Investors can now buy a small chunk of a triptych painted by Francis Bacon in 1963. Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer shows the artist’s lover from three angles.
The work is the first to be offered by a new company billed as a ‘stock exchange for art’, with up to 70 percent of the painting available in shares equivalent to $100 (£79) each.
The painting was bought by its present owner at Christie’s for $51.8mn with fees in 2017. Artex, the shares platform, which is regulated by the Liechtenstein Financial Market Authority with an EU licence, now values it at $55m.
Yassir Benjelloun-Touimi, a former investment banker and co-founder of Artex, told the Financial Times that the current owner will maintain ten percent of the work, with initial trading opening 19 June and the remaining shares coming available soon after.
A work by Bacon, 3 Works: Studies Of Lucien Freud sold in 2013 for £89.4m, landing it just shy of the top twenty most expensive paintings ever sold. Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer once hung on the walls of the author Roald Dahl’s home in Great Missenden in the English country of Buckinghamshire.
