L’empire des lumières (1961), by Belgian surrealist René Magritte. The iconic work (pictured), one of 17 that form a series, contrasts day and night over a typical suburban house on a quiet street in Brussels. One possible inspiration for the piece is André Breton’s poem L’Aigrette, which opens: “If only the sun were to come out tonight”. It certainly came out for Sotheby’s in London that evening – the painting sold for £59.4m.