Francis Bacon, Milwaukee Art Museum

Francis Bacon in the 1950s  
Milwaukee Art Museum
January 27-April 15, 2007

During the 1950s, painter Francis Bacon began to formulate the iconography of his dark and troubled world in paint. The exhibition, Francis Bacon in the 1950s , opening at the Milwaukee Art Museum, January 27-April 15, 2007, features nearly fifty paintings from the period in which Bacon was at the height of his creative powers. In this intensely fertile time, many of Bacon’s themes-screaming popes, howling dogs, and haunting figures trapped in tortured isolation-began to materialize as the man himself was becoming one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century.

Francis Bacon in the 1950s takes a profoundly personal look at this fascinating period in Bacon’s career and is the first exhibition to examine Bacon’s formative works. Curated by Michael Peppiatt, a close friend of Bacon’s, the exhibition provides a first-person perspective on the artist’s emerging style in the first decades of his career through paintings, drawings, and a selection of archival materials that illustrate the artist’s life and work.

At the core of the exhibition are thirteen paintings collected by Sir Robert and Lady Sainsbury, who were among the artist’s earliest patrons and, eventually, close friends. The works include loans from public and private collections across the world, a number of which have rarely been seen in public.

Throughout his life, Bacon controlled every aspect of his art, from the selection and presentation of his work to the interpretation. He commanded that all exhibitions of his art be classic retrospectives, focusing on his most recent works. As a result, his later work was more visible. In contrast, Francis Bacon in the 1950s brings together paintings from a single decade in that earlier, less visible period.

“The usual feeling you get in a Bacon show is of tortured, strangled human beings alone in a room,” explained Michael Peppiatt. “These paintings have a much more narrative quality, a much more approachable Bacon, of sorts. Someone who hadn’t decided who he was going to be, someone still in search of himself.”

By the 1950s, Francis Bacon had acquired sufficient technical prowess as a painter and expressed his often dark vision with force, but he was not fully in command of his disturbing images. Eager to explore themes and take risks in his early career, Bacon created images that contain a rawness and sense of urgency that would be lost in his later works.

To guest curator Michael Peppiatt, the fifties seemed to hold a lot of the clues to who Francis Bacon was: “That was when he located his biggest themes. He felt that he had to focus on the most important things of all to man…his existence. ”

Francis Bacon is one of the most unique and powerful artistic visionaries of post-war European art. The 1950s were the most fruitful years in Bacon’s career, but they were also the most tumultuous and tortured of the artist’s existence. During this time, the artist was regularly without a fixed address, borrowing rooms and changing studios with incredible frequency. The artist established a pattern of all-night revelry, culminating in a feverish fit of creativity-painting into the early morning hours. Much like Bacon’s approach to life, his approach to the canvas was radical, aggressive, and seething with raw human emotion.

FRANCIS BACON

Bacon’s staunchly Catholic father banished him from their Irish home when he was sixteen after learning of his homosexual activities. Bacon departed for Berlin, where he participated in the bohemian nightlife. Leaving Berlin in 1927, Bacon traveled to Paris where he saw an exhibition of drawings by Picasso that inspired him to become an artist.

The Surrealism of Picasso was not the only influence on the artist; poetry and film had a significant role in forming Bacon’s artistic vision. Bacon described his process: “I am like a grinding machine, I look at everything, and everything goes in and gets ground up very fine.” For example, Sergei Eisentein’s famous film, Battleship Potemkin (1925), had a major impact on the artist. The blood-splattered face of the screaming nurse in this film was an enduring image for the artist, and one that featured in many of his paintings, most significantly, Study for the Head of a Screaming Pope, 1952.

Although he never attended art school, Francis Bacon began to draw and paint in watercolor upon his return to London in 1929. There he established himself as a furniture and interior designer. While Bacon did not seriously pursue painting, he did exhibit a few early paintings alongside his design work. It was not until the end of the war when he began to formulate his evocative style of misshapen figures that reflect his disturbed worldview.

The artist’s work was met with financial success during the 1950s, and the artist himself became an instant hit in art circles, showing work at major galleries and moving comfortably between his aristocratic patrons and the seedy side of society. Throughout this period, Francis Bacon visited exotic places where he engaged in relationships that would shape his life and influence his work. Bacon’s relationships with his lovers were vibrant and interesting, like the artist himself; however, some had violent and tumultuous overtones. Bacon’s personal relationships often bled onto the canvas, and are evident in the violence, intimacy, and passion portrayed in his work. According to the artist: “My work is like a diary. To understand it, you have to see how it mirrors my life.”

In the early 1960s Francis Bacon settled into a studio space in South Kensington, where he resided until his death in 1992. Bacon described the studio: “I feel at home here in this chaos because chaos suggests images to me.” Heaps of photos, bits of illustrations, books, catalogues, magazines, and newspapers provided nearly all of his visual sources. Bacon added: “Images also help me find and realize ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people’s plates.”

The artist utilized the entire space: paint was mixed on the door, and scraps of clothing were used to apply paint. When the artist died, seventy works on paper were found along with one hundred slashed canvases.

Catalogue and Tour

A fully illustrated, 174-page catalogue is available.

The exhibition will be on view at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, UK, October-December 2006. From Norwich, the exhibition will travel to the Milwaukee Art Museum, January 27-April 15, 2007; then on to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, May 5-July 30, 2007.

This exhibition was initiated by the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, with funding from the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Charitable Trust. It was curated by Michael Peppiatt, who is also the author of the exhibition catalogue. The exhibition has been made possible by UBS, the global financial services firm.

Milwaukee Art Museum
www.mam.org

Francis Bacon, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads 
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh 
4 June - 4 September 2005 

A powerful new exhibition of Francis Bacon’s intense and forceful portraiture is the major summer show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2005. Francis Bacon is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the latter half of the twentieth century: this is the first museum exhibition to explore in depth his vivid and striking portraits of friends, lovers and other artists. Jointly conceived and organised by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the British Council, the exhibition comprises over fifty works, including self-portraits and portraits of Francis Bacon’s best-known sitters, on loan from public and private collections throughout the world.

Born in Dublin in 1909, Francis Bacon spent most of his life in London. He began working as a painter in the l930s and from then to his death in l992 the human figure remained the dominant subject of his art. Making portraits that reflected the intensity of his personal relationships was one of Francis Bacon’s abiding artistic preoccupations. This exhibition begins with small single heads from the late l940s, which echo the imagery of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion - the painting which caused a sensation and effectively launched Francis Bacon’s career when it was shown in 1945. There follows a group of large single portraits, some full-length, in which the human figure is depicted as a more integrated whole; and finally – the core of the exhibition – small heads of friends from the artistic and social milieu of London’s Soho – Lucian Freud, Henrietta Moraes, Isabel Rawsthorne, and Francis Bacon’s lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer.

The subjects in these captivating portraits are painted slightly under life-size and are seen from close to. Beginning in 1962, with Study for Three Heads, in which Francis Bacon’s own head is flanked by images of his lover Peter Lacy, who had recently died, these small canvases – each 14 by 12 inches, a format which Francis Bacon seems to have settled on in 1961 – are often grouped in threes. This format – the triptych – gave Francis Bacon the opportunity to show three different aspects of the same personality or to contrast images of two or more different people (including sometimes, himself). Like private, devotional portraits, these small heads open up a rich vein of intimacy in Francis Bacon’s art, and come as a surprise to those whose knowledge of the artist is restricted to his large-scale triptychs.

For a period in the late-Fifties Francis Bacon’s output of portraits was dominated by the image of Peter Lacy, with whom he enjoyed a tense and often violent relationship but who, it has been claimed, was ‘the one great love of his life’. Peter Lacy is the subject of five portraits in this exhibition, including two showing him asleep, which are remarkable for their tenderness and poignancy. The exhibition also contains a number of full-length portraits from the 1960s, their subjects shown standing, seated or reclining. Looking at these works one can understand what the artist Michael Andrews meant when he praised Francis Bacon’s ‘realism of palpable presence’ – the sitters appear so real that you feel they are in the room with you. Yet, while their blurred features evoke movement and life, they are also, perhaps, suggestive of dissolution and inevitable death.

Striking for their qualities of improvisation and immediacy, Francis Bacons’ portraits were painted from a combination of photographs and memory: ‘I don’t want to practise before [my subjects] the injury that I do them in my work. I would rather practise the injury in private by which I think I can record the fact more clearly.’ Increasingly, Francis Bacon himself became the main subject of his art, and the exhibition shows him in a variety of roles and states, from combative and self-assured to spectral and faint near the end of his life.

Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads demonstrates Francis Bacon’s attempts to revitalise the art of portraiture, following the crisis in humanist values brought about by the Second World War. The exhibition includes important loans from many public collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Hamburg Kunsthalle; Tate, London; and the Thyssen Collection, Madrid, as well as rarely seen loans from private individuals. The exhibition has been selected by Andrea Rose, Director of Visual Arts at the British Council; Richard Calvocoressi, Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Philip Long, Senior Curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; and Christoph Heinrich, Chief Curator of Contemporary Art at the Hamburg Kunsthalle. To be shown in Edinburgh during the International Festival, the exhibition will travel to the Hamburg Kunsthalle in the autumn.

A fully illustrated catalogue has been published, containing texts by Martin Hammer (Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and author of Bacon and Sutherland, 2005) and Richard Calvocoressi; published by the National Galleries of Scotland in association with the British Council. Special exhibition price: £9.95; normal price: £12.95.

SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART  
75 Belford Road, Edinburgh
www.nationalgalleries.org

Bacon Picasso, Musée Picasso, Paris - La vie des images

Bacon Picasso

La vie des images

Musée Picasso, Paris

2 mars – 30 mai 2005

Avec une centaine d’œuvres de Pablo Picasso et de Francis Bacon, cette exposition veut rassembler les œuvres-clefs qui, depuis le début des années 30, témoignent de la fascination exercée sur Francis Bacon par l'art de Picasso. La dimension plastique, thématique et philosophique de ce dialogue virtuel se manifeste tout particulièrement dans cette « brutality of fact » qui, selon ses propres termes, liait l’œuvre de Bacon à celle de Picasso.

Pour comprendre l’œuvre de Bacon, et notamment ses origines, l’étude des rapports qu’elle entretient avec celle de Picasso est essentielle. Si l’artiste lui-même a toujours indiqué de la manière la plus explicite le rôle tenu par sa découverte de l’œuvre de Picasso dans sa décision de devenir peintre, comme dans ses options thématiques ou stylistiques plus tardives, cette filiation n’avait encore jamais fait l’objet d’un travail d’analyse systématique.

L’exposition traite de la période qui s’ouvre en 1927-1928 avec le voyage de Bacon à Paris ; découvrant l’œuvre du maître espagnol lors de l’exposition "Cents Dessins par Picasso" à la galerie Paul Rosenberg (juin-juillet 1927), Bacon, que rien ne prédisposait à un tel choix, décide alors de s'engager à son tour dans la peinture. Entre 1933 et 1944, se situe une période cruciale d'expériences artistiques qui vont le conduire à peindre le triptyque Trois études de figures à la base d’une Crucifixion (1944) prenant comme source la Crucifixion de Picasso, 1930, et la série des dessins que ce dernier fit à Boisgeloup deux ans plus tard.

C'est autour des grands thèmes communs aux deux artistes qu'a été conçu le parcours de l'exposition qui bénéficie de très importants prêts de prestigieuses collections publiques et privées internationales. Ce parcours commence par une salle d'introduction qui confronte quelques témoins majeurs (collections particulières, Marlborough International Gallery) de l'œuvre initiale de Bacon (l'artiste a en effet détruit la quasi-totalité de son œuvre de jeunesse), aux dessins et peintures surréalistes (1927-30) de Picasso qui en furent les sources directes. Viennent ensuite des sections thématiques :

- Clefs / Ombre : Les Baigneuses à la cabine, 1927-28, et L’Atelier, 1928, de Picasso sont présentés, en vis-à-vis du Triptyque à la mémoire de Georges Dyer (Fondation Beyeler) de Bacon.

- Crucifixion : Ici sont réunis, autour de la Crucifixion de Picasso de 1930 et des dessins de Boisgeloup, 1932, une petite Crucifixion de 1933 (collection particulière) et la seconde version des Trois études de figures à la base d'une crucifixion datant de 1988, peints par Bacon (Tate Gallery).

- Cris : Cette section confronte les Têtes dominées par le motif des « bouches dentées » peintes par Picasso entre 1925 et 1935 et le tout premier de Papes de Bacon, Head VI, 1949 (Hayward Gallery-Festival-Hall).

- Portraits : Cette section associe des Têtes peintes par Picasso durant la période cubiste (1907- 1914) ou dans les années 1930-40, aux Portraits d’Isabel Rawsthorne et de Michel Leiris et à un groupe d'Autoportraits de Bacon (musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Pompidou, et collections particulières).

- Nus : Autour de La Flûte de Pan, œuvre de Picasso datant de 1923, sont rassemblés le Triptyque, 1972 (Tate Gallery), et Study from the human body, 1987 (collection Claude Berri), de Bacon. De même que le Grand Nu au fauteuil rouge, 1929, les dessins pour les Femmes d’Alger d’après Delacroix, 1954, ou les dernières Odalisques de Picasso sont présentés en vis-à-vis du Nu couché, 1969 (Fondation Beyeler), de Bacon.

Grâce à la présentation de cet ensemble d'œuvres majeures, l'exposition permet de mesurer la place tenue par Pablo Picasso, moderne anti-modèle du grand maître, dans le puzzle d'images du « musée imaginaire » de Francis Bacon. 

Musée national Picasso

Hôtel Salé - 5, rue de Thorigny, 75003 Paris

www.musee-picasso.fr

Francis Bacon: Paintings from The Estate, 1980-1991 at Faggionato, London

Francis Bacon 

Paintings from The Estate, 1980-1991
Faggionato Fine Arts, London 

25 June - 26 August 1999

Faggionato Fine Arts, the European and UK representatives of The Estate of Francis Bacon, has selected 8 pictures from the Estate (five of which have never been shown), that span the last 11 years of Francis Bacon’s career.

“Our decision to show this particular period of Bacon’s work was to illustrate how, to the last, he never became complacent. He continually pushed the boundaries, both in the way he painted and the toughness of the subject matter. In two of the works on show, Study from the Human Body 1987, there is a brutal focus on the male genitalia and Painting 1980 depicts three men with a shotgun which according to John Edwards was inspired following an incident with the notorious Kray twins”. -- Gérard Faggionato.

However in contrast to the work in the sixties and seventies, his portrayal of the human body in these late years takes on a celebratory form. His lines have a sculptural edge to them and his figures, rather than appearing grotesque and animalistic, become icons, reminiscent of classical Greek sculptures. The powerfully muscled male torso, in Study from the Human Body 1987 and the thigh and lower leg depicted in Study from the Human Body 1991, (painted a year before his death), show the delicacy of the paint and the elegance of the long straight lines, a feature that becomes a signature of the later works.

It is as if the inner torment in Francis Bacon has subsided, and has been replaced with a certain lyricism. The works in the show illustrate how in the last ten years Bacon keeps detail to a minimum; everything is pared down, leaving a highly stylised, and simple grandeur as in Portrait of John Edwards, 1988.

Francis Bacon painted few landscapes devoid of any human or animal presence, however the show also includes two ‘urban landscapes’ – Blood on Pavement, circa 1988, relating to the now well known anecdotal story told by John Edwards, of the blood left on a pavement after a club brawl. Possibly the most unusual of all the works in the show is Street Scene with Car in Distance, circa 1988 - depicting a car speeding down an American highway .

FRANCIS BACON, FAGGIONATO’s EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

Supporting the exhibition is a 48 page colour catalogue with a text, “Points of Reference, Francis Bacon and Photography”, by the leading photography historian and critic MARTIN HARRISON, whose recent books include David Bailey, Archive One and Young Meteors: British Photojournalism 1957-1965.

FRANCIS BACON

Paintings from The Estate, 1980 - 1991

Works by Francis Bacon © The Estate of Francis Bacon

Exhibition catalogue cover image courtesy of Faggionato Fine Arts, London

FAGGIONATO FINE ARTS, LONDON
49 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4JR

Icon / Iconoclast at Marlborough Chelsea, NYC - An Exhibition of Works by: Francis Bacon, Francesco Clemente, David Hockney, Robin Kahn, Alex Katz, R.B. Kitaj, Ouattara, Ad Reinhardt, Philip Taaffe, Fred Tomaselli, Terry Winters, Curated by Raymond Foye

Icon / Iconoclast

Marlborough Chelsea, New York

November 8 - December 27, 1997

An Exhibition of Works by:

Francis Bacon

Francesco Clemente

David Hockney

Robin Kahn

Alex Katz

R.B. Kitaj

Ouattara

Ad Reinhardt

Philip Taaffe

Fred Tomaselli

Terry Winters

Curated by Raymond Foye

Marlborough Chelsea presents an exhibition of paintings, Icon/Iconoclast. The exhibition, consisting of one work each by eleven artists, is about the persistent power of images in modern life. Even though creative strategies in the arts have varied widely in the past three decades, challenges to pictorialism seem only to strengthen the hold that certain images possess over us. Attempting to break or destroy imagery, artists have, in fact, created entirely new pictorial conceptions expanding our definition of what constitutes a picture. This paradox is expressed by the title of the exhibition.

Beginning with Ad Reinhardt's black painting as an ultimate statement of both the iconic and the iconoclastic impulses in art, the exhibition explores the many ways in which contemporary painters have sought to re-define the image within the formal traditions of Western art. 

Like Ad Reinhardt, Francis Bacon has served as a touchstone for subsequent generations of artists: in this case, painters who have sought to pursue aspects of figuration, portraiture, and the passions of the flesh. Yet, the attempt to instill in modern painting the secular equivalence of the experience of ecstasis - so integral to the art of the Renaissance - was a lifelong preoccupation with both these artists, each in their own way.

The iconic image stands as an object of mediation and contemplation and embodies a system of belief which may be communicated through narrative, metaphor, or allegory. The painters chosen in this exhibition may all be characterized by their commitment to expanding conceptions of picture-making by means of investigating the image itself. The mistrust for iconoclastic images, which persists to this day, springs from similar origins: that artists are conjurers of illusions, and may propagate false beliefs. Recently, similar criticism has been most sharply directed at artists employing figuration and representation such as David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Alex Katz, and Francesco Clemente.

In the work of Philip Taaffe and Fred Tomaselli, figurative elements are deployed in the service of abstraction while preserving the flatness and frontality of the icon. Both artists explore a diagrammatic language akin to the mandala or symbolon: ritual configurations that speak to the inner working of an image and its correspondence to archaic forms. The wider perspective of the primacy of the aesthetic experience itself is the basis of the work of Terry Winters whose imagery finds its analogy in the complex nexus of biology and cognitive science.

Conceptualizations of the female body and aspects of women's roles in society have been the subject of recent work by Robin Kahn who draws on sources as diverse as history, alchemy and anthropology. The legacy of symbols which is the inheritance of iconography from Medieval and Renaissance times have functioned as source material for many of her works. In the work of Ouattara, an African artist from the Ivory Coast, the icon comes closest to its animist origins as mediator between the worlds of the human and the divine.

All of the living artists in Icon/Iconoclast are represented by new work. A centerpiece of the exhibition is a major ensemble of paintings and drawings by R.B. Kitaj constituting a single work, The Killer Critic Assassinated by his Widower, Even, (1997). The subject of a controversial exhibition earlier this year at London's Royal Academy, the work is a visual rebuttal to the critical malign following Kitaj's retrospective and the subsequent death of his wife, Sandra, events which the artist relates in the work itself. It is Kitaj's farewell address to London, a final salvo launched at the same philistine cultural establishment that Ezra Pound once lampooned in his famous suite of poems, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.

Icon/Iconoclast has been organized by Raymond Foye. Along with Francesco Clemente he is co-publisher of Hanuman Books, a press devoted to poetry, Hinduism, and writings by artists (a list that include William Burroughs, Rene Ricard, Francis Picabia, Willem deKooning, Cookie Mueller, René Daumal, Jack Kerouac, Robert Frank, Max Beckmann, Patti Smith and others). He has curated (with Ann Percy) a full scale retrospective of the works of Francesco Clemente, Three Worlds (Philadelphia Museum of Art), and over the past twenty years has edited books, catalogues and livres d'artiste by numerous artists in the exhibition, including David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Philip Taaffe, Terry Winters and Francesco Clemente. His published works on poets and poetry include James Schuyler (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux), John Wieners (Black Sparrow Press), Bob Kaufman (New Directions) and Edgar Allan Poe (City Lights Books). He presently lives and works in New York City.

MARLBOROUGH CHELSEA

211 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.malgoroughgallery.com