Three Studies of Lucian Freud

In three panels the painter Lucian Freud sits on a wooden chair within a spare gold space, his body and face twisted, smeared, and wrenched out of shape yet vividly, unmistakably present. Francis Bacon painted his friend and rival with brutal intimacy, distorting the flesh to reach a deeper truth of the living, restless person. Now in a private collection after selling, for a time, as the most expensive painting ever auctioned, Three Studies of Lucian Freud is a triptych masterpiece - two titans of modern figuration confronting each other, the sitter pinned and contorted under Bacon's merciless, searching eye.