Exhibitions

The Foundation lent a series of rare photographs of Francis Bacon including two unique portraits of the British painter taken by Helmar Lerski and Francis Julian Gutmann respectively.

Showcasing more than fifty works from the 1950s onwards, this exhibition explored Francis Bacon’s deep connection to portraiture and how he challenged traditional definitions of the genre. From his responses to portraiture by earlier artists to large-scale paintings commemorating lost lovers, artworks from private and public collections recorded Bacon’s turbulent life-story.  In addition to the artist’s self-portraits, the exhibition included portraits of major figures from the art world whom he knew socially, such as Lucian Freud and Isabel Rawsthorne, and his lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer.

The exhibition itinerary featured a significant collection of Francis Bacon’s works from the early 1930s and included paintings by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Roy de Maistre and Fernand Léger and creations by various designers, to provide context and highlight differing influences on Bacon’s work.

A sizeable section of the exhibition was devoted to paintings from Fernand Léger’s ‘Purist’ period, which are directly echoed in the geometrical designs of Francis Bacon’s rugs.

Francis Bacon’s attitude to printmaking was highly ambivalent. Although he claimed to have no interest in prints as a medium, he eventually allowed some of his major works to be reproduced and even became involved in the process of creating the prints.

The first part of the exhibition shows the metal plates used to create some of the engravings, alongside the prints made from them.

The exhibition explores themes dear to the artist via a selection of prints. Bacon’s favourite themes, which encompass the human figure, bullfighting, Greek mythology and religious subjects, all reflect an enduring interest in the human condition. Displaying these graphic works provides an opportunity to study the narratives they generated in greater depth.

The hang also highlights the importance of repeated images. Bacon’s interest in repetition can be discerned in his graphic works, in which the principle of reproduction is inherent.

Dotted along the itinerary are photographs and source materials from the artist’s various studios and copies of periodicals and folio format books that afford insights into Bacon’s approach to printmaking.

All the items on display are from the MB Art Collection – the private collection of the founder of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation.

This powerful exhibition focused on Bacon’s enduring fascination with animals, which shaped his approach to the human body and lay behind some of his distortions of it. it shows how, caught at the most extreme moments of existence, his figures are barely identifiable as human or animal.

It also explored how mesmerised he was by animals’ movements, observing animals in the wild during trips to South Africa, filling his studio with wildlife books and constantly referring to Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th-century photographs of humans and animals in motion. Bacon felt he could get closer to understanding the true nature of humankind by watching the uninhibited behaviour of animals, be they chimpanzees, bulls, dogs, or birds of prey.

The major artworks on display spanned the five decades of Bacon’s career, and included youthful works, his last-ever painting and a trio of bullfight paintings which had never previously been exhibited together.

Further information can be found at https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/francis-bacon

It was over twenty years since the last major exhibition on Francis Bacon, who loved France with a passion, to be held in France ‒ at the Centre Pompidou in 1996. ‘Francis Bacon: Books and Painting’ assembled paintings from 1971, the year of the legendary Grand Palais retrospective, to the artist’s last pictures, painted in 1992. This innovative exploration of the influence of literature on Bacon’s painting was curated by Didier Ottinger.

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. Its itinerary consisted of six sections organised around works of literature, and included readings of excerpts of texts from Francis Bacon’s library.

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.

From 1971 to 1992 (the year he died), 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.

Around a hundred items connected with Francis Bacon ‒ paintings, graphic works, photographs, objects from his various studios, letters and source materials ‒ were displayed on the premises of the Foundation.

The exhibition also included works by artists who knew Bacon or were influenced by his art. One room was entirely dedicated to his Paris studio, where he worked for more than a decade.

It was the first exhibition to take an in-depth look at the parallel careers of two of the 20th century’s most influential artists: Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) and Francis Bacon (1909–1992).

Via around a hundred artworks, curators Catherine Grenier, the Director of the Fondation Giacometti (Paris), Michael Peppiatt, an expert on Bacon and a personal friend of the artist, and Ulf Küster, Curator at the Fondation Beyeler, revealed startling parallels between the two artists, who became friends through Isabel Rawsthorne.

The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation lent several photographs for the exhibition, some taken by renowned photographers such as Mario Dondero and Edward Quinn and others taken by close friends.

In this exhibition, the Musée national Fernand Léger continued its exploration of the friendships and artistic relationships of the painter Fernand Léger (1881‒1955) with other artists of his time.

By setting artworks from the museum’s collection in counterpoint with a selection of works by major painters and sculptors of the European avant-garde, the exhibition showed how Léger and his fellow-artists influenced each other in the context of the artistic ferment of the early 20th century.

The meaning of the term ’friend’ was broadened to include Fernand Léger’s artistic legacy: his art became a rich source of inspiration for major artists of the second half of the 20th century such as Roy Lichtenstein and Francis Bacon. Although they belonged to later generations, these artists had a strong intellectual and aesthetic connection with their illustrious predecessor.

In addition to the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, which lent Bacon’s first known work, entitled ‘Watercolour’ (1929), and a rug which is one of the rare surviving items designed by the artist during his short career as an interior decorator and furniture designer at the beginning of the 1930s, the Musée national d’art moderne-Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Villa Arson (Nice), the Fondation Maeght (Saint-Paul-de-Vence) and the Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris) were associated with the exhibition.

Despite Francis Bacon and Bruce Nauman being of different generations and having little in common in terms of artistic background, juxtaposing their work prompted a salutary new look at these two major 20th-century creative artists. Over and above their differences in terms of medium and fields of exploration, they share an experimental conception of art and a fascination with the body ‒ its potential to be distorted, transformed, assaulted and its animality ‒ and both explore notions of physical and psychological constraint and hindrance in their work.

This exhibition, devised by Cécile Debray, the Senior Curator of the Musée national d’art moderne-Centre Pompidou, was organised around a group of about ten major artworks generously lent by the Centre Pompidou as part of its 40th anniversary celebrations. The Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation lent two paintings by Francis Bacon for the exhibition, Figure with Monkey (1951) and Study for a Portrait (1979), and supplied several photographs for the exhibition catalogue.

Other important loans by important museums and private collectors completed the selection of artworks, offering the public a display of about sixty works – paintings, drawings, sculptures, neon art, videos and installations – an itinerary in the image of the two artists, spectacular and disturbing.

For its 2016 summer exhibition, which ran from 2 July to 4 September, the Grimaldi Forum Monaco chose the theme ‘Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture’. The exhibition was curated by Martin Harrison, the author of Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné. It showcased over sixty of Bacon’s works and was mounted in association with The Estate of Francis Bacon, based in London, and the Monaco-based Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, which supported the exhibition by lending three paintings and a series of photographs and suggested Martin Harrison should curate it. The Foundation also brought out a book entitled Francis Bacon, France and Monaco, jointly published with Albin Michel, to mark the occasion.

Visitors were invited to consider Francis Bacon from a new angle: the influence of French culture and his time in Monaco on his work. Major triptychs, some of the artist’s most important paintings and less well-known works that referred directly or indirectly to France and Monaco were grouped by theme. An unusual feature of the exhibition was the way it made connections with seminal works by great artists who inspired Francis Bacon including Alberto Giacometti, Fernand Léger, Jean Lurçat, Henri Michaux, Chaïm Soutine and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

The artworks on display came from both public and private collections and were chosen to show the full eloquence and power of this giant among artists. Major institutions that lent paintings for the exhibition included Tate Britain and the Arts Council Collection in London, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Francis Bacon steeped himself in French culture, beginning with his first trip to Paris in the late 1920s. In the spring of 1927, aged seventeen, he stayed with the Bocquentin family in Chantilly. They took him under their wing and taught him French. It was also in 1927 that he encountered Picasso’s works when visiting an exhibition at the Paul Rosenberg Gallery and was impelled to become an artist.

After selling his picture Painting 1946 to Erica Brausen, who was to become his art dealer two years later, Bacon left London for the Principality of Monaco in July 1946 and lived there until the early 1950s. It was there that he painted his first pope, chiefly inspired by Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, and began to concentrate on the human form. It was a crucial phase in his career that subsequently led him to being recognised as the most enigmatic of post-war figurative artists.

Bacon returned for stays in Monaco and the South of France throughout his life. In the 1950s and 1960s, he often came with his circle of friends from Soho and Wivenhoe. During the ensuing two decades, he could frequently be seen with his Parisian friends and John Edwards, who was both his muse and his companion.

In 1974, Bacon took a studio that doubled as a flat in Paris. He set up home there in 1975 and held onto it until 1987. He painted many pictures there, including portraits of the friends he socialised with in Paris, in particular Michel Leiris et Jacques Dupin.

Although the Tate mounted two Francis Bacon retrospectives in his lifetime, in 1962 and 1985, he regarded the 1971 retrospective at the Grand Palais as the most important in his career. At the time, Picasso was the only other artist to have received this ultimate accolade in his lifetime, in 1966.

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’.

The Grimaldi Forum Monaco exhibition was the first major event organised under the auspices of the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation, which was officially opened in Monaco on 28 October 2014.

The exhibition, curated by Kasia Redzisz (Senior Curator, Tate Liverpool), Lauren Barnes (Assistant Curator, Tate Liverpool) and Ina Conzen (Curator and Deputy Director, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart), examined an underexplored but significant element in Bacon’s work. In the 1930s, 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.

Visitors were invited into the artist’s inner sanctums, where they could see for themselves the unconventional surroundings in which he lived and produced the most harrowing images of his time. The painter himself said, ‘I am very influenced by places – by the atmosphere of a room.’

The first part of the exhibition focused on his initial career as a furniture and rug designer, on which he embarked in 1929, working from a studio at 17 Queensberry Mews West in London. The display included very rare items of furniture and rugs which had seldom been shown to the public. Although he achieved some success as an avant-garde designer and received several commissions from friends and patrons, Bacon also began to paint at this time. His earliest pictures, painted between 1929 and 1934 and displayed in the exhibition, reveal the influence of Cubism and Surrealism. The displays also included numerous objects, artist’s supplies and source materials found in his Paris studio at 14, rue de Birague, which he occupied from 1975 to 1987.

A highlight of the exhibition was Bacon’s legendary, chaotic studio at 7 Reece Mews in London, which played a major role in his work and life and reveals much about the artist’s creative process. He worked there for more than three decades, and it became a repository for thousands of items. The exhibition included an impressive recreation of the studio in miniature by the artist Charles Matton.

Rarely seen photographs of Bacon’s various studios taken by eminent photographers and close friends were dotted along the exhibition itinerary, which also introduced visitors to the paintings of the Australian artist Roy de Maistre, Francis Bacon’s chief mentor and a close friend.

All the items on display were from the MB Art Collection, the personal collection of Majid Boustany, who set up the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation.

The first exhibition held at the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation featured around a hundred items from the MB Art Collection, the personal collection of Majid Boustany, who created the Foundation. It highlighted Francis Bacon’s close ties with the Principality of Monaco, the South of France and Paris and included paintings produced by Bacon between 1929 and 1979 and several items of furniture and rugs designed by him. Dotted along the exhibition itinerary were rarely seen photographs of the artist taken by eminent photographers and some of his close friends.