Whoa, what a triptych...

Francis Bacon's take on Prometheus and the Orestia, the minimalistically entitled "Triptych, 1976" was sold at Sotheby's last night for a sweet $86.28 million. The large sum of money - the biggest ever garnered by a Bacon work - earned the auction house just over $10.3 million with the previous owners, the wine-producing Moeuix family, hauling in the remaining $76 million or so.

Since its purchase by the Moeuixes in 1977, "Triptych, 1976" has been exhibited at the Tate Gallery in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museo d'Arte Moderna in Lugano.

In the lead-up to the auction, Sotheby's worldwide head of contemporary art Tobias Meyer called the triptych "undoubtedly the most important Bacon in private hands. It has been with the same collection ever since it was acquired ... over thirty years ago, and it is a masterpiece of the 20th century."

Bacon (1909-1992) is known as one of the foremost figures in figurative art, a 20th-century movement that featured deliberate derivation from original source material; cf. Aeschylus and certain Greek myth in "Triptych, 1976."