The Power of Paint

Photo courtesy Christie's

A work from the Merians collection offered at Christie's London June 20: Francis Bacon, "Two Men Working in a Field" (1971), est. $10-14 million

Lucian Freud Francis Bacon Frank Auerbach Tyeb Mehta FIAC Lures Iconic (and Expensive) Works to Paris The Pavilion Heats Up Hirst Among the Masters Splashy Hirst Show Opens to Rough Reviews

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In varying combinations, the men shared meals and a dealer, went to the same parties and bars and painted one another. "I think it is a question of spirit," Auerbach told Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon's biographer, in discussing what these artists had in common, "and a sense of isolation and a certain degree of puritanical thoroughness."

By 1976, when the London-based American painter R.B. Kitaj coined the phrase School of London, hoping it would put local artists on the international map, the five men who have remained its core had been painting for more than a quarter century; Bacon, born in 1909 and the oldest of the group, had been at work even longer. From the start all had been almost devotionally committed to routine. Some, like Kossoff, were early to bed, early to the studio. Others—most infamously Bacon—might stay out late or even all night, getting up to things best left unsaid, but were early to the studio every morning just the same.

Another shared trait was a desire, or need, for intimate, unbroken connection with their work, and their subjects. London neighborhoods, friends, family—in Freud's case, his dogs—are repeatedly depicted. Collector Ruth Bromberg, author of catalogues raisonnes of Canaletto and Walter Sickert prints, has sat for Auerbach every Thursday since 1991. And she's a relative newcomer. Others have been sitting for him religiously twice as long.

The late Helen Lessore, a painter and dealer, was another thread drawing these five artists together. In 1953, Lessore (later this writer's mother-in-law) showed Bacon at the Beaux Arts Gallery in Mayfair. In 1955, after seeing Auerbach's thickly painted work at the Royal College of Art, she bought six pictures from him—for a total of £60. Lessore gave repeated shows to Auerbach, Kossoff and Andrews. (Her planned show of Freud didn't come off because he went instead to Marlborough Fine Art.) Bacon, a friend until his death, compared Lessore's role in the London art world of the 1950s and '60s to Vollard's in the Paris of an earlier era.

In 1995 the influential critic David Sylvester, who had known the artists from early on, wrote of Auerbach's and Kossoff's "fine disregard for fashion." He could have said the same about Freud, Bacon and Andrews. Each painter has had his singular vision and development, certainly. But all have kept the figure as their focus throughout the decades, as art styles evolved from Abstract Expressionism through Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptualism to pickled sharks.

"They haven't changed, but fashion has," says Michael Findlay, director of New York's Acquavella Gallery, Freud's dealer since 1992. "People are excited to see the power of the loaded brush." Auction specialists see a similar shift.

"Now the trend is back to painting and the figure," says Pilar Ordovas, head of Christie's London postwar and contemporary department. Recognition and higher prices for the School of London have followed.

In February, Bacon and Auerbach made news when paintings by them set world auction records that were multiples of previous highs. At Christie’s King Street, Bacon's haunting 1956 pope, Study for a Portrait 11, sold for £14,020,000 ($27.5 million), nearly twice the $15,024,000 (£7.9 million) brought in November 2006 at Sotheby's New York by his Version No. 2 Lying Figure With Hypodermic Syringe (1968). And Auerbach's 1977 Camden Theatre in the Rain made £1,924,000 ($3.8 million) at Sotheby’s London, almost quadrupling the £456,000 ($844,400) of his 1993 Mornington Crescent.

Immediately people began to wonder: Were these sales mere hot spots in a notably torrid contemporary-art market, fated to be followed by a fast cooling down? Or were they a platform from which prices would rocket higher still? And if so, would the value of other School of London painters shoot up too?