"My painting is a representation of life, my own life above all, which has been very difficult. So perhaps my painting is very violent, but this is natural to me." Francis Bacon
Of course, I’m not listing all the pictures here.- see a lot of interesting information about the artist, his models and work on the Tate Gallery website (link below). The exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is very similar in layout and composition to the last exhibition of F. Bacon held at the Tate Gallery in London in 2008. This is perhaps the same exhibition that travels. For those who are interested, I highly recommend taking the time and “dropping in” - this is http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/francisbacon/interactive/ a wonderful website about the Francis Bacon exhibition at the Tate Gallery, which will guide you through the entire exhibition using a navigator, you will see photographs of famous photographers that he used for his work, you will hear his voice talking about his paintings, there is much more here interesting information. (The paintings are organized into virtual “rooms”, according to the theme and time of creation, - the right mouse button shows a menu from which you can easily manage the page of this website).
http://www.francis-bacon.com/paintings/triptych-1991/?c=85-92 - This is directly a site about the artist, where you can most fully view his paintings in chronology.
Right here http://rockkent.narod.ru/Becon/becon.htm several good articles and links (menu window at the bottom right) in Russian
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Crucifixion / Crucifixion, 1933 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion / Three studies of figures at the feet of the Crucifixion, 1944 Bacon was not a believer, but the topic of the crucifixion interested him throughout his life, as it was closely connected with the idea of self-sacrifice.In this picture and many others painted later, there are ominous, terrifying, biomorphic creatures. Bacon wrote them for the first time, influenced by the paintings of Pablo Picasso. They convey his sense of time - the Second World War has just ended world war. They were also symbols for him of the Erinyes (Eumenides) - the avenger goddesses from ancient mythology who in Aeschylus's tragedy "Eumenides" persecuted Orestes for the murder of his mother, Cletemnestra. Much later, he created a separate cycle and called it “Triptych based on Aeschylus’s Oresteia.” The theme of retribution and persecution does not leave him and is also closely connected with the circumstances of his life. This is the second version of the picture
Head I, 1947-1948 A scream, as the ultimate expression of emotion, and a screaming mouth are an attribute of many of Bacon’s paintings. He borrowed many of the details from a medical book with pictures about diseases of the oral cavity, which he came across on a layout.
Head III, 1949This painting was inspired by Sergei Eisenstein’s film “Battleship Potemkin,” which Bacon admired. The nanny's glasses, pierced by a bullet in one of the episodes, were his favorite motif from painting to painting.
Study for the Nurse in the film "The Battleship Potemkim / Study for the portrait of a nanny from the film "Battleship Potemkin", 1957
Photos almost everywhere, unfortunately, do not convey color and the emotions associated with it: ominous, furious and
frantic..
Painting/ Painting, 1946 - looking at this is like looking into the abyss of hell, but masterfully written
Study for Crouching Nude Without an audio guide and accompanying texts, it would be more difficult for me to understand what was happening, although I liked the pictures without explanations - I find it difficult to explain the concept of “like”, but everything is written perfectly and conveys emotions in such a way that you become involved in what is happening.
Study after Velazquez / Study based on Velazquez, 1950 Bacon was in Rome, but did not go to the Doria Pamphilj gallery, where the original of Velazquez’s “Portrait of Pope Innocent X” is located. According to him, there was no point in this, since it was impossible to write better. He painted his series of paintings based on reproductions, which differed in color rendering.
Two Figures, 1953
Study of a Baboon, 1953 From this photograph it is difficult to catch the amazing silvery shine of the baboon’s skin, straining its body in a bend, and something else, elusively mystical in this picture...
Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh V, 1957
Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh VI, 1957-studies for a portrait of Van Gogh. Bacon has almost no landscapes, this is one of the few
Head III, 1961
Study after Vélázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X / Study based on "Portrait of Pope Innocent X" by Velázquez, 1953The blood stains on the cardinal's cassock attracted the eye in the hall.Bacon painted in series, spontaneously, in obedience to a goal that, according to him, dictated to him the development of events unknown to him. Sometimes he even suffered because there was nothing left for him; the paintings “filled” themselves, without his participation. The series could not be interrupted until reality was built in accordance with its laws, according to the formulas that he discovered as a scientist studying the structure of the world. Bacon painted eight paintings in the series with Pope Innocent X in 1953. in two weeks. This series “Three Studies for the Crucifixion” is considered significant for the middle of his work
Triptih- "Three Studies for a Crucification", 1962 Below are individual parts of the triptych on a large scale
These two figures are related to the fact of Churchill's meeting with Hitler, captured in one of the war photographs that were in Bacon's collection. But its meaning goes far beyond the scope of this event. The figure on the left is also credited with resemblance to the artist’s father, who was a retired military man and was very cruel in his relationship with his son. Bacon, he said, perceived people as pieces of flesh, “meat” and “frames” on which this meat is hung.
He had at his disposal an extensive collection of photographs of crime scenes, for which he had a particular predilection.
This spread out, bloody mass, distorted by suffering, in the triptych depicts the body of Christ sliding down from the cross. Many of his paintings are nothing more than scenes from a massacre, but the world, too, is ultimately a massacre...
Three Figures in a Room / Three figures in a room, 1964 This triptych is dedicated to George Dyer - Bacon spent seven years of his life with him, until his tragic suicide.
Henrietta Moraes / Henrietta Morales / Study for a portrait of Henrietta Morales, 1966 Bacon also could not work when his models were in the studio; as he put it, he was too “nervous” - they prevented him from distorting reality in accordance with what he saw and had to convey. He started with sketches and ended up painting from photographs previously taken from models.
"Portrait of Isabella Rawshorne Standing in a Street in Soho", 1967 The artist Isabelle Rowshorn was the favorite model of the sculptor Giacometti in the 1950s, whose work I first saw at MoMA and immediately succumbed to its magic. Francis Bacon also loved to draw her. Nice, isn't it?
Two Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, 1968 The presence of monochrome planes recreates a closed, isolated “space” within which the “action” takes place.
Study of George Dyer in Mirror ,1968
Self Portrait, 1973 The famous "Self Portrait", painted a year after the death of George Dyer.
Oedipus and the Sphinx (after Ingres) / Oedipus and the Sphinx (based on Ingres) “Marks” are visible in this picture; by highlighting them, the artist removed “everything unnecessary” from the picture - this was his method.
Black the wall inevitably swallows the figure
Portrait of Michel Leiris, 197 6
By distorting the proportions of the face, Bacon “deprived” a person of the opportunity to see, breathe, touch, and made him “helpless” in the face of the elements Three Studies for a Self Portrait, 1979-1980/ Three studies for a Self-Portrait Triptych Inspired by Oresteia of Aeschylus, 1981 -triptych based on Aeschylus' trilogy "Oresteia"
Portrait of John Edwards, 1988 John Edwards - photographer and artist’s last “muse”
Jet of water Triptych, 1991 One of the last works of passion is still sharp and defiant - Bacon remains himself to the end.
"Bacon has a deep realistic sense of life. He is a man without illusions. And, I think, his art should be looked at as the product of a man who has discarded all illusions."
/David Sylvester/
Number 9. Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon (Bacon; 1909 - 1992) - English expressionist artist
Bacon is not just the full namesake of the great philosopher (1561-1626) - he is his direct descendant. In the Bacon family, it was customary to name one of their sons Francis.
Francis received his education mainly at home from private teachers, as he suffered from asthma and could not go to school. His father, a hereditary military man, horse breeder, gambler and despot, having learned of his son’s penchant for homosexuality, forced the grooms to flog him in the stable, and then actually kicked him out of the house (until 1964, homosexuality was considered a serious criminal offense in England)
Bacon dealt with God quite early. “I was 17 years old at the time. I accidentally started reading Nietzsche and something else like that, and I remember one day I saw a pile of dog shit on the sidewalk. Yeah, I thought, this is the same thing, this is just like ours life until you make something more decent out of it."
A visit to the Picasso exhibition in 1927 influenced him decisive influence- he begins to paint and, upon returning to London, sets up a workshop in one of the garages in the area of south Kensington; he worked there until 1932.
The Crucifixion dates back to 1933. The painting was exhibited in a London gallery and was included in the Art New catalogue. A collector buys a work and orders two others; but after a failure at another exhibition, Bacon abandoned painting and destroyed most of his work. His first teacher (and lover), Roide Meistr, said that when he met Bacon in the early 1930s, he had no idea about painting and asked questions that any schoolboy could answer.
After the war (Bacon served in the Civil Defense) he returned to painting and considers this period as his starting point. In Bacon's life, blood, dirt, cruelty, violence went hand in hand with his world fame. “I think life has no meaning,” he said, “...we are born and we die, and between these points we give meaning to existence only by what we do.” The artist always claimed that he was simply a realist: “Nothing can be more terrible than life itself.”
Under the influence of Velazquez, Bacon painted a series of paintings on the theme “Portrait of Pope Innocent X.” In 1954, Bacon represented England at the XXVII Venice Biennale; he visits Rome, but does not want to see the original “Portrait of Pope Innocent X” by Velazquez. His "Study for a Portrait of Pope Innocent X" will be sold in 2007 for $52.6 million
Sketches by Isabelle Rawthorne
Bacon paints many portraits. Very rarely - female
In the 1960s, Bacon was showered with honors and prizes that he usually refuses: for example, he gave the Rubens Prize for the restoration of Florentine Renaissance painting.
He considered photography to be a third eye that captures the invisible and unforeseen moments of existence: photography captures leakage, it is objective. But the artist puts his own emotion into it - the one that Bacon considered “the secret of painting.”
Bacon said that "the plot should not scream louder than the colors"
He described his painting technique this way: "You can't imagine how hopelessness in work can make you just pick up paint and do whatever it takes to get out of the confines of creating an illustrative image of any type."
Bacon mercilessly destroyed works that he considered unsuccessful, both those just coming out of his brush and early ones that were scattered throughout the world.
"Once, in the window of a gallery on London's Bond Street, Bacon saw his early painting. "How much does it cost?" - he asked the seller. “50 thousand pounds,” he replied. Without saying a word, Bacon wrote out a check, took the canvas outside and immediately tore it to shreds on the sidewalk.”
This was not an isolated episode, and Bacon himself said that he destroyed about 9/10 of his works when they were already worth millions.
Creativity was the main thing for him, and everything else - money, love, play, alcohol - mattered only insofar as it stimulated this process. He regularly worked in the mornings, often waking up after a severe hangover (he never drank while working), and evenings and nights, as a rule, were spent in pubs and gambling clubs, where he lost huge sums at roulette. Moreover, he believed that playing, and especially losing, is an excellent stimulus for creativity: they force you to look fate in the eye and rely on chance.
"Even in beautiful landscape, among the trees, under the leaves, insects devour each other.
Cruelty is part of life"
In Bacon's view, an ideal portrait is not a realistic painting, but an image in which facial features are distorted, but the personality and inner essence of a person is accurately reflected. He despised "flattering" portraits
During his life, Bacon created thirty-three large triptychs (three of which he later destroyed). His lover John Edwards said that Bacon once destroyed twenty completed paintings at once.
This triptych was valued at Christie's at $10.2 million - two days earlier, at the same auction, four paintings could be bought for the same amount - two paintings by Monet "Peaches" and Olive Trees and Palms, Sasso Valley", Pissarro's painting "Valley of the Seine in Dampe, Octave Mirbeau's garden" and big picture Cezanne "Houses among the trees"
Bacon was not very interested in money. He entered into a fantastically unprofitable contract with the Marlborough Gallery - 165 pounds for a painting 61 x 51 cm and 420 pounds for a size 198 x 168 cm. For ten years. Although his “Study of the Human Body” alone was sold for $250 thousand.
Gallery representative Valerie Beston organized the artist's private life, handed over his laundry to the laundry, paid department store bills, bought the artist from those to whom he lost money (and one of these creditors threatened to cut off his hands), and even consoled his abandoned lovers
Although his works were bought for millions, Bacon continued to live and work in a miserable and uncomfortable apartment in south Kensington. He really did not like order, the slightest manifestations of which he fiercely fought in his London workshop. Having created a proper mess, he did not calm down until he turned the walls of his studio into one large palette, after which he peace of mind for 30 years he realized his strange fantasies.
Bacon did not change his habits and lifestyle until the end of his days. At the age of 80, he could be seen in the same company, in the same pubs in London's Soho, where he drank and generously treated his friends. He underwent major kidney surgery, and when friends began to express condolences, he waved his hand and said: “Yes, but if you’ve been drinking since you were fifteen, you should just be glad that you still have at least one kidney.”
Art is famous for its beauty, but there is also enough ugliness in it, even in the works of the most famous artists. Not to mention blood, guts and existential horror. So, we present to you 13 creepy paintings!
1. Figure with Flesh, Francis Bacon (1954). The painting is an allusion to the portrait of Pope Innocent X by Diego Velazquez.
2. “A Few Little Tweaks,” Frida Kahlo (1935). This painting is based on a newspaper news story about a man who killed his girlfriend by stabbing her 20 times. When questioned, he said: “I only pinched her a little!”
3. “The Face of War”, Salvador Dali (1940). This is Dali's most terrifying surreal work, written immediately after the end of the Spanish Civil War.
4. “Saturn Devouring His Son”, Francisco Goya (1819-1823). Based on Greek myth about Cronus eating his children so they wouldn't overthrow him (one of them survived and did just that - you know, Zeus). This is one of the paintings that Goya painted directly on the walls of his house.
5. “Child with a Toy Grenade,” Diane Arbus (1962). Many of Arbus's works are scary, but this one is especially scary. Diana walked around the child, Colin Wood, and filmed him at the moment when he had enough of it. “Take a photo already!” - he shouted.
6. “Judith and Holofernes”, Caravaggio (1598-1599). Many artists have painted this scene, but it seems to us that painting by Caravaggio- the most terrible.
7. Gustav Klimt (1901). Pay attention to Typhon, the most terrible monster in Greek mythology, and humanoid creatures: they embody illness, madness, death (left), debauchery, voluptuousness and excess (right).
8. “A Thousand Years”, Damien Hirst (1990). Whatever you think about Hirst, he is, firstly, famous, and secondly, terrifying, that's why he's on the list. This is a picture of life cycles: Flies lay eggs in a severed cow's head, the eggs turn into maggots and die again from the fly swatter.
9. “Lovers”, Rene Magritte (1928). You and your boyfriend dressed up for Halloween and decided that if you can't see anyone, no one can see you either.
10. "Untitled #140", Cindy Sherman (1985). Almost all of her works are scary, but this is probably the worst.
11. “Egg”, Alfred Kubin (1901-1902). Symbolist Kubin was obsessed female body as the body of both victim and aggressor and often depicted death and pregnancy together.
12. “Suicide”, Andy Warhol (1964). In the early 60s, Warhol became interested in all kinds of horror. This is a work from the “Death and Catastrophe” series.
13. Three Studies for Figures at the Foot of a Crucifixion, Francis Bacon (1944). Sorry, Bacon again. This picture makes me feel uneasy. Bacon was obsessed with religious motifs and iconography and planned to depict the entire crucifixion scene. This triptych is his first mature work.
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“In one of his letters, Van Gogh talks about the need to subject reality to changes that become lies more truthful than the literal truth. This is the only way for an artist to restore the depth of the reality that he is trying to reflect. I believe that reality in art is something fundamentally far-fetched and that it must be recreated.” Francis Bacon, who is an artist
There was such a “Bacon Society” in England, which studied the philosophical heritage of the founder of empiricism, Francis Bacon (Bacon, English). And they kept receiving letters about the poor quality of bacon. In short, we got it. They exhausted me to no end with their stupid slander to the wrong address. People are busy with the eternal, but here they are constantly reminded of the perishable. In general, they placed an advertisement in the press that the “Bacon Society” was renamed the “Association in the Memory of Lord Bacon.” Then they receive a letter: “Instead of changing names, you would better monitor the quality of bacon.”
I read this story about forty years ago. Since then, when it comes to some Bacon - and there are a whole lot of them, there are only two philosophers - or bacon, I tell it, and it enjoys constant and well-deserved success. Well, I couldn’t help but tell it here. In addition, this Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is some kind of direct ancestor of our Francis Bacon (1909-1992). Bacon also came in handy here, you’ll understand why later.
Or maybe I'm just stalling for time. For I have bad news for you - Francis Bacon* was a very deeply disgusting person. He was an atheist, a gambler, a drunkard, a drug addict, a homosexual, and also loved to dress up as a woman. In our time, when good traditional values have blossomed and blossomed all around us, the soul of such a bad and degraded artist, of course, does not accept it in any way.
His dad was good. A full-fledged WASP, an officer, then a former officer, a horse breeder - he supplied horses to the royal army. Strict, of course. When he saw his sixteen-year-old son changing into a woman's clothes, and also found out that he was engaging in ugly sexual acts with the grooms from his stable, he ordered the grooms at the same stables to flog his son with rods, and then kicked him out of the house, to his uncle, in Berlin - they didn’t correct the son of the couple. Those. Bacon was familiar with violence - as I say, dad was a family despot - from childhood. He was still born and lived for some time in Dublin, where violence was practically the norm at that time - they fought for independence from Great Britain.
Plus he suffered from asthma, Bacon. Because of her, and also because of the frequent moves, he did not really receive an education. And in 1927, after Berlin, he ended up in Paris. There two things hit his brain: the Picasso exhibition and “Un Chien Andalou” by Buñuel and Dali. And Bacon decided to become an artist.
His teacher was an adult man - he also served as Bacon's lover - the Australian artist Roy de Maistre. That's his job.
Roy de Maistre. Bacon's Workshop
We are interested in it because of what we can see on it. early works Bacon, of which very few remained - in the mid-30s. he destroyed them en masse due to dissatisfaction with them**. Some kind of decorative expressive surrealism, if such a thing existed.
Here are more of his works from the 30s.
Portrait
Figures in the garden
Here, too, of course, surrealism had a strong effect. What are you going to do? It was then one of the main trends in avant-garde art.
Then, as we now know, the war began, and London was bombed assiduously. Bacon served in civil defense and saw enough of everything, including mangled human bodies. In 1944 he makes his first famous work.
Three studies of figures at the foot of the Crucifixion
This, of course, is not divine history. In general, despite his atheism, Bacon made several works on the theme of the Crucifixion, but these were always works about humanity, about cruelty and suffering. Actually, there was nothing original in this approach to the topic; many have interpreted it this way since the Renaissance. He turned it in a non-standard way. Christ is not here, by this he completely removed the theme of the divine. There are only some creatures that apparently correlate with the relatives and followers of Christ who were present at the execution - this follows only from the name. In principle, these monsters are simply some kind of living flesh, which, of all its many functions, has only two left - to suffer wildly and to scream terribly about this suffering. Everything else is unimportant, which is why there are almost no sense organs responsible for other carnal manifestations. Well, the ear still sticks out, it works as an input, i.e. again to suffering.
Of course, this work makes us remember Picasso’s “Guernica” - with its expression, the animality of suffering - remember, there is a screaming, not neighing, just a screaming horse - and the degree of symbolic generalization. Dali also makes us remember, first of all, of course, “Premonition of the Civil War” - again with expression and terrible manipulations with the body.
To broadly generalize, we can say that main theme Bacon was the existence of flesh in the world, its suffering, defenselessness, loneliness, finitude, variability, pleasure, its extreme experience, its beauty in any, even in a dismembered and ugly state, because it is still alive***.
Paralyzed child walking on all fours
Bacon, as an alcoholic, a drug addict and a gay man, experienced the adventures of his body much more acutely than decent citizens. His hobbies were increasingly obscene and condemned, even criminal****. He knew well that the spirit lives in the torso, and not on its own, and the ups and downs of his spirit largely depend on his torso. Actually, we also know a little about this. Well, everyone was drinking. And the next day everyone lived. And there are also a lot of maxims about what kind of philosophers people become when they have a toothache. Again, war was for Bacon a rich source of knowledge about the life and death of the flesh.
Triptych on the theme "Oresteia" by Aeschylus
Here, out of standard art criticism habit, I’m trying to introduce Bacon’s work into the context of twentieth-century art, to tie it to something, but this is not easy. It hurts that he is some completely separate character. They write that he has something to do with surrealism. So it’s very distant, at the reception level. Bacon simply very freely assembled pieces of the human body***** and placed them in a strange environment, but he did not describe other psychic realities and did not call to give up everything and go into them as into the kingdom of freedom.
Figures in motion
**** Homosexuality in Great Britain ceased to be a crime only in the mid-60s.
***** Bacon, as you know, worked not from life, but from photographs. It was easier for him that way. This, of course, is not photorealism , he did not replace reality with its photographic reproduction. It’s just easier to work with a photographed object - it doesn’t move, you don’t need to communicate with it, etc. He also painted himself from photographs. So, Bacon, these photographs are glossy, reproductions, medical, sports and reportage photographs, porn, etc. – folded it so that part of the image disappeared in the folds. And then I redrew it.
****** Most expensive piece art ever sold at auction. $142.4 million last year.
Today, several paintings by Francis Bacon are included in the list of the most expensive paintings in the world - Bacon, we recall, holds the world auction price record (we are talking about open auctions, exact information about closed auctions is not available):
In November 2013, Bacon's triptych "Three Sketches for a Portrait of Lucian Freud" (1969) was sold at Christie's for $142.4 million, thereby breaking the previous auction price record, when in 2012 famous painting“The Scream” by Edvard Munch sold for $120 million.
in the photo: fragment of a portrait of Francis Bacon, artist Reginald Gray
Also, according to public auctions, in 2007 the family of the Sheikh of Qatar purchased Bacon’s “Study for a Portrait of Pope Innocent X on a Red Background” for $53 million, and the following year Bacon’s painting “Triptych, 1976” was purchased at auctionSotheby’ s Roman Abramovich for $86.3 million. In February 2014, an anonymous buyer from the United States purchased “Portrait of a Talking George Dyer” (1966) for $70 million. In May 2014, the triptych “Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards” (1984) was purchased by a Taiwanese collector for $80.8 million.
More and more exhibitions are dedicated to the artist’s work, one of them - “Francis Bacon and the Legacy of the Past” - is currently being held at the Hermitage, in the General Staff building on Palace Square(d.6/8), from December 07, 2014 to March 08, 2015.
"Three sketches for a portrait of Lucian Freud", 1969, oil on canvas, Art Museum, Portland (Oregon), USA
The exhibition “Francis Bacon and the Legacy of the Past”, one of the most large-scale and significant cultural events of the outgoing year, is held as part of the cross Year of Culture of Great Britain and Russia 2014, as well as as part of the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Hermitage, - prepared by the State Hermitage together with the Center fine arts Sainsbury, University of East Anglia.
Francis Bacon (1909-1992) is one of the greatest masters of the 20th century. His works are the most important exhibits in the halls contemporary art world museums, private collectors shell out fortunes for his paintings. In his youth Bacon did not receive art education and for a long time was in the dark about his future profession, experimenting with various types of activities, so his style is a special mixture of his own perception and bright borrowed images that can be seen in many of the artist’s works. The main theme of his works is the human body - distorted, elongated, enclosed in geometric shapes, against a background devoid of objects.
The exhibition “Francis Bacon and the Legacy of the Past” presents thirteen paintings by Francis Bacon from the collection of the Sainsbury Center for the Fine Arts. They come from the collection of Lisa and Robert Sainsbury, his first and most generous patrons of the arts, who provided the artist with significant moral and financial support in difficult years for him. The paintings were painted mainly in the 1950s and early 1960s and are the basis around which the rest of the artist’s works were collected.
The exhibition will feature paintings from the Tate Gallery (London), Art gallery and the Aberdeen Museum, the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, as well as from the collections of private collectors. The exhibition is perfectly complemented works of art from the collection State Hermitage, ranging from Egyptian art and examples of Greco-Roman sculpture to the paintings of Velazquez and Rembrandt, Matisse and Picasso, sculptures of Michelangelo and Rodin.
According to one opinion, the concept of the exhibition at the Hermitage is to present the work of the most expensive auction artist of our time in the context of his predecessors, whom he admired - from Rembrandt to Degas. And the main goal is to make people think about art and creativity. Nothing promotes the thought process like comparison. This exhibition provides the necessary ground for this.
Returning to Francis Bacon, let us recall that the future artist was born in Dublin into a military family who came from an old but impoverished family. However, despite his noble origins, the artist did not even receive a systematic education; he was hampered by poor health and frequent family moves, first associated with the First World War, and then with the War of Irish Independence. Due to serious differences with his father, he left home at the age of seventeen. Bacon began painting after visiting the Picasso exhibition in Paris in 1928. But the turning point in his work came a decade and a half later, in 1944, with the creation of the triptych “Three Studies for Figures at the Foot of a Crucifixion,” which received high marks from critics, and Bacon began to be considered one of the leading British artists XX century.
"Three Studies for Figures at the Foot of a Crucifixion", 1944, Tate Gallery, London
In the autumn and winter of 1949, his first personal exhibition was held in London, they started talking about him as one of the leading artists in Britain, and his works became an integral part of contemporary art exhibitions around the world. Since 1961, the artist settled in South Kensington, London, where he remained until the end of his life and where he created the famous large triptychs, which became his favorite compositional form (“Three Studies of the Human Body”, 1970, Ordovas collection, England). Francis Bacon died in Madrid in 1992.
Always feeling dissatisfied with his work, he called almost every piece of his work a sketch. Often he destroyed his works in whole or in part. The exhibition features his cut-out painting and the canvases he used as a palette (Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin). The figures and faces of people depicted by Bacon are usually deformed, twisted, and distorted. But those whom he painted recognized their resemblance to the image and the accuracy of the reflection of their personality (the exhibition includes several portraits of Lisa and Robert Sainsbury, Isabel Rawsthorne). According to the artist, when creating images, he surrendered to chance and imagination. He was not interested in what the body looked like; it was important for him to convey what and how it felt.
A powerful source of inspiration for Bacon was the art of Van Gogh. Bacon created a series of paintings inspired by the works and letters of Van Gogh to his brother Theo, in which Van Gogh expressed his attitude towards copies of the paintings of his predecessors. Being sick, he consoled himself by copying from black and white reproductions of Delacroix and Millet, which he used as a source for plots. He explained to his brother that he was improvising with color, trying to remember their paintings. Bacon interpreted Van Gogh in his own way in the studies “Portrait of Van Gogh I” (1956, Sainsbury Collection) and “Van Gogh IV” (1957, Tate Gallery).
Portrait of Van Gogh, Francis Bacon
Archival materials from Bacon's studio - photographs, books, torn sheets from art albums and magazines, newspapers, damaged and unfinished paintings - as well as Perry Ogden's photographs of the studio itself, which recorded the chaos that was happening in it, allow insight into the artist's psychology and are partly the key to understand his working method. Bacon admitted that “in this chaos he feels at home,” that chaos gives birth to images in him.
It will be possible to get into this “purely personal space”, which retains the imprint of Francis Bacon’s bright individuality and conceals clues to understanding his creative genius, until March 08, 2015. Next, the exhibition from St. Petersburg will have to travel to Norwich.
A second: Galina Malashenko