Francis Bacon: “Triptych May- June 1973”, 1973. Oil on canvas, each panel 198 x 147.5 cm. Private collection © The Estate of Francis Bacon /All rights reserved / Adagp, Paris and DACS, London 2019 © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS/Artimage 2019. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
‘Bacon: Books and Painting’ at the Pompidou On view at Centre Pompidou Paris, from September 11th 2019 to January 20th 2020, ‘Bacon: Books and Painting’ presents paintings dating from 1971, the year of the retrospective event at the national galleries of the Grand Palais, to his final works in 1992.]]>
Source: Centre Pompidou Paris
The exhibition includes six rooms along the gallery, placing literature at the heart of the exhibition. These rooms play readings of excerpts of texts taken from Francis Bacon’s library. Mathieu Amalric, Jean-Marc Barr, Carlo Brandt, Valérie Dreville, Hippolyte Girardot, Dominique Reymond and André Wilms read from Aeschylus, Nietzsche, Bataille, Leiris, Conrad and Eliot. Not only did these authors inspire Bacon’s work and motifs directly, they also shared a poetic world, forming a ‘spiritual family’ the artist identified with.
‘Bacon:Books and Painting’ focuses on works produced by Bacon in the last two decades of his career. It consists of sixty paintings (including 12 triptychs, in addition to a series of portraits and self-portraits) from major private and public collections. From 1971 to 1992 (the year of the artist’s death), his painting style was marked by its simplification and intensification. His colours acquired new depth, drawn from a unique chromatic register of yellow, pink and saturated orange.
1971 was a turning point for Bacon. The exhibition at the Grand Palais earned him international acclaim, while the tragic death of his partner, just a few days before the exhibition opened, gave way to a period marked by guilt and represented by a proliferation of the symbolic and mythological form of the Erinyes (the Furies of Greek mythology) in his work. The ‘Black’ Triptychs painted in memory of his deceased friend (“In Memory of George Dyer”, 1971, “Triptych–August 1972” and “Triptych, May–June 1973”), all presented at the exhibition, commemorate this loss.
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