Early Bacon work may sell for £500,000

An early example of Francis Bacon's work comes up for sale at Sotheby's in London next Thursday evening. Interior of a Room, dating from 1935, was included in the Bacon retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris two years ago and it is now expected to fetch £300,000-£500,000 sterling. Another Bacon work in the same sale is a double portrait of the artist's friend, American wildlife photographer and author Peter Beard; called Studies for Portrait - Diptych, 1976, it has a pre-sale estimate of £200,000-£300,000. Both pictures are included in a contemporary art sale which opens with a group of significant work by German and Austrian artists. Among those represented are Gerhard Richter (Seestuck from 1969/70) and Anselm Kiefer (1981's Die Meistersinger); both pictures carry the same estimate of £300,000-£400,000. Other artists in this section include Baselitz, Beckmann, Kandinsky, Kokoschka and Schumacher. There is also substantial representation by major names from the British, European and American art world this century. Two portraits by Lucian Freud are on offer, for example, as are four of Andy Warhol's silkscreen portraits (one of them showing German artist Joseph Beuys), together with work by Warhol's protege JeanMichel Basquiat, Gilbert and George, Damian Hirst, Cy Twombly, Piero Manzoni (subject of a recent retrospective at London's Serpentine Gallery), Yves Klein and Nicolas de Stael.