Study from the Human Body, Man Turning on the Light by Francis Bacon
BACON’S BLESSING – RENT-CHEQUE PAINTING TO BE OFFERED AT CHRISTIE’S IN OCTOBER BY THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART
Christie’s announce that Study from the Human Body, Man Turning on the Light by Francis Bacon (1909-1992) will lead the auction of Post-War and Contemporary Art EveningSale at Christie’s London on 14 October 2007. The picture is being offered by the Royal College of Art who were given the work directly by the artist as rent for the use of a studio in Cromwell Road in 1969 and who are selling the painting in order to raise funds for a major new campus. The painting isexpected to realise £7 to £9 million and all proceeds of the sale will be invested directly into the construction of the newRoyal College of Art buildings based in Battersea.
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Study from the Human Body, Man Turning on the Light will be the highlight of a series of exhibitions and auctions taking place at Christie’s between 10 and 16 October 2007, a week when the international art world will gather in London for a showcase of contemporary art exhibitions and events including The Frieze Art Fair.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Bacon produced a group of incredibly visceral studies of the male nude. In Study from the Human Body, Man Turning on the Light, he has taken the simple act of switching on the light and transformed it into something strangely brutal. The meat-like quality that Bacon brings to his greatest depictions of flesh invokes the idea of mortality, of the human body being only a step away from a carcass.
This was at the forefront of Bacon’s mind as, only two years earlier, his partner George Dyer had committed suicide. This tragedy was followed by a succession of deaths in Bacon’s immediate circle, all of which made him feel incredibly vulnerable, and it is this vulnerability and angst that emanates from the picture and fills his greatest paintings from the period.
In his most iconic pictures, Bacon took myriad influences and reconfigured them to strange and shocking new effect. The present figure relates closely to Eadweard Muybridge, whose Victorian-era stop-motion photography studying moving figures is quoted in many of Bacon’s most celebrated paintings. Here, the image is taken from a sheet entitled Striking a Blow with the Right Hand. This act of violence has been adapted into a simple domestic movement. Muybridge’s stop-motion photography is jarringly evident in the pentimento-like forms of the torso, which has ghostly repetitions charting movement, appearing to capture not only the motion but also the essence of the person— what he referred to as their ‘emanation.’ Study from the Human Body, Man Turning on the Light combines the artistic investigation of the human form with an exploration of the human condition, revealing Bacon’s anguished existentialism.
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