This season’s auctions feature some of the most iconic figures in 20th and 21st century art. In our Evening Auction, seminal works from Pollock, Bacon, Warhol and Basquiat appear alongside Italian masters like Fontana, Burri and Boetti, with pieces by Peter Doig, Mark Bradford and Cecily Brown representing the best in contemporary painting. Outstanding works by Sigmar Polke, Howard Hodgkin and Jean Dubuffet star in the Day Auction.
The season is led by Andy Warhol’s Six Self-Portraits (1986), one of the most important self-portraits of Warhol’s career. Executed only a few months before his death, the work shows Warhol in the signature peroxide fright wig of his late career, staring starkly out from the canvas in an emotionally arresting vision that confronts the reality of time head on.
The auction’s other top lots include Jackson Pollock’s Number 21, 1950, an exquisite, jewel-like example of Pollock’s revolutionary ‘action painting’ dating from the artist’s 1950 show at Betty Parsons Gallery, commonly considered the creative peak of his career, and Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for a Portrait (1976), his penultimate series of paintings depicting his great female muse Henrietta Moraes, who he brings to life with typically visceral energy.