FRANCIS BACON by natachadejesusc

FRANCIS B A C O N Â´ S G A L L E RY

INDEX

BIOGRAPHY.................................................................... 4 PAINTING......................................................................... 8 DRAWING...................................................................... 12 PORTRAIT....................................................................... 16

Francis Bacon was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his bold, grotesque, emotionally charged, raw imagery. He is best known for his depictions of popes, crucifixions and portraits of close friends. His abstracted figures are typically isolated in geometrical cage like spaces, set against flat, nondescript backgrounds. Bacon said that he saw images â&#x20AC;&#x153;in seriesâ&#x20AC;?, and his work typically focuses

BIOGRAPHY on a single subject for sustained periods, often in triptych or diptych formats. His output can be broadly described as sequences or variations on a single motif; beginning with the 1930s Picasso-informed Furies, moving on to the 1940s male heads isolated in rooms or geometric structures,

the 1950s screaming popes, and the mid-to-late 1950s animals and lone figures, the 1960s portraits of friends, the nihilistic 1970s self-portraits, and the cooler more technical 1980s late works. Bacon took up painting in his late 30s, having drifted as an interior decorator, bon vivant and gambler. He said that his artistic career was delayed because he spent too long looking for subject matter that could sustain his interest. His breakthrough came with the 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which sealed his reputation as a uniquely bleak chronicler of the human condition. From the mid-1960s he mainly produced portraits of friends and drinking companions, either as single or triptych panels..

Following the 1971 suicide of his lover George Dyer, his art became more sombre, inward-looking and preoccupied with the passage of time and death. The climax of this later period is marked by masterpieces, including his 1982’s “Study for Self-Portrait” and Study for a Self-Portrait— Triptych, 1985–86. Despite his bleak existentialist outlook, solidified in the public mind through his articulate and vivid series of interviews with David Sylvester, Bacon in

person was highly engaging and charismatic, articulate, well-read and unapologetically gay. He was a prolific artist, but nonetheless spent many of the evenings of his middle age eating, drinking and gambling in London’s Soho with like-minded friends such as Lucian Freud (though the two fell out in the mid-1970s, for reasons neither ever explained), John Deakin, Muriel Belcher, Henrietta Moraes, Daniel Farson, Tom Baker, and Jeffrey Bernard. After Dyer’s suicide he largely

distanced himself from this circle, and while his social life was still active and his passion for gambling and drinking continued, he settled into a platonic and somewhat fatherly relationship with his eventual heir, John Edwards. The art critic Robert Hughes described him as “the most implacable, lyric artist in late 20th-century England, perhaps in all the world” and along with Willem de Kooning as “the most important painter of the disquieting human figure in the 50’s of the 20th century.”

Francis Bacon was the subject of two Tate retrospectives and a major showing in 1971 at the Grand Palais. Since his death his reputation and market value have grown steadily, and his

BIOGRAPHY work With William Burroughs, is London 1989 among the most acclaimed, expensive and sought-after. In the late 1990s a number of major works, previously

assumed destroyed, including early 1950s popes and 1960s portraits, reemerged to set record prices at auction. In 2013 his Three Studies of Lucian Freud set the world record as the most expensive piece of art sold at auction. Francis Bacon was born on 28 October 1909 in a nursing home in the heart of old Georgian Dublin at 63 Lower Baggot Street. His father, Captain Anthony Edward Mortimer (â&#x20AC;&#x153;Eddyâ&#x20AC;?) Bacon was born in Adelaide, South Australia, to an English father and an Australian mother. His father, a veteran of the Boer War, was a racehorse trainer. His mother, Christina Winifred Firth, known as Winnie, was heiress to a Sheffield steel business and coal mine.

His father was a collateral descendant of Sir Nicholas Bacon, elder half-brother of Sir Francis Bacon, the Elizabethan statesman, philosopher and essayist. When Bacon’s paternal grandfather was given the chance to revive the title of Lord Oxford by Queen Victoria, he refused for financial reasons. Bacon had an older brother, Harley, two younger sisters, Ianthe and Winifred, and a younger brother, Edward. He was brought up by the family’s nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, from Cornwall, known as ‘Nanny Lightfoot’, a mother figure who remained close to him

until her death. Later in his life during the early 1940s, Bacon would rent the ground floor of 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, John Everett Millais’ old studio, and along with Nanny Lightfoot would install an illicit roulette wheel there, organised by Bacon and his friends, for their financial benefit. The family moved house often, moving back and forth between Ireland and England several times, leading to a feeling of displacement which remained with the artist throughout his life.

Francis Bacon began portraying figures lying on a bed with the triptych Three Studies for a Crucifixion, dated 1962. Early on, he represented human figures enclosed in a claustrophobic, dark space. Later, the explicit aspects of the portrait became something intimated in compositions of a single figure which establishes an ascetic

body seems to seek an immutability brimming with the vulnerability of human nature. His idea of being influences how he conceived painting. This reaffirmed figurative painting as a form of critical expression of reality during the period when abstraction was at the forefront.

PAINTING space. Bacon approached the human body from the perspective of his nihilistic vision of existence, marked by the inevitability of death. The physicality of his depiction of the

Bacon did not paint from life, instead he used memory and his personal photography archive as the main source of his imagery, which formed a visual dictionary of his world.

Lying Figure,1966

The composition of Lying Figure (1966) demonstrates another of his points of reference, emerging from his dialogue with past masters such as Cimabue, Velรกzquez, Rembrandt, Poussin, Van Gogh and Picasso, and evoking the fallen figures of Mannerism through his representation of the body in forced foreshortening. Bacon, who lived through the successive collapses of the two world wars, went beyond visual replicas to reflect the

auctioned for US$86 million in 2008. Is a large three panel painting (each panel measuring 78 x 58 in, 198 x 147.5 cm), with dense colors and abstract shapes. He used his usual technique, starting on the left panel and working across. The piece draws on classical Greek iconography and mythology, and makes reference to Prometheus, as several interpretations claim.

human condition, the violence inherent in our nature, our existential isolation, the idea of being threatened, offering a new image of mankind that seems to embody the anguish of an entire age. Triptych, 1976 is a large triptych painted by the British artist Francis Bacon in 1976. It comprises three oil and pastel paintings on canvas. It is the second most expensive Bacon ever sold, after Three Studies of Lucian Freud, being

Triptych, 1976

Despite Bacon’s claim to be ‘a late starter’, by the early age of twenty, he was about to ‘start a shop in London for ultra-modern furniture’ and was active in interior design until the late 1930s. He only gradually shifted his focus towards the Fine Arts. No oil paintings survive from the 1920s but the two works from 1929 are a watercolour and a gouache. Just like his furniture, they are deeply rooted in European Modernism and similar to his rug and screen designs emulate continental artists such as Georgio de Chirico, Jean Lurçat, Fernand Léger and

PAINTING

In the early 1930s Bacon began to concentrate on painting, and works of this period channelled Picasso and Surrealism. Furthermore, Bacon’s colour schemes and subject matter were closely interdependent with those of his early mentor, Roy de Maistre. Bacon met the Australian artist in 1930 and, as a self-taught painter, he benefitted greatly from his more experienced colleague’s technical advice. Yet Bacon was struggling to develop an original approach. Despite producing individual masterpieces, according to David Sylvester ‘there was not much consistency in what he did, in style or in quality, until the 1940s.’

Picasso. Bacon could have seen the originals in context during his trips to Paris from 1927 onwards or absorbed them filtered through British painters Edward Wadsworth, Paul Nash and John Armstrong, who drew inspiration from them for their own work. The elusive spatial settings, including predecessors of Bacon’s infamous ‘space frames’, doors and foliage would be recurring motifs throughout his career. Bacon’s Crucifixion, 1933, attracted attention in the London art scene. Displayed in an exhibition at the Mayor Gallery that coincided with Herbert Read’s book Art Now, it triggered a subsequent commission.

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944 was first shown at London’s Lefevre Gallery in April 1945. The three screaming and squirming grey creatures on a hot orange background hit a nerve with its war-ridden audience and, according to John Russell, the work ‘caused a total consternation.’ For Bacon, they represented the Eumenides from

DRAWING Aeschylus’ Greek tragedy the Oresteia. The famous triptych manifested Bacon’s breakthrough in the British art scene and the starting point of his stellar career. The artist himself rated

in variations of Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Innocent X, c.1650. He obsessively collected photographs of the painting and, between 1946 and 1971, he based more than thirty paintings on the portrait. Bacon often combined these with film stills of a screaming woman from Sergei Eisenstein’s silent movie Battleship Potemkin (1925). As such, the ‘Screaming Popes’ are among his most

this work highly for the rest of his life and dismissed anything he had done before. Yet Bacon soon left behind its linear style in favour of a more malerisch approach, exemplified in the sketchy, dry brushstrokes of Painting 1946 and the thick, heavy impasto of Head II, 1949. Bacon found his first major subject

recognisable works. The year 1949 marked a pivotal turning point in Bacon’s creative development: the human figure became his principal subject matter and focal point of all his future efforts. It first features prominently in Study from the Human Body from that year. The painting is based on an image of two men wrestling from Eadweard Muybridge’s The Human Figure in Motion; this photographic motion series of humans and animals walking, running and jumping remained

a constant source of inspiration throughout Bacon’s career. Bacon memorably described the gaunt figure in Vincent Van Gogh’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, 1888, as a ‘phantom of the road’. Two journeys to South Africa, but especially The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, triggered fundamental changes in Bacon’s work in the 1950s. In the early 1950s, the proximity to lens-based imagery and its aesthetics is palpable in the candid camera poses and the sombre colour schemes of Bacon’s paintings.

Three Studies for a Crucifixion is a 1962 triptych oil painting by Francis Bacon. It was completed in March 1962 and comprises three separate canvases, each measuring 198.1 by 144.8 centimetres (6 ft 6.0 in Ă&#x2014; 4 ft 9.0 in). The work is held by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) Study for a Bullfight no. 1 lithograph in colours, 1971, on Arches paper, signed and dedicated For Brigitte in green felt tip pen,

DRAWING

numbered 21/150, published by Musée du Grand Palais, Paris, the full sheet, generally in good condition

Image: 1150 x 1265 mm. Paper: 1202 x 1597 mm. The subject of the corrida was most likely explored by Bacon after his visits to the South of France and Spain where he would have had the opportunity of encountering the bullfight first hand. This, combined with his admiration for Picasso’s work, in particular Tauromachie, would have encouraged him to paint this subject. In 1969, Bacon painted Study for a bullfight no. 1 and Second version of study for a bullfight. Two years later, in 1971, on the occasion of Bacon’s retrospective in the Grand Palais, Paris, a large lithograph was published based on the painting.

Three Studies of Lucian Freud is a 1969 oil-on-canvas triptych by the Irish-born British painter Francis Bacon, depicting artist Lucian Freud. It was sold in November 2013 for US$142.4 million, which at the time was the highest price attained at auction for a work of art when not factoring in inflation. That record was surpassed in May 2015 by Version O of Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger series. Crucifixion is the work that first launched Bacon into the public eye, long before the much greater successes of the post-war years. The

painting may have been inspired by Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox (c.1638), but also by Picasso’s Surrealist style perhaps sensing this latter connection, Herbert Read, in his book Art Now, illustrated Bacon’s Crucifixion adjacent to a Picasso Bather). The translucent whiteness painted over the bodily frame in Crucifixion adds a ghostly touch to an already unsettling composition, introducing Bacon’s obsession with pain and fear.

The 1970s began with a tragedy. Two nights before the opening of Bacon’s retrospective at the Grand Palais, Paris in 1971, George Dyer, who had accompanied his friend to the event, died from a drug and alcohol overdose in his hotel room. During the following years Bacon painted a group of ‘Black Triptychs’, such as

obsessively, because ‘people have been dying around me like flies and I’ve had nobody else to paint.’ Perhaps for the aging artist self-portraits offered a way to confront his own mortality, too. In some of them, as for example in Self-Portrait, 1973, the prominent wristwatch is a poignant reminder of the passage of time.

PORTRAIT Triptych, May—June, 1973, to express his grief and to commemorate his friend. Even though he was not always named, Dyer continued to appear in numerous paintings thereafter. Bacon began to paint self-portraits

However, new people to paint were soon to be found. Bacon had already met Peter Beard, an acclaimed fashion and wildlife photographer, in the mid-1960s but the likeness of the handsome young man only appears

in Bacon’s oeuvre from 1975 onwards. In 1976 Bacon befriended John Edwards and painted him frequently from then on. The process of simplifying the settings for his figures had already started during the 1960s when the so-called ‘space frames’—linear rectangular constructs—evolved into highly abstracted, stylised interiors. This process

continued during the 1970s, until often only allusions to spatial settings remained, such as the railing in Triptych— Studies from the Human Body, 1970, which accommodates three nudes in an otherwise undefined space. Bacon had briefly experimented with landscape painting in the 1950s and revisited the genre by the end of the

1970s. Works such as Landscape, 1978, are unusual for their lack of a human or animal figure. Landscapes occasionally appeared over the following years but remained an exception in Bacon’s oeuvre. During the 1980s Bacon exhibited in prestigious institutions all over the world. Now in his seventies, Bacon was at the height of his fame and when Tate Britain celebrated him with a second retrospective in 1985, then director Sir Alan Bowness declared him the ‘greatest living painter.’

Far from resting on his laurels, however, the artist continued to advance his art. Bacon’s canvases became even more minimal and backgrounds were often reduced to monochromatic colour planes, predominantly in bright oranges and hot pinks, sometimes in beiges and pale blues. Abstract perspective lines and ‘space frames’ continued to deliver only vague indications of depth and space. As a consequence, the emphasis on the figure was amplified and in no other period was the compositional focus on the depicted subject so palpable and direct.

PORTRAIT

Bacon’s passion for portraits and self-portraits was unbroken. Men in cricket pads, anonymous male and female torsos and fantastic bird-like creatures populate his paintings, often presented on plinth-like structures which imbue them with a sculptural quality. Bacon’s protagonists similarly became quieter. Often seated and serene, they are executed in less gestural brushwork and flatter impasto than in previous decades. In addition to oil paint and household emulsions from the DIY store, Bacon increasingly employed aerosol spray paint.

‘On a good day, when glimpsed from the other side of the street, he had even in his eighties the same lifelong spring-heeled walk,’ John Russell recalled of Bacon in the early 1990s. The artist still approached large-scale canvases, such as Study for Human Body, 1991, with the vigour and sexual explicitness typical of his work. As dedicated to painting as ever, age 82 he remarked ‘I’ll go on until I drop.’ Bacon went on living life to the fullest and during his last years, he enjoyed the company of his new partner José Capelo. The young Spaniard appears in a number of portraits and he features—merged with the likeness of racing-car driver Ayrton Senna borrowed from a magazine cover—in the left panel of Triptych, 1991. However, despite his youthful appearance and undaunted dynamism, Bacon’s health was deteriorating. In spring 1992, Bacon travelled to Madrid to see Capelo and died there from a heart attack on 28 April.

SELF-PORTRAITS 1972