A Francis Bacon self-portrait from the 1960s heralded as the star of Christie’s contemporary art auction in New York on Wednesday night found no new owner as the auction house stopped the anemic bidding.

Francis Bacon’s 1964 “Study for Self Portrait” had been expected to fetch as much as $40 million but bidding would only approach $30 million and Christie’s stopped the process.

Bacon works have sold wonderfully this year therefore it was natural to expect similar enthusiasm Wednesday night.

His “Triptych, 1976” was sold at Sotheby’s spring auction of postwar and contemporary art in May in New York for $86.28 million, bringing the artist an auction record. Sotheby’s had estimated the three-canvas painting would sell for about $70 million, an estimation that was exceeded through the telephone bidding of two persons.
The previous record for a work by the Irish-born Bacon, who died in 1992, had been set last year, when “Study For Innocent X,” 1962, sold for $52.68 million.

In July, Christie’s sale of post-war and contemporary art in London featured another excellent sale for Bacon, with a triptych titled “Three Studies for Self-Portrait” fetching $34.5 million, against the $20 million presale estimate.

Last night, other works that found new buyers included a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting “Untitled (Boxer)” which took $13.5 million. It sold short of the record $14.6 million for a Basquiat but above the expected $12 million. The 1982 work had belonged to Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich.

Gerhard Richter’s 1989 “Abstraktes Bild (710)” sold for $14.9 million, becoming the night’s biggest success story.

New records were set for Yayoi Kusama, whose “No. 2,” a 1959 painting, sold for $5.7 million, and Joseph Cornell, whose “Pharmacy” sold for $3.7 million.