Francis Bacon exhibition catalogues

In November 1946, Francis Bacon travelled from Monaco to Paris to see UNESCO’s international exhibition of modern art, which included Painting 1946, shown under the title Peinture.

The exhibition also featured works by artists such as Roy de Maistre, John Minton, Henry Moore, Rodrigo Moynihan, Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland.

On 8 November 1949, twelve Bacon paintings, including the ‘Heads’ series the artist began in Monaco in 1948, were shown alongside drawings by the neo-romantic artist Robin Ironside.

In 1951, Bacon showed paintings at the Arts Council alongside works by artists such as Lucian Freud, John Minton, Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Ben Nicholson and John Piper.

Bacon’s Figure Study II, 1945‒46 was exhibited with the title ‘The Magdalene’.

The artist later said that he had never thought of the figure as Mary Magdalene and never associated it with the Crucifixion.

Bacon’s first retrospective, consisting of thirteen paintings, was mounted by the ICA in London.

This was Bacon’s first solo exhibition in Paris. He was an habitué of the City of Light, which was his favourite place, from the late 1920s.

After nearly a decade of working with a monochrome palette dominated by silver and dark tints, Bacon broke away from it with the bright, saturated colours of the Van Gogh series inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon (1888). Bacon always identified with Van Gogh’s constant endeavour to recreate reality. The gestural paintwork shows that these paintings were produced at great speed. Painted to tight deadlines, the two last paintings of the series, one of which was Study for a Portrait of Van Gogh VI, were delivered to the gallery still wet and allegedly smeared the clothing of unwary beholders.

This was Bacon’s last show at the Hanover Gallery founded by Erica Brausen and Arthur Jeffress.

Erica Brausen became Bacon’s first art dealer in 1948. She was a devoted and extraordinarily benevolent representative. Other artists represented by the gallery include Matisse, Giacometti, Miró, Duchamp, Magritte and Ernst.

This was Bacon’s first exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art.

In 1958, Bacon suddenly left the Hanover Gallery for Marlborough Fine Art, which he had a feeling was better run and more go-ahead and would be better for his career in the long term and internationally. Marlborough Fine Art continued to represent Bacon until the end of his life.

Marlborough Fine Art was founded by Frank Lloyd and Harry Fischer in 1946. They were joined by David Somerset in 1948. Frank’s son Gilbert Lloyd took over the running of Marlborough Fine Art London from 1972 onwards.

On 24 May 1962, the Tate Gallery opened a major retrospective of Bacon’s work comprising ninety-one pictures, for which he had produced a whole series of paintings including Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962).

On the opening day of the show, along with messages of congratulation, Bacon received a telegram informing him that Peter Lacy had died the previous day in Tangier.

In this first Francis Bacon retrospective to be held in an American museum, the artist exhibited sixty-four works.

For Bacon’s second solo exhibition in Paris, the Galerie Maeght showed seventeen of the artist’s works and published a special issue of the magazine Derrière le miroir. The catalogue introduction by Michel Leiris, entitled ‘What Francis Bacon’s paintings say to me’, is followed by an interview with Francis Bacon by the art critic David Sylvester.

Bacon made his first trip to the United States in November 1968 for his exhibition at the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery in New York, in which twenty of his paintings were shown. He was accompanied by his lover and muse George Dyer. They stayed at the Algonquin Hotel.

In the winter of 1971-72, Bacon received the accolade of a retrospective at the Grand Palais. At the time, he was one of the few living artists to have been granted such an honour (another was Picasso in 1966). From 27 October 1971 onwards, 108 of  Bacon’s paintings were on display to the Parisian public.

On 24 October, two days before the private view, Bacon’s lover George Dyer was found dead at the Hôtel des Saints Pères in Paris, where they were both staying.

From 19 January to 26 March 1977, twenty of Bacon’s recent paintings were shown at the Galerie Claude Bernard. This now legendary Paris exhibition attracted such a crowd that it resulted in the police cordoning off the rue des Beaux-Arts to direct the horde of visitors making their way to the gallery.

The catalogue includes a preface by Michel Leiris.

Bacon had a second retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1985, comprising 125 of his paintings. Alan Bowness, the Director of the Tate, referred to him as ‘surely the greatest living painter’.

In 1987, the Galerie Beyeler, which owned several outstanding artworks by Bacon, held a Francis Bacon retrospective comprising thirty-six paintings.

After a first show at the Galerie Maeght-Lelong in Paris in 1984, Bacon exhibited eleven paintings at the Galerie Lelong in 1987. This exhibition consolidated his status as a living legend in Paris.

Jacques Dupin wrote the preface for the catalogue, which also included an interview with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester.

In late 1988, the gallery-owner and curator James Birch, the Soviet diplomat Sergei Klokov, the British Council and Marlborough Fine Art mounted a Bacon retrospective in Moscow. It was the first time an exhibition of this kind devoted to a living British artist had been held there.

The exhibition consisted of twenty-two of Bacon’s paintings produced between 1945 and 1988.

At the end of June 1996, a posthumous retrospective celebrating one of the last giants of twentieth-century art, comprising ninety-five paintings spanning Bacon’s entire career, opened at the Centre Georges Pompidou. David Sylvester was one of the curators of the exhibition.

A posthumous Francis Bacon retrospective was mounted at Tate Britain in 2008 – 2009 in anticipation of the centenary of the artist’s birth in 2009. This third Tate retrospective comprising ninety artworks reassessed his work in the light of new research that had emerged from the discovery of the contents of his studio after his death.

The exhibition ‘Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture’ was mounted by the Grimaldi Forum under the aegis of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation. It showcased over sixty of Bacon’s works and explored the direct and indirect influences of Monaco and French culture on his work.

The exhibition was accompanied by a book edited by Martin Harrison, the author of Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné, who curated the exhibition, and jointly published in a bilingual (French and English) edition by the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation and Albin Michel.

The exhibition went on to be shown at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain from 30 September 2016 to 18 January 2017 under the title ‘Francis Bacon: From Picasso to Velázquez’.

This exhibition surveyed an underexplored but significant element in Bacon’s work. In the 1940s, Bacon began to place cubic or elliptical cages around his figures to make his compositions more dramatic. These imaginary spaces emphasise the figures’ isolation and direct the viewer to observe their psychological state. Placing the models in ‘invisible rooms’ focuses attention on complex human emotions that are felt but cannot be seen.

The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation and The Estate of Francis Bacon were among the Francis Bacon Exhibition Supporters Group for this event ‒ the largest Francis Bacon show ever staged in the north of England. In addition to twenty-six paintings, ‘Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms’ included a large number of works on paper and archive items. The exhibition was also shown at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart from 7 October 2016 to 8 January 2017.

More than twenty years after the last major French exhibition dedicated to Bacon the ardent Francophile was held (in 1996 at the Centre Pompidou), ‘Francis Bacon: Books and Painting’ showcased paintings from 1971, the year of the legendary retrospective at the Grand Palais, to the last pictures painted by the artist in 1992. This innovative exploration of the influence of literature on Bacon’s art was curated by Didier Ottinger.

The exhibition itinerary was organized in six sections centring on literature, and included readings of excerpts of texts from Francis Bacon’s library. The exhibition consisted of sixty paintings (including twelve triptychs and a series of portraits and self-portraits) from major private and public collections and focused on artworks produced in the last two decades of Bacon’s career. From 1971 to 1992, the year of the artist’s death, his painting style became increasingly simplified and intense. His colours acquired new depth and he used a unique chromatic register of yellow, pink and bright orange.

For Bacon, 1971 was a watershed year. While the exhibition at the Grand Palais consecrated his international reputation, the tragic death of his lover, George Dyer, two days before the private view triggered a period of guilt, symbolically represented by the mythological figures of the Erinyes (or Furies) which proliferated in his painting. The three ‘Black Triptychs’ In Memory of George Dyer, dating from 1971, Triptych August 1972 and Triptych May‒June 1973, all of which featured in this exhibition, commemorate his friend’s death.